Dave & Meredith’s Travel Blog

Today we completed a long-distance mission that we accepted while in the Galapagos in March. There was a place on the island of Floreana called “Post Office Bay” that has a barrel that holds postcards written by people visiting the Galapagos, addressed to others all around the world. The idea is that other visitors rifle through the postcards, take any that are near their homes, and then deliver them when they return. No postage required. There’s a lot of history in that barrel – it dates back to the 18th century when whalers used it to send messages home.

Dave and I are not quite as fast as the postal service, since we picked up the postcards on March 11 and delivered them on August 23. Also, there was no snow, rain, sleet or even a cloud in the sky today as we delivered our mail (unlike the rest of August here!), so we’re not as hardy as the postal service. But, you get what you pay for. We have only been home a few weeks since March, so not too bad.

We delivered four postcards to people who live in Boston and in one of the suburbs that’s not too far from us. We rang the doorbells hoping that the recipients would come out to chat, but unfortunately no one was home at any of the places we visited. We just left the postcards in the mailboxes or under the door with a sticky note saying that Dave and Meredith delivered them (of course we also left our blog address!).

Mission accomplished.

- Meredith

Dave finally shaved his beard off!! For those who haven’t had the pleasure of seeing Dave for a while, he had gotten a little too…Yeti…for me. He had decided not to shave during the trip to Mongolia, partly for fun, but partly because we were in the middle of nowhere and he would have had to shave with icy water from glacial streams.

At first, I thought he looked quite handsome with his rugged not-yet-beard:

And even when he got to the point when it really was a beard, I didn’t mind it too much. But that was when I thought he would shave it once we got to Hawaii. But the experiment continued. I thought, “No problem, he’ll shave it as soon as we get home.” But Dave wanted to show it to our friends to see their reaction.

Almost three weeks after we got home, he finally shaved it (he wanted to wait until we saw our friends Andy and Darcie in Maine, which we did this past weekend).

Here are the before and after shots:

Dave the Rough (Before)

Dave the Smooth (After)

HOORAY! Dave’s face is back!

- Meredith

*Too obscure a musical theatre reference? How about, “Ding Dong the Beard is Dead”? The problem with that one is that while more people know The Wizard of Oz than they do Bye Bye Birdie, it’s just not as clever a word play. Thus, I chose to title this post “Bye Bye Beardie!”

A quick post to say that I’ve posted a gallery of pictures from Hawaii. Click here to see them. Enjoy!

- Dave