Jun

24

Today was one of those days where you are both exhilarated and exhausted. The wife had trouble sleeping last night. When that happens, she tosses and turns all night. Her restlessness made it impossible for me to fall asleep. So I was awake until sometime after 2 am and up at 7 am.

So this may be a short report as there is a deck chair with my name on it and I am experiencing a serious "nap attack".

First a personal observation: We took a bus tour today. Although the tour guide was very knowledgeable, his grasp of the English language was not that great. And maybe we were spoiled in Gibraltar with a tour guide who went out his way to make everything interesting and personal, but that was not the case today. We often couldn't hear our guide because we were in crowd of 40 people. Couple that with other tours, and the noise was just too much.

If I do this again, I'm going to look into hiring a personal tour guide to show us around.

The history of Cartagena is fascinating. We were told that "he who controls Cartagena, controls the Mediterranean.

It is a very strategically located port and that is easy to defend due to it's shape. The father (?) of Hannibal had a wall built around the city that became known as the Punic Wall. It was thought to be a great defense system that would protect the city. When coupled with the shape and location of the harbor, the city was thought to be a very safe place to be (which turned out not to be the case).

The geological wealth of the city, especially in the form of the silver mines grew the wealth of to fantastic proportions.

The wealthy of the city chipped in and built the great Roman Theater of Cartagena. It was very cool touring the theater and learning of it's history and architecture. It was amazing to me that the theater was lost from history until discovered by archeological digs in the 1980s.

They've been able to recreate most of the theater using (they say) 70% of the original materials and building blocks.

We toured the city streets of the area, walked into a small Catholic Church and took pictures of the statues. I'll try and post some of the pictures later.

The Punic Wall was very nice to see. We were told that we stood at the same place that Hannibal gathered his army to march across the Alps. Supposedly, 90,000 men and 100 Elephants.

Of course, while Hannibal was trekking to Rome, The Roman's used that as an opportunity to attack Cartagena (it was called by another name then…I don't recall what it was). The Romans conquered Cartagena. Hannibal was absent.

Not the best military maneuver on the part of Hannibal.

A few personal notes:

Try not to have elbow surgery a few days before you go on a trip. it limits your ability to do stuff.

I had an infected bursa sac and had to have some minor outpatient surgery. Apparently, there is an international law that says if you see Scott, you must find a way to bump his elbow.

There is a basketball court on the ship. So I went out to shot a few free throws. There are maybe 3 or 4 other people on the court shooting around. As I stand on the free throw line getting ready to see if I can go 5 for 5 from the line, SLAM, a ball crashed into my left elbow. Not my knee, not my back, not my butt, my freaking elbow. Of all the places the ball could have gone on that court, it hit me on the elbow.

The kid apologized hitting me in the elbow. I accepted his apology (he certainly didn't do it on purpose…at least I think he didn't ;-) and decided to try some other activity.

I tried to get a ping pong game going, but the tables were all full. So I came back to the room. My 16 year old, Hunter was sitting at his desk working on something. I asked him what he was doing, he said, "chemistry".

He set a goal of doing at least a little bit of chemistry or physics or anatomy study on the ship each day in preparation for his AP courses in those classes.

It warmed my heart!

Well, it's off the flow rider to watch the kids ride the boogey boards.

Take care, my friends!


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