Nicaragua
Badass buses (Drive Day 72 minus 14 years)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The irony of Ruben Dario being known as the father of modernism does not escape us in this dusty outpost of the past.
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.
Looking for Miraflor (Drive Day 68 minus 14 years)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Leaving Leon (Drive Day 66 minus 14 years)
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.
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.
Loving Leon (Drive Day 65 minus 14 years)
It’s not every city where Jesus takes your photo from a shoebox – even if, when you email your friends the photo, they think you’ve been kidnapped. If Leon is holding us hostage, we have a Nicaraguan version of Stockholm syndrome. Just look at these images Gary is capturing.
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.
Taking shelter in Leon (Drive Day 64 minus 14 years)
The streets flood in minutes when afternoon storms hit this Colonial city. A teenager brings us inside his house to wait it out, and there are cold beers with a view of the cathedral when skies clear.
It’s a stunning city, offering protection on both journeys. The first time around it’s where we met the publisher of El CentroAmericano, who took us in so that his wife Yanina could nurse me back from a bout of malaria. She still recognizes me and the chance to thank her makes every bump on the road we’ve travelled worth it.
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.
- ← Previous
- 1
- 2
"TeresaBruceBooks" 