Wandering Browns

View in the morning when we woke up Beach right outside our door I'm searching for words to describe Bali. Paradise, relaxation, and rich, deep culture come to mind. Since finding out we were traveling to Indonesia, Bali has been on my short list of places we MUST go. I had a deep visceral longing to see this place. I'm glad that my dreams came true. It was a process involving ever changing Austin's work and clients' schedules and ultimately involved booking plane tickets the day of, only to find out that our flight out of Cilacap (only a few flights a day, only to Jakarta) was not at the time that the person from Austin's work booking tickets had told us, which led us to waiting three hours without air conditioning in a small room that passes for the Cilacap airport,  having to reschedule/change/miss our first connecting flight to Bali and hop on a different flight a few hours later. It involved switching airports in Jakarta and trusting a taxi van that ...

It's becoming a tradition that I write a guest post for each location we're in, but I've been at a loss for what to write about in Indonesia.  Then, my wonderful wife reminded me that I just had a birthday, and convinced me that it wasn't at all narcissistic to write about my own birthday, since who can do a better job writing about my birthday than me, of course?  Who can argue with that flawless logic?  Not me.  So here it goes... In all, it turned out to be a fairly awesome birthday, mostly by coincidence.  If you're OK with my summary, stop here, otherwise, read on for the full story... Firstly, I had the day off.  Nobody knew it was my birthday, but it just worked out that my customer asked me to stay at the hotel on Thursday.  Having the day off on your birthday is always an immediate bonus.  It was nice to not have to worry about getting up and ready in the morning, and just take some time and hang out with Elise and Landon.  Th...

Borobudur  Walking up to the temple Borobudur is the largest Buddhist temple in the world. It was built in the 8th century AD and abandoned later after the island of Java's conversion to Islam. It was first discovered by outsiders in the 1800s and Governor Raffles, an English governor of Java at the time, ordered excavations on the temple. It has undergone several renovations and restorations over the years and was named a UNESCO World Heritage site in the 80's after its last restoration. It sits near a few active volcanoes, including Mount Merapi which spewed ash all over it in 2010. Fortunately, there was no volcanic eruption while we were there.  Borobudur from the base We set out in the afternoon to visit this great structure. Our driver lent us an umbrella because I forgot to bring ours, as the sky was cloudy and threatening rain the whole time we were there. As we came in the gates, we realized that the foreigner ticket office and the domestic ticket of...