Attention: Residents of The Villages, Florida!…Please contact us to get together!…

Yesterday, a band of mongooses was in a frenzy climbing this tree. Could they have smelled a snake residing there? Very possibly, when a mongoose’s favorite meal is a snake of any type. They are immune to snake venom.

Gosh, we’re receiving lots of email messages and comments regarding residents of The Villages who may want to get together during the three months we’ll be renting a holiday home in the Barrineau Neighborhood, from April 30 to July 29. We’re hoping many of our readers in the area will also contact us for social events, including happy hour get-togethers, lunches, and dinners out and hosting at our place.

If you know of anyone living in The Villages in Florida that may want to meet, contact us via either of our email addresses listed under our banner on our home page. How exciting that will be! Based on the comments we’re getting so far, we expect to be very busy.

But you never know. Sometimes, people are shy and hesitate to make new friends, especially those who are content with their current circle of friends, and also hesitate to make friends with “transient types” such as us. It’s similar to making friends on cruise ships, which we’ve done many times, and many of those beautiful relationships continue today. We are grateful for all the friendships we’ve made along the way.

When they calmed down, we gave them a good-sized portion of paloney, cut into bite-sized pieces, which they devoured in seconds.

Perhaps, our expectations are too high after living here, on and off, over the past 2½ years. Residents of Marloth Park are extremely friendly, and we’ve even cultivated friendly get-togethers with other short-term visitors with whom we stay in touch via social media. It’s been so easy here, easier than anywhere we visited worldwide, even easier than in our old lives in Minnesota.

As much time as we’ve spent in Las Vegas/Henderson, Nevada, in the past over ten years we’ve been residents of the state, we’ve yet to make any new friends, although we have a few old friends and family who live there. In the four months we spent in Bali and Costa Rica, we never made new friends, although we had a few social interactions on a few occasions.

On many occasions, we’ve socialized with our landlord and property managers, such as Hans and Geri in Kenya; Gina in Madeira; Sylvie and Andy in Trinity Beach, Queensland;  Mario in Fiji, Australia; Trish and Neal in New Zealand; Françoise and Egon in Bali; Fran and Terry in Penguin, Tasmania; Anne and Rob in Huon Valley, Tasmania; Bob in New South Wales, Australia; Bev and Sam, Atenas, Costa Rica (met them in Kauai in 2015 and later rented their holiday home in Costa Rica); Linda and Bill in Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Eileen in Connemara, Ireland; Lorraine and Graham in Cornwall, England; and finally Renate and John in Cornwall, England.

This zebra foursome visits often for pellets and a sip in the pool.

And, of course, the closest friendships we’ve made with property owners/managers have been Louise and Danie, who, after ten years of fabulous friendship, are like family to us and will remain so in our hearts forever. How lucky we have met so many lovely people along the way!

We are hopeful we will have a full and enriching social experience while we are in The Villages, Florida, hoping many of our readers will contact us to meet and share stories of our life experiences, travels, and more. Undoubtedly, we’re looking forward to this new location as we continue our world journey.

Be well.

Photo from one year ago today. April 10, 2022:

Port Everglades as the ship began to journey out to sea. For more photos, please click here.

Day #178 in lockdown in Mumbai, India hotel…The challenges of a new site…Photos from Fiji in 2015…

Yesterday, Tom took this stunning photo of the coral reef in Fiji from a high peak he climbed with our friendly neighbor, Sewak.

Today’s photos are from the post on this date in 2015, while we were living on the island of Vanua Levu in Savusavu, Fiji. For more on this date, please click here.

Firstly, I felt compelled to share a challenge I am facing over the next few weeks, one I am not in the mood to do whatsoever. in order to acquire new traffic on our new site, This is called SEO which is described as follows:

What is SEO?

“SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.”

Sewak’s home of over 40 years includes a separate Hindu temple area and family shrine which he happily showed us.

This is a normal process to accomplish on most websites, especially in our case, when our newly revised site looks forward to further enhancing our traffic than we experienced in the past on Blogger. Why more traffic? Our goal for the upcoming years is to increase the revenue on our site by more clicks on our advertisers. The more clicks, the more revenue we’ll generate.

Once this is accomplished, I’ll begin to work on adding advertisers to our YouTube page. There, also, we’ve had millions of readers, but this is another opportunity to generate more revenue, a normal part of having an online presence.

The hilly side yard at Sewak’s home.

Over the years, I’ve mentioned we weren’t doing our site to earn a living or to fund our world travels. However, we’d like to generate enough income to pay for the cost of maintaining our new site, including ongoing developer support, promotional costs and design enhancements.

This will not impact your continued readership in any manner. You do not have to buy a thing or even use our advertiser links if you prefer not to. However, we appreciate the tiny commissions we may earn if you do so, keeping in mind, you do not pay a penny more from using our advertisers than going directly to those sites from Google or another search engine.

Sewak drove us up this steep hill in his truck for this view. It was outrageously steep.

In the interim, the web developer has given me “homework.” I have to write five new posts of at least 2000 words each, (twice our usual daily text count) to include the “keywords” we’ll be using. The last thing I feel like doing right now is writing additional posts, over and above those, I already write daily, a project I thoroughly enjoy.

Ensuring these SEO posts consist of this large word count will be challenging so I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think how I can make this fun for me and also, enjoyable for YOU to read once they are uploaded as five individual daily posts over five scattered days.

Some of my photos were slanted. I was standing on a steep hill and didn’t properly adjust for the angle.

The only way I could reframe this task was to find a sense of satisfaction in the knowledge that I’ll be summarizing multitudes of accumulated world travel tips that hopefully appeal to readers of all ages and from many parts of the world. These five posts will be a compilation of our vast travel experiences over the past almost eight years.

We’ll be focusing on tips to save money on travel; tips in regard to safety, health, and well-being while traveling; reveling in the safari experience and wildlife in general;  booking hotels, holiday homes, cars and flights and more. Each of the five posts will have their own theme.

The wind was blowing requiring Tom to hold this perfect flower for my shot while we toured Sewak’s grounds.

For our long-time readers, some of this information may be redundant. But, we’ll make every effort to make it light and refreshing in every manner possible. We’ll also be factoring in the new normal we are all facing in light of COVID-19 and how it may impact each of these topics.

As for today’s photos, last night, after watching the exciting new series on Amazon Prime, “The World’s Toughest Eco-Challenge Fiji.” It’s been special for us to once again see the warmth and kindness of the Fijian people as they assist the competitors along the way. Also, it’s been fulfilling to be reminded of the beauty of these exquisite islands. Fiji, info follows:

Fiji’s 300 islands

“The archipelago consists of some 300 islands and 540 islets scattered over about 1,000,000 square miles (3,000,000 square km). Of the 300 islands, about 100 are inhabited. The capital, Suva, is on the southeast coast of the largest island, Viti Levu (“Great Fiji”).”
Badal, Sewak’s dog, bounded up the steep hill with ease. Badal visited us every night for dinner. We made him a plate of the delicious meats we were having for dinner. We’d asked Sewak if it was OK if Badal ate meat with us since he is vegetarian as an Indo-Fijian. He assured us it was no problem. Badal arrived at our door every night about 30 minutes before we dined, politely awaiting his plate of food.
If you are Amazon Prime members you can watch this fascinating race at no additional cost. Lately, we’ve been watching many of Amazon’s original series, some of which we’ve thoroughly enjoyed while in lockdown, day after day.
Off I go now, for yet another walk in the corridor. The convention guests have left and the hallways have re-opened for us, making the walking a bit less boring. Anything to keep us from being bored while in lockdown, now on day #178, in this hotel.
Have a safe and pleasant day.

_____________________________________________

Photo from one year ago today, September 17, 2019:

The church’s bell tower is similar to those seen on series, “Game of Thrones” and other historical movies and TV shows.For more photos, please click here.