Happily Busy

A post that I wrote over a year ago, and that ended up in my files, but for some reason I did not post when I wrote it!

Over the past few months I have visited Trinidad, Montana, North Carolina and New Jersey. Family, work and in one case just taking a few days off. Part of my alcoholism seems to be this dual sense concerning most of things I do in life. I like to travel and I like to stay home. Funny how my brain and emotions work. Anyway I do seem to manage to get to go to a new cool place about once a year and somewhere really cool every few years.

Trinidad was a neat place to be but unusual in a lot of ways. One of the strange things was my inability to decide if the place was safe or not. I spent some of my time attending a conference at a University there. It was fortified with lots of fencing and security personnel. The locals too were willing to point out that I should be careful when I was out and about. I was not able to get far beyond my work meetings, a few organized road trips and field work (I am a biologist so fortunately my work is often pretty cool too). Taxi was my main mode of transportation but Trinidad is a laid back place. This means for a taxi ride, if you make plans to have a cab pick you up they might be there within a half hour of the time you set. A few people staying at the same place as me we also attending the conference so it was convenient for us to go back and forth to the University together. One trip back, we did not get in a cab until 1 1/2 hours after our scheduled pick-up time!

The place I stayed at was on a mountainside and there was a winding road up to and past my accommodations. This was also the route to a trailhead into some mountain rainforest where I spent some time doing some work.  There were numerous old buildings along the road, with most of them originally associated with an old monastery. One of these buildings had a sign indicating that said it was a treatment center. Yet there was only ever a person or two that I saw around the place. It seemed more deserted than anything. A few days before I left someone was out by the gate to this place and I asked if there were any meetings there. Turns out the place was closed down. There were not many meetings listed on the AA schedule I was able to pull up from a local AA website. So with the uncertainty of the taxi service, there not being many meeting and most of them being scattered around and my work schedule it was just not in the cards for me to go to a meeting while I was there.