Buck's Blog

A few months ago, I saw a post on one of the on-line blogs in which the author had taken a dollar store armored vehicle, applied a few bits, and made it a science fiction armored vehicle.  The genius is that many of the armored vehicles that came in packs of plastic army men were historically inaccurate and generally out of scale but had the right elements to easily convert them for science fiction game involving 28mm figures.  Since reading that article, whenever I am in Target, Walmart, Five Below, the PX, The Dollar Tree, Dollar General, or other stores with a toy department, I make a quick trip down the aisle looking for a suitable “conversion fodder.”  I have been unsuccessful.

That led to my observation that even after ten years of war in the Middle East, kids must be really uninterested in military toys or military history.  There is nothing on the shelves. There are plenty of Minecraft, Star Wars, Marvel superhero, and even Scooby Doo toys, but almost no “army” toys.  Recently I found a tub of plastic toy soldiers at a Virginia Walmart, but that has been the extent.  Just ten years ago I and my buddies were hitting every Walmart we passed for the 21st Century Toys line of 1:50 and 1:144 WWII vehicle sand airplanes to repurpose them for wargaming.  Today, there is precious little on the shelves.

When I was a kid, you became very popular when you brought home the newest G.I. Joe accessory (or one with life-like hair!).  Lots of kids came to my house to play with my Guns of Navaronne play set, Anzio Beach back 1:72 set, Blue and Gray Marx play set, etc.  What I find ironic is that while video games are becoming more violent (and graphically so), kids don’t seem to play with toy soldiers.  They play with toy guns in the form of Nerf guns and their clones, but those always have a science fiction vibe to them, not current or historical military theming.

I find it interesting that when we were kids we read Sergeant Rock, watched John Wayne, and played with toy soldiers, but today kids watch fantasy, science fiction, and super hero movies and play video games.  There seems to be little love or interest in history or the military.  I think that those comic books and old movies were important forms of education.  Yes, education.  Watch Sand of Iwo Jima, Objective Burma, or Patton with you kids and see what I mean.  Will your kid understand Forrest Tucker saving John Wayne from being picked up by the shore police even though he can’t stand Stryker?  Will they understand shared sacrifice and perseverance through adversity as presented by Errol Flynn.  How about the ethos of not leaving a wounded buddy behind?  Thinking back, I think a lot of my world view and concept of right and wrong was formed by John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart (a real life hero), Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (another real life hero), David Niven in The Immortal Battalion (where the important lesson was not letting down your team and your heritage), Randolph Scott, and Gary Cooper — and not just in their war movies.  Hoppalong Cassidy was a terrific role model!!  Even when Randolph Scott played a bad buy opposite Errol Flynn, he had a sense of integrity missing in today’s media.  Those movies taught lessons about camaraderie, duty, honor, and country that you don’t see in Captain America XII or Iron Man XXXIV.   In movies like Chisum, John Wayne and the others employed violence in a controlled way and only as a last resort.  Contrast that with Fast and Furious MCMVII in which the objective is to sleep with prostitutes and steal cars.

How do kids learn positive lessons about duty, honor, country, comradeship, perseverance through adversity, teamwork, the appropriate use of force, and the importance of something greater than oneself?  And how do they role play those lessons without toy soldiers or plastic cowboys?

The term “cowboy” is today used pejoratively by those who wish to vilify, give away, or destroy all that made this country great.   Here is what “cowboy” means to me.  Many of my childhood heroes portrayed this kind of cowboy.  This may not be an accurate reflection of every cowboy who worked a trail herd, but this is how men like John Wayne depicted them.  This nation could use a lot more cowboys.

On Monday morning (13th) we woke, packed, and had our final breakfast at Cabinas Capulin, in Monte Verde.  Then Orlando picked us up and took us to the Curi Cancha nature preserve.  This is one of many privately owned preserves in Costa Rica.  We went looking for wildlife — and found some.

We took this picture in front of a giant ficus tree.  We had ficus in our yard when we lived in Florida, but I never guessed they could get this big.

I took this picture of the “bell bird” with my phone through Orlando’s spotting scope.

This is a picture of the triple waddle something-or-other.  That is the technical name for this species of bird.  Even with the “long lens” on my camera, I couldn’t get this close, so I used my phone to take the picture through Orlando’s scope.

There was a big tree with a dozen hummingbird feeders hanging under it in an open field.  With the “long lens” I was able to get extremely closeup shots of the birds.

Curi Cancha is one of the places you can see the continental divide in Costa Rica.  On the other side of that cut in the mountains is the Caribbean (Atlantic).  The valley running from left to right in front of us flows into the Pacific.

After a couple of hours at Curi Cancha, we got into the Turismo Van and headed down toward the Pacific Ocean.  The first third of the trip was over unimproved roads through the mountains.  Eventually we hit the Pan American highway, and the going became easier.

On our way between Monte Verde and Quepos (Manuel Antonio National Park), we stopped at a bridge over the Tarcoles River where we saw a bunch of crocodiles.

 Having arrived near the Manuel Antonio National Park, we checked into our hotel, took a quick look at the beach, and found some place for dinner.  As Tom can legally drink in Costa Rica, we ordered a pitcher of sangria to share.  I think he liked it.  The next morning we had breakfast early and then walked to the entrance to the national park.  Along the way we were accosted by a number of guys offering tour guide services.  Apparently this is something of a scam.  We were warned ahead of time that the private, non-licensed guides are the source of a number of complaints.  At one point, an employee of the National Park latched onto us and walked us to the park entrance.  Once we were with him, the other folks stopped trying to sell us their services.

We decided to go into the park without a guide, which turned out to be a pretty good idea.  We moved about at our own pace.  Often we would see three of four groups with guides stopped along a trail looking at something, and we would stop and take pictures ourselves.  The value of the guide is that you are supposed to see more wildlife with one than without one.  I think we did okay on our own.

Someone who had visited Costa Rica told me that the beaches weren’t very nice, but I think they were terrific.  The sand is not quite as sugary white as Panama City, Florida, but it was good, clean sand.  The water was a very comfortable temperature.  There were few rocks or shells, so walking barefoot was easy.  Look at the color of the water!

Sloths have got to be the ugliest mammals on the planet.  To me they look like the Morelocks in 1960’s version of The Time Machine.  They move so slowly that their fur is full of mold, parasites, and insects.

I asked Orlando who Manuel Antonio was.  I figured he might have been a president of Costa Rica, famous explorer, or some other notable figure.  Apparently, a woman didn’t make it to the hospital and gave birth on the beach.  The locals began to refer to the area as “the beach where Manuel Antonio was born” or “Manuel Antonio’s beach.”  When the park was created in this area, they kept the name, Manuel Antonio National Park.

After a couple of hours at Manuel Antonio we went back to our hotel, locked up the camera and other valuables, and went to spend some time on the beach behind our hotel until the clouds darkened and threatened rain.  The water was a very comfortable temperature.  Tom, Sam, and I played in the breaking waves for an hour or so, and then we relaxed on towels for a while.  Finally we went in to shower up and get ready for dinner.  By the time we got on the bus to take us from our hotel up the hill to the restaurant area, it was raining.

For our last dinner in Costa Rica we ate at the El Avion restaurant.  The restaurant’s bar is inside this US cargo plane that was involved in the Iran-Contra incident and was eventually shot down in Honduras or Nicaragua.  After several years it was bought by the folks who own this restaurant.  The food was good, but it wasn’t the best meal we’ve eaten in Costa Rica.  As with most of the restaurants in Costa Rica, there were no windows, just open walls with a beautiful view of the ocean.  It would have been a great place to view the sunset if it hadn’t been cloudy and raining.

We then returned to our hotel room for snacks while watching a movie on my computer.  We all hit the sack very early, because the next day, our travel-home day, was to start very early in the morning.

On this day, we were on our own in Monte Verde without our guide, Orlando.  We began with another terrific breakfast, provided in the reception area of Cabinas Capulin before setting out for the Don Juan coffee and cacao tour.  The Don Juan tour was billed as “three tours in one:” coffee, sugar cane, and cacao.  The sugar cane portion seemed like an afterthought, and the coffee portion was good, but for me the highlight was the cacao portion.

Having been on this tour, it is amazing to me that people ever figured out how to turn coffee beans into food.  The plant germinates in a green house for two or three years before being planted in the ground.  The plant is only good for 25 -30 years.  This coffee plantation pulls out the plant at 25 years and plants a new seedling.  Of those 25 years, they only get 15 harvests.  The beans must be hand picked, because the beans ripen at different rates.  Our guide said that the pickers might visit the same plant 15-20 times during the six-week harvest season.  Then the bean goes through a six or seven step process in which the various layers are removed to reveal what we know as the coffee bean, which is then roasted.  The roasting time determines the flavor of the coffee.  Our guide asserted that light roast provides the best, non-bitter, non-burnt taste.  She also said that longer roasting times, such as “dark roast,” does little to make the coffee stronger, despite popular misconception, while giving the coffee more of a bitter taste.  Except for Sam, none of us are coffee drinkers, so we found this presentation and tour interesting, but not overly so.

This particular plantation is small.  They only sell to the US via internet sales.  The major coffee brands in the US only buy from large plantations.  I tried a cup of the light roast at the end of the tour.  I still don’t like coffee, but the Don Juan light roast was less terrible than other coffee I have tried.

The next step of the tour was showing how sugar cane is pressed to create a sugary water.  This sugary water can then be processed into sugar.  In this part of the country, most of the sugar cane is processed into rum.

By far the most interesting portion of the tour was the discussion of cacao.  The cacao pod was surprising.  When our guide cut the pod open, what came out looked like meat.  Tom commented that if he had seen this before ever seeing chocolate, he might not have ever eaten chocolate.  The meat-like stuff you can see in the picture is peeled and processed into the cacao nut.  This nut is then roasted.  The nut is often then processed to separate the cacao powder from the butter.  The butter is used in cosmetics, generally.  The powder is then used to make chocolate.  Our guide talked about how you have to look at the label to make sure that the chocolate has a lot of cacao in it and is not adulterated with “chocolate flavors” and other additives.  Apparently the pure cacao has many health benefits.  the good stuff is 90 something percent cacao with a little of the cacao butter added back.

She mixed the cacao a few different ways for us.  The Aztecs thought this was the food of the gods.  Sugar cane and coffee are not indigenous to this part of the world, so the Aztecs did not mix the cacao with sugar.  They mixed it with chili powder and perhaps cinnamon.  This mixture was then stirred into hot water.  Because the pure cacao has a number of health benefits, the Aztecs felt stronger and satisfied.  We tried it this way.  It was really good!  Then she mixed in a little brown sugar from their sugar cane, and this mixture was terrific.  During this portion of the tour, she showed us a number of ways that the cacao is processed and used.  I found this portion of the tour the most interesting — plus, we got to sample stuff!

After the tour was over, we rode in a traditional Costa Rican ox cart back to the mandatory gift shop.  The ox cart, originally from Europe, probably Italy, holds a special place in Costa Rican culture.  It was the first major transportation system that brought coffee from the mountains to the coast.  Costa Rica was exporting coffee before it was an independent country.  Each cart is individually painted and is a work of art in its own way.

Following the coffee tour, we set out on a hike along a trail on the grounds of our cabins.  The Cabinas Capulin is also a working farm, so along the trail there were some parts of the farm to view.

It has rained every afternoon since our arrival, so the ground was slippery.  Sam’s stumbling and near falls were very funny.

The trail was well marked.  We weren’t very quiet during our walk, so we didn’t see any wildlife.  There was one point where we heard a lot of birds in a distant tree being quite loud, but we never saw the birds.

There seem to be very few flying, biting insects in this area.  We were wandering through the cloud forest without applying any bug repellant, and we were never bothered by mosquitos, flies, or other insects.

Upon our return from our hike, Tom and I played with the frisbee for an hour, and then I made grilled cheese sandwiches on the hot plate in our cabin.  We then spent a relaxing afternoon reading and taking a siesta in our cabins.

This was the only afternoon / evening since we arrived without torrential rain.  We took advantage of this clear weather to book a night nature walk through the forest with a guide.  Armed with flashlights, we ventured into the forest.  We saw a sloth, some snakes, a few sleeping birds, and some interesting nocturnal insects.  It was a little pricey for what we saw, but it was worth doing once.

We returned to our cabin to snack on some popcorn and relax before bed.

After a terrific breakfast at our cabins, Orlando met us and took us to the Selvatura Cloud Forest park, where we began a zip line tour over the cloud forest.  Where we were in Monte Verde, Costa Rica, looks a little like a tropical rain forest, but in fact a cloud forest is different.  Where rain forests get torrential rains, most of the rain runs off and moves into tributaries of rivers.  A cloud forrest doesn’t have as much rain.  Most of the moisture comes from clouds that are pushed inland by ocean winds.  This means that the moisture comes in the form of condensation that runs off leaves and soaks into the ground.  The Selvatura park features a number of really long zip lines, the final one measuring a full kilometer.  At points we were hundreds of feet above the canopy, passing over and among terrific scenery.

Soon after our arrival we were suited up and ready to go.  We had to take a short shuttle ride from the reception area to the first tower. After a short instruction session, we were on our way.  The first zip was short, but the next one was almost a kilometer.

After completing the zip line tour, we then hiked along the couple miles of trails through the Selvatura Park, which is sort of a privately held nature preserve.  Tom wanted to see a “big cat.”  Sam wanted to see a sloth.  Candy wanted to see a monkey.  I wanted to see a toucan.

I’m not exactly sure how long the nature trail was, but it took us nearly two hours to walk it, stopping from time to time to try to spot some wildlife.  There were several pedestrian foot bridges along the trail that gave us a chance to look at the forest from the middle and top of the canopy as well as walking from bridge to bridge along the ground level.

This picture gives you some sense of scale for the length of these suspension bridges through the cloud forest.

The best way to find wildlife at a national park in the US is to watch where all the cars are parked by the side of the road.  Someone spots an animal and everyone else stops to see it too.  The same was true in the cloud forest.  We came around a curve in the trail and found a couple pointing into the trees.  It turned out to be an oncilla, which is somewhat smaller than an ocelot.  He eventually got tired of all of us staring at him, came out of his tree, and disappeared into the vegetation.  Tom was the only one who got to see what he wanted to see on the hike.

As we finished the walking tour, we were getting hungry for lunch.  Orlando took us to a small Soda in town where we had yet another terrific meal.  We bought a few groceries to take back to our cabin as the afternoon rain began to fall.  We then spent the afternoon relaxing in our cabin.  We went to a nearby pizza joint for dinner, and then ended the day with some board games back in our cabin.

Over the past 6 Summers we worked to get the kids to all 50 states in the US before Tommy went off to college.  We managed to complete that goal about a week before he reported into West Point for Beast Barracks.  We had thought about trying to go to England this Summer, but the cost of airfare just put England into the “too hard” box for this year.  To work around Sam’s Summer School and Tom’s military training, we decided to have two smaller vacations rather than one long one.  The first vacation of the year is a week in Costa Rica.

Normally Candy has spent months planning each of our family vacations, using TripAdvisor, Yelp, and other Internet sites as well as travel books from the library.  This year she did some basic research, but then we hired Orlando Vargas, a Costa Rica guide, to work out the details.  This was both liberating and stressful to Candy the Microplanner.  Orlando picked us up in the airport and began the four-hour drive over largely unimproved roads to La Fortuna.  Along the way we stopped at a small “Soda” for lunch.

Most traditional Costa Rican meals include black beans and rice.  All of the food has been superb.  The drinks were fruit juices of different types.  Tom and I hand pineapple, Sam and Candy had something red.  Tom and I also tried the home-made hot chillies in large yellow-topped jar.

We arrived at the Los Lagos resort just as the afternoon rain began to fall.  We checked in then went to the pool-side snack bar to get a light dinner to take to our rooms.  We weren’t very hungry after the huge lunch we ate.

This first day was largely a travel day, but the second day was full of high adventure.  We began with a wonderful breakfast buffet at Los Lagos and then Orlando took us to Pure Trek, where we had scheduled an excursion in which we conducted four rappels down canyon walls and waterfalls.

After signing a bunch of waivers, we boarded the PureTrek van to take us to the adventure area.  Most of the drive was along unimproved roads past houses and agricultural fields.

I haven’t been rappelling in many years, and I was really looking forward to it.  Sam and Tom had both rappelled with scouts.  Tom had just finished air assault school, during which he rappelled from a helicopter.  Candy had never rappelled.  So we were a mixed bag.

I volunteered to go first for the day.  I wanted to check the safety of the apparatus before Candy and the kids came down.  We all lived. One of the things I liked about these PureTrek guys is that they were safe, but they let you bound down the cliff instead of just walking.  It was an awesome experience.

From this shot, you get a sense of scale.  The cliff for the first rappel was 145 feet.

The guide at the bottom of the cliff, pulled the rope to stop our descent and then dragged us under the falling water to make sure that everyone gets wet.

Our next stop for the day was to see the La Fortuna falls.  Getting there meant going down hundreds of stairs to the base of the falls and then back up again.

After leaving the La Fortuna falls area, Orlando took us to a local watering hole on the La Fortuna river.  Tom and Sam both had a chance to swing out and drop 30 feet into the pool.

After all the adventure and hiking, we went back Los Lagos to relax a little before dinner.

The resort had several pools, some “cold” and some fed by the volcanic hot springs.  They both had the fastest water slides I have ever experienced.  You could really shock yourself going from the cold pool to the hot pool and back.

The Los Lagos also had a butterfly enclosure, some alligators, a frog enclosure, and an enclosure for leaf cutter ants.  We spent a few minutes walking through these areas before getting ready for dinner an at upscale steakhouse / soda.

The next morning, after another hearty breakfast, we took a hike up a trail to an observation area for a better view of Arenal.

After this hike we began a three hour drive over unimproved roads to Monte Verde.

Upon arriving at Monte Verde we went to lunch at the Tree House restaurant.  A tree grows up through the middle of the restaurant.  It is a living tree and home to birds.

After a terrific Italian dinner at a local restaurant in Monte Verde, we hit the sack early and got ready for the next day’s adventure.  Stay tuned!

I recently travelled to London to attend a conference for work.  To save a large bag of cash on the flight, it was cheaper for us to go over a couple days early, so I had a chance to see a few fights the day before the conference started.

The first thing we did was go atop The Shard.  This is the tallest structure in the EU.  From atop the Shard you get some spectacular views of London.  It was a bit hazy in the morning, but the weather cleared up nicely the rest of the week.

I met my buddy Simon, and we then visited two places I hadn’t seen in my previous visits to London.  The fist was the Cabinet War Rooms, where the British Government ran during WWII.

In the Cabinet War Rooms was also an extensive museum dedicated to Winston Churchill.  It was really terrific, tracing his life from his earliest days as a soldier and war correspondent to his second term as Prime Minister and his death.

I have been to London several times, but I had never gotten to the Imperial War Museum.  I had been told it was primarily filled with WWI artifacts.  Since that war doesn’t interest me much, this museum always took a back seat to other things I wanted to see, like the British Army Museum.  The ground floor is dedicated to WWI, and the displays are excellent.  The museum focuses on soldiers’ stories, not the battles and generals.  I really enjoyed it.  The other displays, WWII to the present were less impressive.

We passed this sculpture at one point.  Since I have played a number of pirate games, I had to get a picture of this.

That evening we saw an excellent production of The Taming of the Shrew in the Globe Theater in London.  This theater is an exact reproduction of the original Globe.  It was really neat to see Shakespeare in the Globe in London.

After three days at the conference, all of the folks I know headed home, but I stayed to attend the Partizan wargaming show in Newark on Trent, Nottinghamshire.  That is the subject of my next post.