Stranded No More - 2023

May 2023 I received my honorary membership to the Explorer's Club. I'm not sure that my qualifications fit those of the other members; astronauts, Himalayan mountaineers, and deep-sea divers. The club was founded Admiral Robert Peary. My grandfather was his post-Arctic doctor in Westbrook, Maine, and his daughter, the Snowbird, was my grandmother's good friend, but my explorations concentrated on the social research of bars from the Jakarta docks, qat dens in the Masaii Plains, and quaffed champagne at Moet in Epinay not to mention how to score opium or 'Ma' on the Burma side of the Golden Triangle without being mistaken for a fucking DEA agent. Of course I have climbed mountains, free dover through caves off the Yucatan, and leapt off granite cliffs into the emerald waters of the Quincy Quarries

My travel days have been on hold for medical reasons. No getting on a plane until September, unless it's deadheading on a London-bound private plane to answer the need of a Kuwaiti prince. My mission helping him not lose at cards. He's the biggest loser in the world and the world's casinos love a rich loser.

Stranded on Clinton Hill for the foreseeable future I recalled reading a passage from Richard Burton, the famed Nile explorer, about how he was stranded in Trieste at the end of his life and felt like Robinson Crusoe. Waiting for ship to end his exile fromthe world. Last week I spoke with my around-the-world travel agent, John, at Pan Express. He was surprised to hear from me. Obviously he had thought last year's trip to visit my family in Thailand might have been my last.

"Sir, when are you traveling again?"

"Soon and I have a plan to recreate my first trip?"

"Are you going to Biak?"

"If possible."

"Sir, everything is possible for you now. welcome back." John and I go back thirty-three years.

"I'd love to stand of the veranda of the Dutch Hotel and have a European breakfast on Cendrawasih Bay."

He clapped his hands together and said, "Sir, you are back!!!" Like Richard Burton I was ready to stand someplace far from my death bed, for I still possessed a winning hand.