Traveling in Our Lucky, Yellow, New Year's Underwear (Luis)

Colombia is one of several Latin American countries where it is considered good luck to wear yellow underwear on New Year's Eve. Not wanting to tempt fate on a complicated travel day, I decided to go all in and wear my new yellow-striped briefs that we bought at a mall store called "Feria del Brasier Solos Kukos". They had a huge selection of "KukoSuerte" (literally Lucky Undies) of men's and women's yellow underwear. When we passed the display, we couldn't resist. They even had a "Buy Two, Get One Free" deal going on (Luella got the extra).

After my first experience with lucky, yellow underwear, I've decided that if they have any lucky powers, those powers seem to decrease over time. I say this because our luck on our return travel day started good and only got worse as the day went on.

Good Luck (New Year's Eve morning):

• Easy trip to MDE - Jose Maria Cordoba International Airport
• Great flight to Bogota - Brand new airplane, great weather and views flying into the Bogota area

Average Luck (mid day):

• Long but uneventful layover in Bogota at El Dorado International Airport
• Brand new Colombian Passport worked like a charm getting out of Colombian Migration
• Flight from Bogota to San Salvador was uneventful

Bad Luck (afternoon/evening):

• Flight from San Salvador to LAX was oversold so I was bumped from the flight.
• At the last minute, I was given an aisle-seat but it was in the very back of the plane. What seemed like good luck, turned out to be bad luck as I spent most of the five hour flight with the lavatory line of butts in my face.
• Back of the plane seat, meant last in Immigration line. By the time we made it out to baggage claim, our bags had been removed from the carousel. It took us about 20 additional minutes to find them.

Really bad luck (New Year's Eve night):

• When we got into our car (which had spent two weeks in long-term parking), it wouldn't start. Apparently, the stater was out. 
• We had to then take the shuttle back to the terminal, take a taxi to my sister's house in Santa Monica, borrow a car, drive back to the long-term parking lot to pick up our luggage, then drive home.

In total our travel day was 21 hours long, and the lucky underwear powers were completely done.  

Piedras Blancas and Parque Arvi (Luis)

Thursday & Friday, December 29 & 30, 2011 - Many of you know that Medellin is located in a deep Andean valley. On Thursday, we took a trip literally up and out of the valley. We took the Medellin Metro to one of the two MetroCables. The Line K MetroCable line climbs from the valley floor up through two intermediate stations to the top of the Santo Domingo Savio neighborhood where the new Biblioteca España library is located. From there we transferred to the Line L gondola line that travels 3 miles in 14 minutes to the Parque Arvi nature preserve. It is a pretty amazing experience to travel by gondola from a crowded city center to the nature park where you don't see any development in such a short amount of time.

We had reservations to stay at the new Piedras Blancas Hotel and EcoPark. We got a little unlucky when we got off the gondola because it had started to rain. Further, we expected a clearly marked van or bus that would take us to hotel. That wasn't the case and we wasted about 20 minutes and missed about 5 buses before figuring out that every bus except the first one that we checked went past the hotel.

The hassle was quickly forgotten when we go to the hotel. It is located deep in forest on the edge of a small reservoir at 8,200 feet of elevation. We had a late lunch and relaxed before enjoying a bottle of wine on the terrace. There are only 24 rooms at Piedras Blancas and it was fully occupied, so it was very quiet and peaceful.

The next morning I went on a guided hike through the forest. The hike took us through the native forests and the non-native pine forests that were replanted after the native wood was harvested early last century. The utility company that owns and manages the forest is slowly harvesting the pine trees and actively encouraging the regrowth of the native plants. In both forests there were interesting growths of moss, once commonly used in peoples home to decorate the nativity scenes. This practice is now discouraged. To emphasize the point, some of the locals had made a natural nativity scene in a moss patch out of sticks and pine cones. Yet another great Colombian pesebre. The other highlights were the Mario Bros-like mushroom and the blue snake.

Before leaving, I took a ride on the zip-line (see video below). It's called "canopy" in Spanish.