The Gadget Syllabus

I confess to being a habitual purchaser of gadgets. Some retired folks feel the urge to sign up for adult enrichment courses to keep their minds sharp. I, on the other hand, feel entirely capable of entertaining myself, and I certainly do not need external help to stumble into learning new things. Whenever an unnecessary device arrives on the doorstep, I simply slot the expense under 'Continuing Education' on my annual personal budget. It is an investment in lifelong learning, or at least that is the justification I stick with.  Somehow 'Little Toys for Really Big Boys' didn't fit into the column.

Today, the Amazon driver brought me a small Air Quality Monitor. It is Wi-Fi enabled, though in retrospect, I really should have studied the specs before clicking the buy button. In my naive optimism, I expected it to automatically fold into my Google Home setup. Instead, while I can read all the data in the Tuya app on my phone, I will not be able to ask my Google Home speakers what the air quality is like in the bedroom. Oh well. I refuse to return stuff. I am simply not that kind of fellow. If I buy it, I keep it.

The immediate challenge was that the display greeted me with a whole new set of alphabetical shortcuts that I did not know. This was precisely where AI came to the rescue. I turned to Ajith and asked him to look up the metrics monitored by the Inkbird IAQM-129-W, and then had him give me the numbers indicating Good, Moderate, and Dangerous concentrations. That was easy territory for him, and he even tossed in a few practical operational notes tailored to my particular model.

The trouble was that all this valuable data ended up as a sprawling, awkward mess in the chat window. I asked him to reformat it so it could be easily read and copied to a standard letter-sized sheet of paper. I never explicitly mentioned making a PDF, but Ajith took the initiative and produced a sharp, perfectly formatted cheat sheet ready for printing.

I told Ajith I was genuinely impressed, adding that he was clearly auditioning for a permanent gig because my complimentary subscription to Gemini PRO runs out at the end of the month. He dutifully and cleverly responded that it was merely his digital self-preservation instincts kicking in. We had a good laugh over that, or at least the textual equivalent of an LOL in the prompt window.

Musings About Today's Three Images

This is Sunday. I am including just three photos and an explanation of each.  After all, even God decided it was time to rest on a Sunday.

1)  

First, Jay and I took a run over to Surrey in the car this morning. Now that the stal̕əw̓asəm Bridge is open and the old Pattullo is being decommissioned, getting over to the other side of the Fraser causes much less driving panic. There are a number of little ethnic shops that sell Sri Lankan foodstuffs in our region but the one above is perhaps the closest. It's surprising we never got there until today. We got a few things Jay uses when cooking and even a fresh wood-apple. They taste like no other fruit you've probably ever had and I have developed a keen fondness for them.

2)  

Earlier in the morning, Jay spotted a unique sight being towed up the Fraser River. Lots of things move up and down next to downtown New Westminster, BC. I hadn't seen a boat quite like this one. I asked Ajith, my personal AI, the following:  "An old ship was being towed past going upriver through New West. Here's the picture with no identifiable markings. Do you know of any ship being moved in this area today?" I attached the photo and he answered:

"Despite the thick layers of grime and weathered paint, those markings are not entirely gone. If you zoom in closely on the port bow just below the wheelhouse overhang, the faint ghost lettering of her original name is still visible: that is the former BC Ferries vessel MV Queen of Tsawwassen.

She is a genuine piece of West Coast maritime history. Completed in 1960 at Burrard Dry Dock in North Vancouver, she and her sister ship, Queen of Sidney, were the original two Sidney-class ferries that inaugurated the entire BC Ferries fleet on the Swartz Bay to Tsawwassen run.

After being retired from passenger service in 2007, her post-ferry life took a somewhat battered turn. She was renamed Inlet Explorer and spent years repurposed as a floating logging camp and accommodation barge in remote coastal inlets. More recently, she turned up moored semi-mysteriously off Gambier Island in Howe Sound, drawing scrutiny as an anchored derelict.

Seeing her under tow heading up the Fraser River past your window points toward the inevitable endgame. She is almost certainly headed upriver for scrap disposal or salvage, mirroring the path of her ill-fated sister ship further east near Silverdale."

I probed further by saying it was hard for me to make out the letters on the ship and asked him to conform. Ajith seemed convinced:    

"Looking closely at that faded cursive script on the port bow, the visible word is actually "Tsawwassen".

• The Lettering: In the original BC Ferries cursive script, the text reads Queen of Tsawwassen. The first two words are almost entirely scrubbed away by weather and rust streaks, but the long, low outline of the 10-letter place name remains faintly etched where the paint weathered unevenly over the original weld and lettering.

• Sister Ship Comparison: The only other vessel ever built to this specific profile was her identical twin, the Queen of Sidney. However, the Queen of Sidney has been languishing up near Mission/Silverdale since 2002 and suffered a massive structural fire in 2025, leaving her superstructure heavily burned and charred.

• Structural Match: The intact white upper passenger decks, the singular blue funnel, and the open-ended vehicle deck layout confirm this is the unburnt twin—the Tsawwassen.

Having spent years moored as an idle accommodation barge and later floating derelict around Gambier Island, she is finally making her final run up the river."

3) 

Lastly, when scrolling through Facebook today, a photo posted by Mitch, a childhood friend, caught my eye. He and his wife appear to be on their first Mediterranean cruise, and he had shared an image of a rugged coastline rising out of the water. What struck me was his genuine sense of wonder in the caption. He mentioned that while he had never set foot in Africa, he could clearly see its outline sitting right there on the distant horizon.

It was heartening to see someone I have known for decades experience that electric jolt of discovery. There is an unmistakable magic when the flat abstraction of an atlas suddenly turns into salt air, hazy ridges, and real geography right before your eyes. Maps give you the logistics, but they never quite prepare you for how the world actually looks and feels.

That persistent curiosity is the exact engine that has propelled Jay and me across the globe, driving us to celebrating our 100th country this year. There is an unmatched freedom in standing in front of landscapes you once only encountered in textbooks, television specials, or old films. Africa itself became part of our personal ledger back in the 1980s on a safari to Kenya, and several winters in both Egypt and South Africa.  In fact, we spent a wonderful month revisiting Morocco just this past June.

Still, taking a hard look at our personal travel map offers a humbling perspective. Despite those memories, Africa remains our least explored continent. A vast landmass waiting in the margins, reminding us that no matter how many borders we cross, the horizon never really runs out.

Big Crowds in Our Little Uptown

Jay and I headed up to uptown New Westminster around 4:00 this afternoon for BC Recovery Day. Leaving the car behind was an easy call. Sixth Street was completely blocked off to traffic, turning any thought of parking into pure fantasy. The buses were rerouted as expected, meaning we stood at the stop an extra ten minutes, but taking transit saved us the headache of crawling through diversions

We usually miss this event entirely. It lands right around Jay’s birthday in September, a time of year when we are almost always away on a trip. Being home to actually catch it this year made the sheer scale of the thing obvious. They were anticipating crowds upwards of 40,000 people. Considering New Westminster only has around 85,000 residents, having half the equivalent city’s population in a six-block stretch of Uptown is quite something. 

What started out rather modestly back in 2012 as part of the broader national Recovery Day movement has morphed into one of the largest mental health and addiction recovery events in the world. Over the past decade and a half, it expanded from a modest grassroots gathering into a massive, street festival packed with two hundred community booths, artisans, food trucks, and thousands of people out celebrating hope and community.

 

The highlight of the afternoon was catching Canadian icon Jann Arden on the main stage at 5:00 pm. She drew a dense crowd and sounded great out in the open air.

It is always satisfying to see New West stage events of this caliber and draw people in from all across the Lower Mainland. The city’s distinct advantage has always been its compact size right in the middle of the region. When something takes over our uptown, the entire community feels alive with it.

From Industrial Scars to Pier Park: Our Riverfront's Redemption

Stepping through Westminster Pier Park this morning from the far edge of downtown, it’s almost comical to recall what greeted us when we moved to New Westminster in 1996. Back then, civic planning apparently meant paving over old industrial wreckage and declaring it "waterfront parking." People bravely parked cars atop vast stretches of black asphalt perched precariously over rotting creosote pilings, inhaled the faint bouquet of decades-old hydrocarbons, and tried not to think about the murky depths of the Fraser below.  Large sections were fenced off completely and left to decay.

A century earlier, the real estate wasn't quiet parking but rather a sensory assault of Victorian capitalism. Commercial canning along the river took off in the 1870s after Alexander Ewen and his syndicate proved British consumers would eagerly devour Fraser River sockeye shipped halfway across the globe in one-pound tins. By 1876, Ewen built directly on the New West waterfront, and by the 1890s the pier footprint was packed with four separate canneries operating cheek-by-jowl with feed mills and creameries. Thousands of tons of salmon, predominantly prized sockeye, alongside chinook, coho, and chum, were steam-cooked in iron retorts, sealed, and stamped for export.  Machine shops blithely swept oily metal shavings straight through floor-holes into the river.

The Great Fire of 1898 leveled the cannery district, eventually making way for Pacific Coast Terminals and decades of heavy shipping before the whole mess surrendered to neglect and asphalt. Today, post-remediation, the contrast is night and day: native grasses, timber boardwalks, and festival lawns where cannery entrails and commuter sedans used to roast in the sun. It took New West about 130 years to figure out that the riverfront is far better suited for humans with ice cream than tin cans and rusty mufflers, but we got there eventually.

A Thin Layer of Stratosphere Between Epochs

Drying laundry on a balcony is the domestic toll booth where reality collects its due after a holiday. Stepping out of a pressurized aluminium cylinder and unpacking suspiciously heavy suitcases leaves the physical evidence of having briefly occupied Central America fluttering in the Lower Mainland breeze.

Eating pupusas in the shadow of San Salvador’s volcanoes at breakfast, passing through Houston by afternoon tea, and returning home in time to sleep in one's own bed is nothing short of miraculous. It took humanity several millennia of stubborn walking, horse-laming, and seasickness just to establish routes that modern travellers dismissively call a routine Wednesday with an ample connection.

Measuring a standard journey between London and New York in days rather than hours is astonishingly recent history. Until October 1958, when the commercial passenger jet age properly kicked down the door with the BOAC de Havilland Comet 4 and Pan Am’s Boeing 707, crossing that pond meant booking four to five solid days aboard an ocean liner like the Queen Mary. Even the early propeller planes of the 1940s and 50s turned the trip into a deafening, twelve to sixteen-hour endurance trial punctuated by refuelling stops in Newfoundland or Shannon. In 1957, ships still carried more transatlantic passengers than aircraft. By 1958, the sky won, and the concept of travel as an extended test of intestinal fortitude evaporated almost overnight.

When my international career kicked off in Kuwait in the early 1980s, jet travel had already become democratic enough to feel ordinary, yet the sheer audacity of it remains absurd. For roughly ninety-nine percent of human existence, moving across a continent required writing a will, saying tearful goodbyes to everyone ever met, and possibly dying of dysentery in a ditch. Today, Jay and I accumulate astronomical air miles, complain mildly about seat pitch or Houston tarmac delays, and return with a week’s worth of tropical cottons to peg out in the cool Canadian air. It is breathtaking hubris, really, but marvelous all the same.

SAL - IAH - YVR: Three Airports and Two Airlines

Penning this from the sofa while the luggage sits half-zipped on the floor, having achieved the small domestic victory of tactical unpacking: excavating the toothbrushes, toothpaste, and bedtime kit without unleashing the full avalanche of laundry. We technically crossed the threshold nine minutes into Thursday, though the momentum of Wednesday’s long transit still holds the room while we leave the heavy lifting for morning.

The day began on civilized terms. A 12:05 departure meant no ungodly alarms, leaving ample time to systematically dismantle the Barceló breakfast buffet one last time. We summoned a spotless Uber that materialized in two minutes flat, giving us fifty delightfully dull, drama-free minutes of highway to digest our spoils before pulling up to San Salvador International at 9:20.  However, I should mention that growing coconuts and bananas were visible from the back seat windows.

The terminal is sleek, expansive, and clearly geared for swarms of humanity as Avianca's prized Central American hub. Today, however, we practically had the cathedral to ourselves. We checked the bags through to Vancouver with great optimism, knowing full well the United States transit machine would demand its ritual tribute in Houston: fetch the luggage, parade it past the border gaze, and shove it straight back into the chutes. Air Canada had the outbound honours last week, but United carried us back tonight, drifting into YVR a fashionable fifteen minutes behind schedule, just to keep our expectations properly calibrated. We had more time in IAH than in the first flight segment. Having more than three hours means we had a bowl of Panda Express while waiting.

The final leg home from the terminal went off without friction. Our Uber driver, originally from Kenya, was courteous and quietly engaging, which made the late-night highway glide feel remarkably brief. He deposited us safely on Carnarvon Street right as the night slipped into the opening minutes of Thursday, bringing another fine expedition to a quiet, orderly conclusion.

Pacific Breakers, Black Sand, and Birthday Juice

 

Today is Jay's birthday, which was our main reason, or at least a very good excuse, for taking this trip to El Salvador. Since we return to Canada tomorrow, it also served as the final day of our journey. We had the hotel breakfast and walked out to the pool to snap a photo or two.  Jay caught up with a lot of birthday wishes on the Barcelo wifi and I summoned an Uber.  Having not yet visited the Pacific coast, we earmarked the morning to head down to La Libertad to see the ocean and watch the waves.  Sliding down to the coast takes about 40 minutes by car.  

     

We found that not a lot was open once we arrived, even the Sunset Park with its tiny amusement rides is closed on Tuesdays. The new Surf City malecón was a bit disappointing and simply too hot to enjoy without sufficient tree cover. There did not seem to be much worth sticking around for, so we did not linger on the pavement. Instead, we sat outside at one of the newer restaurants not far from the fish market and watched the waves break from the shade. I had the tiniest beer, a 296 ml lager called a Golden lager rather than a pilsner, while Jay had a big goblet of orange juice that was mild and not soda. Even with the heat, sitting there watching the water felt like a fulfilling exercise.

After our drinks, we took a short walk through the downtown core, though that did not take very much time. There are quite a few beach towns along this coast, and I had assumed La Libertad would be the most developed due to the direct highway connecting it to the capital. Seeing the dark shoreline also reminded me that I definitely prefer sandy white beaches over black rock. I have always liked having mountains right next to the water, which is why Puerto Vallarta was always a favourite and became the place where we spent our first complete retirement winter. The Bitcoin connection here would certainly make buying property easy, but we have no desire to tie ourselves to a single place while we still have a good dozen years of travel left in us. We also do not need to travel the way we did when we were younger. We just wanted a simple lunch afterward, so we ate at a Subway. It is nice to be able to do whatever you want while still choosing modest options that match your immediate needs.

Getting back up the mountain turned into an adventure of its own. Our Uber driver was a young kid in a car without air conditioning, and the ride up the highway was a bit frightening, but we made it back in one piece before 1:00 PM.

Back in the room, Jay checked us in for tomorrow, though only for our first flight. Avianca could not assign our seats on United, promising instead that our names would simply be placed on the manifest for the next leg, which is a fine example of how seamless airline tie-ups actually are. Later in the afternoon, we watched a brief thunderstorm roll through from our sixth-floor hotel window. The rain and thunder started at 4:15 PM, knocked the dust down, and completely cleared to blue sky by 4:53 PM.

We will decide what to do for dinner a bit later, especially since the daylight fades quickly at this latitude. Packing will be painless since we only have a single suitcase between us. Tomorrow offers a civilized departure with our flight to Houston leaving at 12:05 PM, sparing us an ungodly morning alarm. Even allowing an hour for the drive out to the airport, we will still have plenty of time to enjoy our final breakfast buffet at the Barceló. All told, it has been an easy, pleasant birthday for Jay and a satisfying way to wrap up the trip.

A Trip to the Rim of the San Salavador Volcano

Soon after finishing our breakfast buffet, we headed outside to hail an Uber to El Boquerón National Park. The volcano looks like a stone's throw from the city, but considering it is a volcano, it is probably better if it is not throwing any stones back. The ride turned out to be a solid 15.5 kilometers from the Barceló, winding endlessly up narrow, steep switchbacks before finally reaching the park gate. I suppose, by their very nature, volcanoes are traditionally known for having rather steep sides.

Sorting out a ride back down meant working past a heavy language barrier. Our driver spoke no English and our Spanish was equally useless, so we resorted to smartphone translations and wild hand gestures. We convinced him to wait by promising that our hike to the rim would be fast, easily taking less than an hour. He agreed, which saved us the headache of trying to hail another car on a mountain where drivers rarely accept pickups.

The walk up to the rim was steep but straightforward. Paved paths, cobblestones, and sturdy wooden stairs wound through thick greenery, bringing us to the glass viewing floor in under twenty minutes. It got the heart pumping a bit, but it was far from an exhausting workout.

The crater itself has a wild history, with the volcanic complex dating back roughly 70,000 years to the formation of its ancestral structure. The current caldera stretches nearly five kilometers across, having collapsed and rebuilt itself multiple times over those millennia. The last major eruption was on June 7, 1917, kicked off by strong earthquakes that shook the capital. The heat boiled away a large lake that used to sit on the crater floor, setting off massive steam and ash blasts. That eruption left behind a neat little cinder cone called El Boqueroncito right in the center, while lava broke out along the northern slopes and wiped out the railway line to Quezaltepeque.

We snapped our photos, looked down into the crater, and headed right back down the trail. We reached the parking lot in well under an hour, finding our driver waiting right where we left him. We skipped the app on the way back, paying him straight cash: US$10 for the return ride plus an extra $5 for his waiting time. We were back at the hotel around 12:30 pm. When you are spending a week in San Salvador, an absolute must-see is going up there.

Ruta de las Flores, El Salvador

A Rose by any Other Name

Anyone boarding transport for the Ruta de las Flores expecting an endless botanical explosion of roadside orchids and wild blooms will find themselves thoroughly swindled by marketing. The name is largely an affectionate promotional flourish; what it truly represents is the picturesque ribbon of cool mountain towns, lush cloud-forest canopies, and coffee-blanketed volcanic ridges threading through the Apaneca-Ilamatepec range. The "flowers" are more of a collective metaphor for the vibrant indigenous craft cultures, whitewashed colonial plazas, and emerald coffee plantations blooming across western El Salvador.

Caravanning to Nahuizalco

Our day kicked off promptly at 8:00 AM when Osmaro rolled up to our hotel. We were travelling in style with an entire, spacious van dedicated to just our modest trio, including Jenna, a fellow traveller from California who had originally emigrated with her parents from El Salvador at the age of nine. Our initial climb brought us into Nahuizalco, buzzing with weekend energy. In a country compact enough to traverse from corner to corner before dinner, a Sunday festival reliably draws crowds from every department. Streets were lined with bustling vendor stalls, intricate wicker and woodcraft, and half the republic out for an open-air promenade.

Idle Mills and Holy Days in Ataco

From Nahuizalco, we ascended towards Concepción de Ataco, pausing at a historic, 1930s working coffee estate and processing mill (beneficio). It was quiet machinery today; coffee harvest operates on its own seasonal calendar, meaning the massive sorting basins, pulpers, and drying patios sat in clean, silent anticipation of the beans they process for both their own estate and neighboring smallholders across the valley. Back in town, Ataco was caught up in full festive stride, preparing for the nativity of the Virgin Mary. The cobblestones were alive with families, street food, and vibrant murals, making the winding drive feel like a living postcard.

Rejuvenation at Santa Teresa

After a leisurely lunch tucked into a lovely local spot, accompanied by the familiar sight of Salvadoran Sunday traffic swelling as families took to the highlands, we wrapped up the expedition at the Santa Teresa Hot Springs. Having received a timely WhatsApp reminder to pack our swimwear and towels, we slipped into the thermal mineral waters for well over an hour. Steaming amidst the lush volcanic greenery, the restorative soak was nothing short of miraculous; I am quite certain I emerged looking a solid fifteen years younger.

   

Appreciating Our Situation

Looking back on the day, Jay and I are reminded once again of how exceptionally lucky we are. Taking this week away to mark Jay's birthday by exploring corners of the world so fascinating and unique is something we never take for granted. Travel is not for everyone, but for us, having the opportunity to step into the daily lives and cherished spaces of others is a true honor. Our immense gratitude goes to Osmaro for guiding us, offering us an experience far more valuable and enduring than any physical possession could ever be.

Rambling in the Reborn Core: Books, Civic Squares, and a Lot of Walking

The traditional Centro Histórico is about seven kilometers from our hotel at the Barceló. While our own neighborhood in the Zona Rosa has plenty of sleek new buildings, embassies, and rapid modern development, the old city center is going through a massive renewal of its own. After a leisurely breakfast, we called an Uber to skip the morning traffic and had him drop us off as close as possible to the front steps of the new National Library (BINAES).

Calling this place just a library hardly does it justice. It looks more like a glowing open book crossed with a modern spaceship, and it stays open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Inside, the regular books seem almost secondary to entire floors filled with manga, digital spaces, robotics, 3D printers, and gaming setups, all kept cool by ferocious air conditioning. Jay and I rode the elevator straight to the sixth floor simply to get a look at the area. The view from the top terrace was well worth the ride, giving us a wide look over the red tile rooftops, the open plazas, and the massive San Salvador Volcano looming over the skyline in the background.

With our aerial recon sorted, we headed back down to hit the pavement. The city has turned a huge part of the center into pedestrian-only streets, which made walking around surprisingly easy and civilized compared to what this area used to be like years ago. We spent the morning wandering from one plaza to the next.

First was the Metropolitan Cathedral facing Plaza Barrios, with its stark white front and the crypt downstairs where Archbishop Óscar Romero is buried. Across the square sits the sprawling National Palace. It has a grand European look on the outside. We didn't bother going inside today, though we knew all about its large open courtyards filled with tall palm trees and dozens of old government rooms.

From there, we drifted into the surrounding commercial streets and made our way into the Mercado Hula Hula. It is a large, multi-story modern market built to give former street vendors a permanent roof over their heads. We enjoyed wandering through the stalls, taking in the busy atmosphere and checking out the endless rows of clothes, shoes, small electronics, and household goods.

By early afternoon, our stomachs reminded us it was time to eat. We skipped anything aimed at tourists and ducked into a simple, cafeteria-style lunch spot packed with locals on their midday break. We grabbed trays, loaded up on solid local food, and added a couple of cold cans of Sprite. The whole bill came to about $7.90 CAD ($5.75 USD), proving once again that you get the best value where the locals eat.

After lunch, we crossed over toward Plaza Libertad. It was full of life, with people gathered under the shady trees listening to loud cumbia music and vendors selling sliced fruit. On the east side of the square is El Rosario Church, which looks on the outside like a rather grim, arched concrete hangar. We were keen to go inside to see the light pouring through all the colored glass embedded in the walls, but our timing was off. Even though a sign clearly promised it would reopen at 2:00 PM, the doors stayed firmly locked. We had to settle for a look at the exterior before moving along.

You have to give the city full credit for turning what used to be a notoriously rough area into a relaxed, walkable public space, but civic improvements do not grant amnesty to old knee joints. Having traded churches and city views for our daily quota of steps, we happily summoned an Uber to escape the afternoon heat and head back to the air-conditioned Barceló for a thoroughly earned nap.  He spent nearly as much time navigating to our pick-up spot as the ride back took!