My monthly trip schedule for the remainder of 2025 is complete now, and the reservations have all been made. All the trips are within Ecuador. I’ll be writing individual posts for each place listed below. If you have questions about any of the destinations, put them in the comments and I’ll do my best to address them.
July 2025: Cotopaxi (staying at The Secret Garden in a “Birdhouse” by choice, but not in one of the world famous “Hobbit Homes”) and Quilatoa (staying at The Black Sheep Inn)
December is amazing in Cuenca with tons of holiday activities, so I’ll be around home for that.
I’m taking public buses for all my transportation. Ecuador has a great system and most trips are well under $10. Exceptions: Izhcayluma has their own bus that takes you there from Cuenca. And Kapawi flies you into the middle of the Amazon, once I take a bus to Puyo.
I know…what about the Galapagos? It’s expensive, although citizens and visa holders get some discounts. And Kapawi Ecolodge is a huge splurge already (the other stays are amazingly cheap). So maybe next year for the Galapagos.
I’m so grateful to be living in the most biodiverse country in the world, to be able to explore it for practically nothing, and to be able to take Kirk with me in my heart.
On Wednesday May 7 2025, I went on a day trip to Sisid Anejo, Ingapirca, and Biblian in Ecuador. The trip was organized by my friend Kendel, with his friend Francisco as our main guide.
The day started with coffee and light snacks with my trip mates at Kendel’s apartment. We left on the approximately two hour trip to Sisid Anejo at 9am. Sisid Anejo is an indigenous village in the canton of Cañar. On arrival we were given a drink – a colada made with machica (toasted wheat ground on an ancestral stone).
We then had a tour of the community’s church, which is the second oldest in Ecuador. It’s largely only used on holidays and for ceremonies, but it is remarkably well preserved.
After our tour of the church, we were treated to some indigenous music, played on a drum, some other percussion instruments, and an accordion. Accordions are very popular here – a lot of both traditional and current popular music uses them. And we danced! Well, some of us did anyway. I am a child of my mother, and she never missed a chance to clap, dance, and participate in any way she could. So yeah, Pat, I clapped and danced and had a great time, thinking of you.
Next we made our own machica. They asked for a volunteer to help. Yeah, Pat, I volunteered. Our indigenous guide from Sisid Anejo ground the toasted wheat on a stone, using another stone, and I caught the machica in a container.. Someone asked how old the stones were, and they had been in use by at least her great great grandmother. so no-one really knows for sure. Man did that machica smell good.
Lunch was next. It was a typical Ecuadorian almuerzo: soup, second course, dessert, and juice. but everything was fresh from the community farm and was absolutely delicious. The details – Soup: Pea flour soup with cabbage, potato, and fresh cheese. Second course: Dry barley rice with quinoa, baked chicken, and corn and peas with homemade mayonnaise and lettuce. Drink: Melon juice. Dessert: Sweet pumpkin. There was also a really innovative aji (the hot sauce served with most Ecuadorian meals) made with fresh pumpkin seeds. Five stars, baby. Absolutely wonderful.
After lunch we took the Uillcañan tourist train to Ingapirca. Tourist train it was. It was more like a party bus that was made to look like a train, and it ran on the road, not on tracks. It was great fun though. I was on the top of the train car with some others, dancing to the music, and waving to the locals as we went through the little towns. Everyone of all ages was smiling and waving, and not sarcastically. They really do appreciate that you are coming to their area.
At Ingapirca, we got another local supplementary tour guide. Access to Ingapirca is tightly controlled; you can’t just show up and go in. You need an advance reservation and you must be accompanied by an approved local guide. I like that a lot – it separates out the yahoos, and ensures that the site remains as untouched as possible.
Ingapirca is basically kind of the Ecuadorian Machu Picchu. It is part of the network of sites along the Inca Trail. But Ingapirca predates the Incas – the Cañari were there thousands of years prior to their arrival. You can clearly tell which areas are which: the Cañari used round stones from the river to build, and the Incas used milled square stones. Our guide was very informative as she described the various histories, eras, and areas.
We finished our tour of Ingapirca with our choice of chicha (a fermented drink made from yuca/manioc) or coca tea.
Last stop for the day was Church of the Virgen del Rocio at Biblian. The gothic style church is built into the side of the mountain, so the sanctuary has only three walls. The fourth wall is the mountain itself. Beautiful and inspirational. Quite a few steps to get to the church itself, and then you can optionally take even more steps to visit the fourteen stations of the cross that rise far above the church itself. Of course I went to the very top, high above the dome of the church.
We got back home about 7pm – tired, but the day was so interesting, and I made several new friends. Highly recommended, but remember, except for Biblian, you’ll need to book a tour to duplicate the day.
2nd oldest church in EC, Sisid AnejoMaking machica from toasted wheat2nd course of lunch, with melon juiceLlamas at IngapircaIngapircaIncan ruins at IngapircaChurch at BiblianChurch at BiblianInterior of church at Biblian
First of all, since my last post in 2023, my husband of 26 years, Kirk Lawrence-Howard, passed away of Covid, six months after our March 2024 early retirement to Cuenca, Ecuador. He received world class healthcare but was unable to fight off the virus. There is a memorial page for him with much more information at http://kirklawrence.com.
Kirk and I had planned to explore Ecuador and the wider world, and I am going to live out that dream, largely as a solo traveler. Since I no longer have social media, I’m going to use this site to document my future travels.
On my current two year temporary Ecuadorian visa, I’m only allowed 90 days out of the country until I get my permanent visa in January of 2026. At that point I’ll have more available days to travel more widely out of Ecuador. So I’ve decided to make weeklong trips within Ecuador every month until this January.
This is my upcoming travel schedule:
May 2025: Sisid Anejo, Ingapirca, and Biblian
June 2025: Chimborazo, Quito, Mindo
July 2025: Cotopaxi and Quilatoa
August 2025: Izhcayluma
September 2025: Kapawi Ecolodge in the Ecuadorian Amazon
October 2025: TBD
November 2025: Loja
December holidays in Cuenca are magical, so I will likely stay around the city, and I have a guest coming early December for two weeks.
Each of my future trips will get a post. If you want to be emailed when new posts are made, please contact me to be added as a user.
our extended family lived in florida when i grew up, and my dad would often elucidate lengthy lists of complaints about the state of the state, and indeed, nearly any other place in the world, always ending with a wish to return to one nirvanic location.
if only he could be in his home state of kentucky, all of his problems would be solved.
apparently at some point my grandmother, who was tough enough for chicago speakeasies and whose biting wit lives on in me, had enough, and told him “things are bad all over, even in kentucky.”
no doubt with her offhand glance that would ice over hell.
…to queerspace.com. i’m rather proud of being prescient enough to figure out how register a url in 1998, and hand-code a website. you can see the old site at archive dot org (sadly no archive of the first two years).
it’s a boring ass wordpress site now, and it’s a miracle if you are reading this as the site has a nofollow tag to block search engines.
take a moment though and click around. there’s some cool stuff here.
i was gobsmacked to see that my all time favorite site on the web is no longer up and running.
thankfully we have archive.org to preserve such things.
if you don’t want to bother to click through, here is the tl;dr:
old fashioneds do not have fruit of any kind. it’s sugar, bitters, and the whiskey of your choice. if you must have ice (and why would you…dilution!) it should be one large cube that fills the entire glass.
For one thing, we live in the inner city, in a row home, with a tiny backyard. Lots of squirrels, feral cats, spotted lantern flies, and various other hardy and unidentified critters.
But we do our best to make it individual and beautiful. And completely low maintenance. It’s all river rock, so no grass and no mowing. There are many perennial herbs, annual flowers responsible for reseeding themselves, a big rhubarb plant, black raspberry vines, a huge Russian sage plant that attracts floods of bees (My sage! Brings all the bees to the yard!) There’s a rudimentary drip irrigation system that we hook up to a garden hose.
And a four-by-four raised bed garden. We always get a head start with volunteer tomato plants from last year, and Swiss chard that’s at least two years old and never seems to die. To that we add indeterminate heirloom tomato plants from Countryside Nursery, with attempts at a couple of other things that never seem to work.
And a few types of complementary basil.
It gets used frequently in summertime cooking. Quite often it’s layered between sliced tomatoes, olive oil, balsamic, and mozzarella for a light dinner. And in early to mid September, when the weeds are starting to take over, we cut back most of it, sit around the patio table, pick and wash the leaves.
Then it comes inside and I make fresh pesto for the year. It gets whirred in an ancient food processor in batches, put into ice cube trays, frozen, and bagged in gallon Ziplocs.
The recipe? Don’t have one. I have a list of ingredients though. Basil, olive oil, Parmesan, garlic, walnuts. I can’t afford pine nuts in that quantity, so it’s nearly always walnuts. Some years it was deluxe unsalted mixed nuts (no peanuts – that would be total heresy and I know I’m skirting the nut line anyway). This year our new Lidl grocery store (Do you have one? Best store ever) had huge bags of whole walnuts for $4 and change. Score.
So today was pesto day. It’s so relaxing. The leaf picking and washing is meditative. The entire process is relaxing and mindful. I feel linked to hundreds (thousands?) of years of people doing the same thing.
And, soon, I’ll probably break out the hand-crank pasta machine.
over the years i’ve come to rely on a few key sources to get my news. some of them are algorithm-based, and some are curated by humans. i think it’s important to not be in a self-reinforcing bubble and i tend to not go to major media as a starting point, as there can be a bias stemming from the stories they choose to cover and feature. i like exercising my critical thinking skills.
here they are, with a few notes of explanation.
memeorandum.com – this is my go to site for news. it’s mainly algorithm-based with a limited human touch, and surfaces news topics that are currently in vogue. they link to everything from the ny times and washington post to breitbart and the daily caller.
joemygod.com – curated by joe jervis, this is a left-leaning compendium of current news from an lgbt perspective.
nextdraft.com – dave pell is the self-styled “editor of the internet” and his daily email newsletter compiles his top ten topics of the day. always clever and entertaining, and for my money he does the best job from the standpoint of curation. subscribe to the daily email at the link.
daringfireball.net – a combination of news about apple, tech, and current events from john gruber, a thinker i’ve come to respect.
do you have any favorites? let me know if the comments.
chances are you clicked over from my “goodbye facebook” post. this is queerspace.com, an off-and-on project of mine since 1998. there’s oodles of crap to explore. click around, or try these links to get started:
…a throwback web community where you logged in via ssh (using terminal on the mac) to make text-only web pages. i requested an invite and promptly forgot all about it.
in mid-september of this year i got in! talk about a delay.
anyway they provided pretty good instructions for a noob like me. i followed their clear directions, set up a public/private key, logged in via terminal, and copied/pasted my hand-coded html index file (tweaked a bit to strip out graphics) from september of 2004.
i keep nearly everything that’s digital – i have saved many versions of the old site. i throw out most physical items. my hoarding is in bytes, not house space.
i digress.
the result is at:
Led by Kirk in 2001, when he talked me through my trepidation and we got rid of our telephone landline, we have been on a steady march to simplify our connectivity.
After 20+ years with at&t, we recently got a deal with t-mobile that was too good to pass up. We had been spending $140 per month for two phones with at&t, mainly because I was afraid to switch and somehow lose my treasured New York 212 cell phone number.
T-mobile has a $70 all in package for two phones for people aged 55+. We took the plunge, my 212 cell phone number is perfectly intact, and we are very very happy.
The t-mobile customer service model (flat pricing including fees, stellar customer service) got me thinking about Comcast again.
There exists no company I detest more, but I’m forced to do business with them because I have no broadband alternative. Their business model is the opposite of t-mobile: horrible customer service, constant reliance on promotional pricing which forces you to call and threaten to cancel each time your deal expires, and deceptive packages that force you to take on services you don’t want or need.
I cut the tv cord with Comcast a couple of years ago, and have a broadband only package with non-promotional pricing. I would dearly love to drop Comcast – hopefully t-mobile and true 5G will make that possible.
In addition to Comcast broadband, we have a few OTT channel packages. Netflix, Amazon Prime, and DirectTV Now. I tried DTVN when at&t offered an ongoing discount, HBO included, and a free Apple TV. I liked the simplicity of the flat fee bill (net $25), the channel selection, and the well-working app.
Now I’ve been off at&t for two billing cycles. But my dtvn discount goes on. No idea when or if it will stop. The monthly fee recently went up $10 a month, so my net fee will be $35 with discount and free hbo. If the at&t discount and free hbo ends, it will be $61 which is waaaaaay too much.
Twice in the last month I canceled dtvn. The first time we tried Sling for a week. Constant buffering and low res connections, a problem we never had with dtvn. So I went back. Then the $10 price hike, and I cancelled again. They sent me an offer to discount my fee by $10 for six months. So I went back again, but they won’t honor the discount code they emailed me because they say I’m already getting an at&t discount. WTH.
I’ve reached out to dtvn via apple business chat, but two days have gone by with no response.
I really think I will end up trying the philo $16 skinny bundle. I don’t need sports and I think I can get by without local channels.
The other option is the AT&T skinny bundle for $15 per month. Given my weird experiences with dtvn, I’m a bit leery to go with what is basically the same company.
I was looking forward to apple’s offering but it holds no interest for me given the scant details they provided.
Frankly I think I need to make the same logical leap I made when dropping the landline. Why do I feel I need to pay to have channels shoveling live television at me? I bet I could get by with Netflix and Prime.
• Kirk and I will be celebrating our twentieth anniversary next January, and this site will soon be twenty one. It will be able to drink! And it will.
• I hadn’t paid much attention to the site other than maintaining WordPress updates. But (as happens now and then) I got a cold call offer to sell the URL. It ranks well and has some value. The offer came from the owner of the fabulously named fuckyeahweddings.com – it was hard saying no to the owner of such a URL. But, as always, I did. Sorry, Kendall. Best of luck with your new venture!
• My initial motivation for what became a bit of a site overhaul was taking down my Obama nag for a Mayor Pete nag. I called Obama early, after his first book was published. I’m hoping I go two for two with Mr. Buttigieg (pronounced boot-edge-edge). He impresses me, and it’s time for the new generation to hopefully do better than the boomers did.
• I don’t post on social media anymore. So it’s time for me to throwback, old school style, to an occasional good old fashioned queerspace blog post. Hello world, again.
Not to be too dramatic, but one of the worst weeks in memory.
Monday: fine except of course, it’s Monday.
Tuesday: Kirk’s car broken into, window smashed, birthday present radio stolen. Police refuse to respond to call. Kirk’s dad taken by ambulance to er and admitted to hospital incoherent and in pain.
Wednesday: bought used factory radio on eBay, made appointment with safelite to repair broken window. Kirk’s dad diagnosed with gall bladder issues. Surgery Monday.
Thursday: rear window replaced, cost $275. Kirk starting to not feel well.
Friday: leave for work at 6am to discover that Kirk’s entire car now stolen. Take day off work, deal with police (who come this time), insurance. Kirk flat on his back, unable to go to rehearsal. Never seen him miss rehearsal.
Saturday: most of day running errands for various sick people.
Sunday: Kirk attempts to go to rehearsal with me driving him to allentown; can’t make it. Kirk’s mom not feeling well. Run more errands for sick people. Finish day watching football. Awaiting arrival of useless eBay radio.
So looking forward to work tomorrow. A return to normalcy.
