Riverbend Journal

  Ever since I have been going to the Philippines, my wife has wanted to go to Palawan, which is a long skinny island among a chain of islands stretching southwest from the Philippines off into the China Sea West Philippine Sea as the locals like to call it. Unlike here though, they don't have any qualms about renaming bodies of water. Palawan is known for their pristine white sand beaches and certain areas like El Nido, a city on the NE end of Palawan, are tourist attractions. Always before though, our trips were just too short to justify spending half of our time in the Philippines on Palawan and away from family. This time around however, we had a shade under four weeks in the country so had time on our hands. Our original plan was just for my wife, two kids and I to go as the plane fair is quite expensive. (We nearly paid the same price for a round trip ticket from Clark to El Nido as we did our tickets from the U.S. to Manila!) In fact, we booked our tickets about a month in ...

After visiting my wife's first home, we continued on to the home that used to belong to the parents of my brother-in-law's wife. They both died in the years leading up to Covid and since then, my SIL and her sister take care of the house with periodic visits. The land includes the store front you see in the picture above and the house barely visible among the trees behind the store and above the rock retaining wall. There is a small garden between the base of the retaining wall and the back of the store that they harvest some vegetables from but mostly they stop here to feed the dogs, more on that later. Just to he left of the store in the first picture, you can see an incredibly steep road heading up to the driveway of the house. Above is a picture trying to convey just how steep the road really is. I am always amazed at how the vehicles we ride in are able to climb up such steep roadways when I feel like my feet are just about to slide out from under me when I walk the very s...

  On another day, we continued touring around the Baguio area, first dropping down Kennon Road a bit which is a very winding road that winds up from the lowlands to the mountain tops of Baguio along a steep gorge. It is very prone to landslides and indeed, just descending down it part way we had to pass several areas which were down to one lane due to the other lane no longer existing due to a landslide. Our destination was the locally famous Lion's Lion.  On past trips, when we have passed by the lion head, I have known that I was near the end of my trip and we would soon be in Baguio. Back then, there was just a pull off for it and one could hop out and take a picture. These days however, it has become a tourist draw so you have to pay to park in the much larger pullouts and then up and down the road from the lion head are lots of vendors peddling cheap Chinese trinkets to the masses. There is even a sort of line that forms for people wanting to climb up near the lion's mout...

  After catching up on the garden and a mountain of paperwork that it takes to run the life of a family and someone who volunteers perhaps more often than he should, I set my sights back on the dresser project. For the last month and some change, it has been residing in our front hallway. I put it there so that it could live in a temperature and humidity controlled environment while I was away, especially after all the effort I put into flattening the dresser slab top. With the flattening done, the hard work was done but the time consuming part began, repairing all the defects and sanding. Repairing the defects is relatively straight forward. I used picks and such to remove dirt, debris and bark from the internal cracks at areas where limbs had been at some point in the walnut tree's life. Once they were cleaned out, I applied tape to one side of the board and then after flipping, poured black epoxy into the defects on the other side of the board. The tapes purpose is to prevent th...

  One sign of increasing wealth in the Philippines was the sheer number of restaurants everywhere. When I say they were everywhere, I do mean they were everywhere. Once could zoom in on a google map anywhere, including in residential districts, and find restaurants on every street and corner. I suspect licensing for restaurants in the Philippines is much less onerous than it is here in the States, which helps to explain the sheer number of them. Many look like they are just run off the porch of the home where a family lives and for the most part, I avoided those. I'm sure there are many with excellent cooking but I tend to think an actual restaurant with a name to uphold might care more about serving food that won't make me sick.  So one afternoon while out driving about, we went to eat at a newer restaurant which was making a name for itself on social media. From what I gathered, the cook of that particular restaurant had made his name on some cooking television show for cook...