I was sitting here munching on a large apple (a crispin) and it reminded me of an adventure my family took one year. Maybe it’ll work for you, if you’re like us. We like apples, the outdoors, exercise, and money.

We happened to live not far from an apple orchard. It was a good year for the owner, and when we asked, he was willing to hire us to pick up windfalls. Windfalls are apples that fell to the ground before they could be picked. They are generally perfectly good, but they tend to have a bruise from when they fell, so orchard owners can’t sell them as eating apples. At least no one will buy them. But they are excellent for making into cider. So one Saturday, we all trooped out to the orchard and gathered apples. The kids had a blast chasing each other around, finding apples, and taking the occasional bite. After several hours we had gathered a fair number of apples, and he paid us piecework, just as if we were migrant workers.

We had more grass and fewer apples

We promptly bought a station-wagon-load of the apples (which go for a lot less than perfect apples) and still had some money left over.

The next Saturday we traveled to a local place that presses apple cider, and we had them make our winter supply of apple cider. That was an adventure all by itself! Real apple cider is cloudy, and the taste is wonderful.

The cloth bags contain chopped-up apples pressure is applied with hydraulics (modern) or a big screw (antique)

We froze the cider because it didn’t have any preservatives. Two points of information:

• If you fill the jugs too full, the expanding freezing cider will expand right out of the jugs and make a royal mess in your freezer.
• If you leave room, though, as the cider freezes, the “essence” tends to concentrate at the top as the crystalizing water in the cider forces the bigger organic molecules aside. This concentrate makes a teriffic apple syrup.
• If you leave the cider out, keep an eye on it. Just before it spoils (turns to vinegar, actually), it becomes naturally carbonated, and you have home-made apple soda. With the right microorganisms you get hard cider instead of vinegar, so watch out.

We paid the rest of our “earnings” to have the cider pressed. Pretty good deal. If you ever make your own cider, tell us about it!

What about San José? I remember something about a famous, blah song when I was a kid called Do You Know the Way to San José? (Sorry—I go more for the classical end of the musical spectrum.)

There are a lot of cities named San José, and I never listened to the song closely enough to tell which one it referred to, so let’s look at the one in Costa Rica. (The one in California is all big and modern and full of traffic. Bleah.)

Our San José is a beautiful city in a wonderful, stable climate, like Katmandu, in a valley in the middle of the country. It’s one of the youngest Latin American capitols, less than 300 years old. New by Katmandu standards, eh? Like any exotic location, though, you won’t run out of things to do. The food is great, the climate is mild, tourism is polished, history and museums are abundant, and the people are glad to have you visit.

I haven't shown a shopping picture for quite a while.

Like Katmandu, San José is pretty much where every trip to the area begins and ends, or the town itself can be your destination.

So which San José is your favorite?

Instead of a submarine (see the last post) how about an ebike? That’s an electric bike, not an electronic bike. One with a battery-powered (those long extension cords are rather inconvenient, dontcha know) motor on a bicycle. So when the pedaling gets tough, the motor gets going. Seems to be a nice concept, and here’s a related vacation idea: Visit the international bike show, Eurobike in Friedrichshafen, Germany. It featured bike fashions, racing bikes, mountain bikes, seminars, vendors, excitement, parties, the works. Well, that’s where it was this year.

One of their tamer bike rides during the show

Not quite so tame

(ahem) Your Serenity agent can fix you up with a trip to next year’s event. It’s sure to be an adventure.

Yup, your own submarine. Take on passengers (for a fee) and take them on underwater tours. I posted about a small sub being tested off the coast of France a while back, but these guys have been in operation for a while, and their subs are dry inside. They have boats that can take as many as six passengers.

This is in the Caribbean, off Aruba

They’re made by a Dutch company, and they’re marketing to the super-rich, scientists, and people who want to start an interesting business.

Dutch company U-Boat Worx builds two- and three-person submarines for private and tourist use and has been doing nice business catering to the superyacht owners of the world for the last five years. Recognizing that its aspirations are greater than the number of independently wealthy superyachters, the company has set up a submarine center on the Caribbean island of Aruba aiming to “break open the luxury tourist submarine market.” “By catering to tourism ourselves, we are showing third parties, such as luxury resorts, hotels, and cruise companies, what the opportunities are” says U-Boat Worx founder Bert Houtman.

Looks like fun.

This country has some of the most beautiful, wild places on the planet, and it has a horrible history, and it hosts the location of an extremely dangerous event that hasn’t happened yet. Rwanda, central Africa. Pronounced roo-wanda.

The country experienced some horrible genocide back in the mid 90′s, but that’s over now, and the tourist industry is justifiably growing by leaps and bounds. For the adventuresome.

Normal adventurers

This is the place to go to see gorillas, hippos (the largest hippo-oriented national park in the world), volcanoes (see a couple posts back about a trip to a volcano in nearby Congo), jungle, elephants, and more. Not to mention local culture and art.

Typical art, typical smile.

Almost ready to call your Serenity agent, right? Maybe not a bad idea, but there’s this one lake you might want to stay away from. Lake Kivu.

Looks innocent, doesn't it?

This lake is dangerous. Here’s a quote from a limnologist (lake scientist)

Lake Kivu is a meromictic lake with a relatively shallow euphotic layer (~18m) usually smaller than its oxic mixolimnion (20-60 m), and with a weak thermal gradient in the mixolimnion.

There’s more where that came from, but what’s going on is that this lake has a lot of dissolved carbon dioxide and methane in it, and tons and tons of these gasses are trapped down at the bottom of the lake. Something might make all that gas escape, all at once. The valley would fill with unbreathable gas, and everybody would suffocate. Maybe in their sleep. You might have heard of another lake that experienced a limnic eruption, killing a couple thousand people. This lake is 2,000 times larger and the area is more densely populated. ‘Nuff said.

On the optimistic side, scientists are working at extracting the methane peacefully and converting it into electricity. It could supply power to the region for a century. I’d rather have that happen.

Have you ever been to Rwanda? We’d like to hear about it.