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When I read those words in July 2008, I recognized them as a clarion call from the future. Four months and a couple
of weeks later, the day after New Year's, I left my life's career as "Cartographer - Instructor - Bureaucrat" and took up
a new one as "Explorer - Dreamer - Discoverer."
I'd spent 24 years making maps, and 11 more teaching cartography and other subjects, for a Federal agency that had
changed its name and its nature over those years. They had been mostly good years, and a few of them - when I was teaching
other countries' agencies how to make better air charts - had been spectacularly good; but travel changes us more than we
might expect, and I was ready to hand on my courses to my successors and look for a different world.
Traveling around the world, you can hardly help comparing "life at home" to "life here". Sometimes "life at home"
comes out second-best, and you start wondering how it would be to "live here" for more than a week or two.
I first had that feeling strike me hard in Piriapolis, Uruguay, on a crisp winter's afternoon in August. "How would
it be to retire here?" A few more trips to the "Southern Cone" region - to Paraguay, Chile, Brazil - reinforced the
attraction. But even with my retirement - enough pension to live really well down there - I'm not quite ready to pack
up and move. I want to see more of my home country first, and Bossa Nova with her big moose of a tow vehicle will take
me there.
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Picking papayas
in Paraná
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Exploring indeed!
Different places, different experiences - Here I'm at the ancestral home
of my adopted nephew Ricardo, in southern Brazil; I'mabout to pick a ripe papaya from the tree.
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