Where to camp out?... A favorite AARP topic.

The white-caps have been with us all weekend. The result of southwest winds at around 15 knots that are pushing the Atlantic Ocean waves onto the sands of Emerald Isle. Air temperatures in the 60s are still quite mild for February, but no complaints here. After three weeks out, everything seems as we left it. Knock on wood.

After two back to back overnight trips rewinding from Valdivia to Santiago to Lima, I finally caught up with B in Miami International from where we flew together to Raleigh-Durham where we had left our car. Then together with the 3-hour drive to Emerald Isle, it was a total of about 40 hours either moving or on lay-overs. The AARP bones and muscles need a little stretching after that.

At the Miami airport we caught some of the news for the day. A little politics and a lot about a terrible series of tornados and storms that had already killed over 50 people in a few states just west of here. Mother Earth is nothing to take for granted. And oftentimes calamities such as these happen so unpredictably that it’s difficult to find a spot on earth that would be safe from anything Mother Earth can dish out.

With the threat of hurricanes, you’d think that we would live in fear sleeping just a few yards from the Atlantic Ocean. But when you think about it, I’d rather have the predictability of a hurricane over the suddenness of a tornado. Even in beautiful Valdivia with it’s peaceful rivers and gorgeous views, it’s recent history shows that in 1960 it was almost completely destroyed by the Valdivia Earthquake with a magnitude of 9.6 on the Richter scale.

The topic of where to live comes up often in conversations with other AARPs. Just this weekend we were chatting with family that came to visit, about where it’d be fun to live next. We played with taking some factor out and seeing how our decisions would change. For example, we’d say: If the financial concerns were not an issue, where would you like to camp out for the next 10 years? If closeness to family was not an issue, then where? This could go on for hours. It’s almost as good a topic of conversation as talking about health and illnesses, but that’s for a more advanced AARP stage.

And the issue of natural disasters is always a factor to put in the equation. But where could we be the safest? Would it also be the most boring place on earth? How much do you weight availability of jobs or closeness to family to the potential to danger? Living in California for several years educated me that people there are aware of an impending earthquake but they seem to feel that easterners are a worrisome lot and that the price of living in the Hotel California is worth the small price. Who knows? They could be right. You could live a lifetime in between catastrophes, so why not take your chances to live in a beautiful and fun location.

The low season at the beach happens to coincide with the off season for hurricanes as well, so the best compromise might just be timing your stays according to where the weather happens to be the best for the season. Well, that’d work for hurricanes, but I’m afraid we’ll have to wait until earthquakes and tornados become more predictable or at least avoidable.

The picture at the top is the beach in Niebla near Valdivia, Chile; the tree is the common southern hemisphere tree, Araucaria; a volcano in the Lake Region of Chile; and finally the movie clip below is a pebbled beach in Lima, Peru.