Teresa Bruce's Blog, page 18
September 13, 2017
Where there’s pain there’s power (Drive Day 75 minus 14 years)
[image error]
I’m not sure what brings most tourists to Managua. But if you’re lucky enough to be a traveler here, its charms will have enough time to sneak up on you. Take art, for example. From music to ceramics to oils, this place explodes with expression. We meet kids at the national music school who give us an impromptu jazz piano concert.
[image error]
It’s as if all those decades of war gave artists ammunition of their own. We are riddled through with awe. I’d become a collector if I weren’t traveling in a tin can. These three pieces come along for the rest of the ride.
[image error]
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
September 12, 2017
Dual realities of the third world kind (Drive Day 74 minus 14 years)
There is an air-conditioned shopping mall in Managua but the locals shop in street markets. There’s an Intercontinental Hotel too, but no locals stay there. Howard Hughes camped out among its luxury suites, doing North America’s reputation no favors. It’s a miracle kids still see our obviously-tourist-faces and still smile.
[image error]
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
September 11, 2017
If your kids complain about doing chores, show them this (Drive Day 73 minus 14 years)
[image error]Nicaragua: photo by Gary Geboy
Managua is no place for whiners. Especially not North American ones. This one so persistently demands to shine Gary’s shoes that I feel bad pointing out that they are sneakers. He’s got an answer for that piss poor excuse too. “Ok take my picture. Same price.”
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
September 10, 2017
Badass buses (Drive Day 72 minus 14 years)
[image error]
Clearly driving around in a truck that screams “We’re from the country that undermined your revolution!” – complete with DC license plates – isn’t a good idea. But I’m not so sure these are either. I get carsick just hailing these collectivos, but you have to admit they have cojones.
[image error]
[image error]Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
September 9, 2017
When cemented in the past is a good thing (Drive Day 71 minus 14 years)
I need to see these monuments. In the midst of abject poverty and the stifling heat that destroys ambitions, these memorials shout aloud that something did change. I wonder what would happen if this were how wars were memorialized in North America. Maybe we wouldn’t need to tear them down.
[image error]Cash for guns, then cemented in place
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
September 8, 2017
Ghosts of Revolution: Managua (Drive Day 70 minus 14 years)
It’s been more than 30 years since the earthquake that devastated the capital. My family camped among its ruins in 1973 and the shocking thing is it doesn’t appear to have recovered all that much. That’s what happens when rebuilding gets usurped by revolutions and counterrevolutions.
[image error]Managua: photo by Gary Geboy
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
September 7, 2017
The father of Nicaraguan poetry (Drive Day 69 minus 14 years)
It’s too far to make it to Managua in one day so we’re looking for the hometown of Central America’s most famous poet.
[image error]
The irony of Ruben Dario being known as the father of modernism does not escape us in this dusty outpost of the past.
[image error]
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
September 6, 2017
Looking for Miraflor (Drive Day 68 minus 14 years)
[image error]
We check out of this cooler-than-our-camper hostel and head higher into the hills, searching for an eco-reserve a guidebook says just opened. Butterflies make faster progress over the rocky strips through fields that count as roads. Eight hours of 4-wheel drive and we are so lost we ask some farmers for directions. I think if I call the resort on the sat phone and ask them to hold, I can get a farmer to listen, figure out where we went wrong and point us in the right direction. She presses it into her forehead instead: if she’s ever used a phone it was inside a building.
[image error]
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
September 5, 2017
San Rafael Del Norte (Drive Day 67 minus 14 years)
This little girl reminds me that thirty years ago Yanina-the-Sandinista-publisher’s-wife was still nursing me through the fevers of malaria. I dig out my mother’s journal and in her cryptic, emotionless documentation is more a ships’ log cataloging disasters than Dear Diary.
[image error]
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
September 4, 2017
Leaving Leon (Drive Day 66 minus 14 years)
[image error]
We drive away with extra bottles of Flor de Cana rum and head for the hills. Mountains, really, to the town of San Rafael del Norte. It’s a day’s drive into what used to be Sandinista country and it’s not hard to understand why Nicaraguans embraced a revolution. Up here, you ride your horse to the corner store and steal glimpses of the outside world through the TV set in the hotel lobby. We look at a calendar on the wall, see that it’s Alex’s birthday and need to hear his voice so much that we break out the satellite phone. I’m sure the other guests think we’re CIA.
[image error]Onion seller, taking TV break
[image error]Same onion seller, back at night for the action flicks
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
