About

Five years ago, I somehow landed in Tanki Flip, which is a small neighborhood on the island of Aruba. Google describes Tanki Flip as a village. Nothing more is said about it other than that. Google got it right to some degree. Tanki Flip is a village of sorts, albeit in the middle of a bustling paradise. All of the roads are dirt roads, and there are chickens running about.

Many things in the neighborhood around my house ran very much like a small island village during that time. My neighbor brought the catch-of-the-day to my front door every evening. There was even a rather large abandoned boat a stone-throwing distance from my porch. I think her name was Elena or Eleanora or something similar. All the men in the neighborhood gathered around this boat to drink from sun up to sundown. By the time I left, she was a behemoth ramshackle of twigs and sticks.

If you do some digging around, you will find out Tanki Flip also happens to be an archaeological site, hence the inspiration for the heading I gave this blog, Tanki Flip Settlement.

I never planned to move to a “village” on a tiny island in the south Caribbean, so far away from home and closer to Venezuela than anyplace else. It just happened one day. After many years of hard work and a feeling I could never shake that there was so much more to see in the world, the road finally opened and took me out to sea, some 2,196 miles away from home. Bon Bini. Welcome to Aruba. You are invited to stay for a while. I suppose that I was both brave and foolish enough to accept the offer. 

And so I created this blog to carve out some space to collect, share, and preserve all that I discovered in my strange new island life. The blog also served as a way for me to stay connected to family and friends back in the States. 

Two months ago, I left Aruba for Italy. And so the adventure continues.