Chapter 12

Welcome to Chapter 12! Is this a late release, YES! But there were also three blog posts last week so fairs fair. 

If you'd love to listen to Chapter 12, click here! And keep an eye out for the corresponding blog. Woot!

Horn-Rimmed Desert Dragons

In Chapter 10, we reviewed a few of the interesting tidbits of my travels. If you have not had a chance to read that post, I recommend going back and looking it over before reading this one. 

As previously mentioned, my travels have always been...interesting. A definite adventure. But sometimes adventures don't always go as planned. In Chapter 11, Brianna comes up against a creature she isn't very pleased to see. During my travels, I have also come across many creatures I would rather never have met. There were giant flying beetles, ants that infested our room, sand flies that gave me hundreds of bites, tiny geckos that stared at me from the walls, and cockroaches that I never really saw but knew were there. I dream about the day when I can travel without bugs. 

However, more than the bugs, the part of this story that I enjoyed sharing was about the bun. If you remember my adventure with my friend watching "dork tourist extraordinaire" and travelling on the longboat of doom, that trip led us to a gorgeous resort unlike anything I'd ever seen. Unfortunately, my friend became extremely ill the day before and on the way to the resort. She was very, very sick on the ferry, and the longboat ride was torturous for her. Sadly, I picked up the bug that evening, though she was better, and was horribly sick the next day as we went on a fantastic boat tour throughout the Andaman Sea. It was awful. I was dehydrated, needing bathroom stops at least every half an hour, but we were on a boat and there was nowhere to stop for hours at a time. I was in horrible pain and so very exhausted, though I still managed to go snorkelling. I was very scared of the fish but my uncle, who is Asian, told me, "Just come swim by me! Fish don't like Chinese food." 

When we arrived back at the resort, I went to the fancy restaurant with my friend and my aunt and uncle. They brought a bread bowl and I took a bun and took one bite, but was so sick, and mentally felt loopy, that I just ended up staring at it. For a good 5-10 mins I stared at the bun until my aunt and uncle suggested I should go lie down. I walked out of the fancy restaurant on the beach and started toward the private room/hut my friend and I were staying in, but couldn't remember where it was. Since they don't have cars on the island, a staff member in a golf cart drove up and asked if he could help. I don't think I formed a coherent sentence, but I did show him my key with the number on it and he helped me into the golf cart and drove me to my hut where I promptly went inside and fell asleep. 

When my friend came back a few hours later, she found me lying in bed, sleeping soundly, with a bun held tightly in my fist. I never did put it down on the journey and I often wonder what that golf cart driver thought. Not long after she arrived, I woke up and we decided to watch CSI, since it was the only thing we recognized on TV. It was dubbed into Thai with English words on the bottom. I was so mentally out of it that I stared hard at the characters and finally yelled, "But they don't even look Chinese!" My friend bust a gut laughing at me, bun still in my hand, and I passed out shortly after informing her that the toilet in our room was going to hate us. 

Later in the evening I woke up and decided to order room service since I was finally feeling a bit better and was hungry. I ordered a sandwich and another staff member in a golf cart drove up with our snack. He handed me a clipboard with a paper for me to sign for the food with a tip option. In my sickly state, I couldn't for the life of me figure out the conversion rate from dollars to baht, so I just wrote down a random number and hoped it wasn't outlandish or cheap of me. I ate my snack and went straight to bed. The next morning my uncle paid the tab and was not impressed that I basically tipped the guy a month's salary. It wasn't that much in Canadian Dollars, but he said the economy has issues when people tip too generously because the workers feel they have enough for the month and they quit and go home and then return the next month for their jobs back. I had no idea. I still have no idea what I actually tipped him, or if I ever paid my uncle back. Oops. 
 

The Quest Begins

 

Welcome to the beginning of the quest!

Have you ever gone on a quest? Perhaps not a quest with a specific goal in mind, but the type of quest where you realize you're on an epic adventure and you have no idea what got you to that point? Writing The Saga of Maior Natu gave me the opportunity to hide tidbits of my adventures with you. This chapter in particular is full of seeds and nuggets from my journeys. They may not be completely accurate, tarnished by years of forgetfulness, but they are all true.

Remember the time...?

Yeah, I used to do a lot of road trips with a really good friend of mine. I don't know why he asked me to travel with him that first year, but I had never travelled with anyone other than my parents and one girl friend who didn't talk to me anymore (not because of the trip, we just moved away from each other), and was very nervous that I would do something typically stupid or embarrassing and ruin my perfectly not normal reputation. That first year I was so worried that he would never want to speak to me again that I was fairly shut down and scared to talk. That is, until part way through...what was it, the first day?... when we stopped to grab a coffee somewhere and he asked me to pour it into his travel mug for him. I tried, but I have never been good at pouring things. To top it off, we were driving and hit a bump and the coffee seemed to soar dramatically into the air before landing with an audible *SPLAT* on my leg. I honestly laughed so hard I cried, and I figured it can't get more embarrassing than that, so I was able to loosen up a little. 

Cut to a couple years later and we're eating fish and chips on the pier in Vancouver. This friend of mine, who is an incredibly intelligent and well-educated individual, sees a swan and asks absentmindedly, "Are all swans female?" It's times like these that I felt the tables turn. I wasn't the only one to do embarrassing and stupid things. 

Another time we were camping throughout the States and we normally would wake up, go to the campground washrooms, then head quickly back to our campsite to pack and leave as soon as possible so that we could get to the next location. I don't think either of us were particularly great morning people; I had a tendency to dawdle and if I took too long he would get annoyed so I tried to hurry. One day I stood outside for ages, waiting for him to come out of the bathroom. Eventually he comes trekking out and tells me that the stall walls in the bathroom fell in on him and the guy next to him. They both had to crawl out under the walls to get to where it was safe. The man had injured himself so my friend, a nurse, patched him up and helped him out. Then the guy got super nervous and asked if he could just give my friend $100 so they wouldn't have to go through his insurance. My friend told him we are Canadian and we just help people and don't need to worry about insurance. I never thought we'd have a crazy bathroom story in our journey, but there it was. 

On my very first vacation with my former girl friend, we went on a month-long trip to Thailand. We were able to have so many adventures there, riding elephants, having a lobster dinner in an almost hurricane-like storm, touring the temples. But our ride on the tuk-tuk stands out as one of the most ridiculous things ever. We got on the tuk-tuk and asked to go to one of the temples to check it out. The driver drove us to what we think was a back entrance and told us the temple was closed for a bit. Then he drove us to a store and asked if we wanted to shop for diamonds. We said no. Then he drove us to another store and asked if we wanted to shop for something else. We said no. Then he drove us to a third store and asked if we wanted to shop for hand-made clothing. We said no. Then he proceeded to beg us to go in because if we went in to one of the stores, even if we didn't buy anything, he got a commission for convincing us to go in. So we did. The tailor was in shock when he saw us since my friend was so tall amongst the shorter Thai people around us, but we said hello and then walked out and the tuk-tuk driver took us to the front of the temple this time so we could actually go in. It was never closed, we just got tuk-tuk scammed. Joke's on him, the ride was still pennies compared to anywhere else I've been.

It was also on this occasion that she and I were able to visit the beautiful Phi Phi Island (pronounced pee-pee island). On our way there, we saw a man we dubbed "dork tourist extraordinaire." He had a massive camera and took pictures for hours on the ferry to the island. He wouldn't sit down at all. When we got to the island, we hopped into a longboat to travel to the other side of the island and get to our resort. Our longboat was called the May Lisa. On route, the engine died. We were stuck out in the middle of the Andaman Sea, far from shore, in a longboat with my name on it, and the engine didn't work. Some other longboat eventually sidled up next to us and tried to help out. They couldn't get it going. Finally, as a last-ditch effort, our longboat driver literally chipped off a chunk of wood from his own seat, shoved it into a crack in the motor and pounded it in with another chunk of wood, and suddenly the engine started. It was so bizarre. My friend and I didn't speak the language, though my uncle did and he was with us, but we still couldn't figure out what was going on.

Those are just some snippets of the list of bizarre and never ending weirdness that happens when I travel. I find it to be all part of the adventure. You really don't have stories to tell when you get home if nothing ever goes wrong. Right?

Chapter 11

 

Welcome to the second half of the book! As we enter into the next phase of this journey, I want to once again thank you for being a part of this project with me. At the end of the chapters, I will be posting a full review of the chapter links so you can listen and enjoy.

Given the chaos of my personal life this week, I was not able to share a blog post about chapter 10. So, as a special bonus to you, I will be sharing 2 blog posts this week about chapter 10, and chapter 11. These are going to be a bit of insight into the craziness of my travel experiences, so I highly recommend you read them. 

I hope you enjoy listening to chapter 11 of The Wicket of Silvus.

Chapter 10

 

We're half way!

Thank you for your patience as I worked on Chapter 10. 

I am happy to share the next chapter today with you as the group begins their journey! I look forward to sharing the next blog with you as well since the background of many of these stories are, hilariously, true.

Now that we are half way, I thought I'd put a question out there. Currently my videos are unlisted on YouTube so that only the people who have the link are able to access the videos. In your opinion, should this be made public? And if so, why?

Combat Training

 

In the history of writing blog posts to correspond with chapters in my book, I have done my best not to talk about the chapter itself, but more the feeling around the chapter or anecdotes about the info in the chapter. Clearly we don't want any spoilers. 

This time I want to discuss the writing of chapter 9. When I reached the end of writing this book, The Wicket of Silvus, I had 19 chapters. If you know me at all, I cringe at awkward or uncomfortable numbers, such as 19. It needed an additional chapter. I tried to think of what to add, but I felt I had concluded the book so nicely that I didn't want to tack on a random chapter. 

And so Chapter 9 was born. Yes, you heard that right, I added a chapter directly in the middle of my book because I couldn't handle an odd number of chapters. Yet somehow it actually fits! Reading it through a hundred times, it still felt cohesive in the book and added depth of character that may have been missing. 

It was my puzzle box of the book. How to fit one more chapter in without messing up what was already complete. And it worked...I think. Let me know what you think? Did you notice it was an "add-on"?