A year of adventures

 I have friends who live in Zurich, Switzerland and though I haven’t gotten to see much of them in over a decade, they assured me they were happy for me to come stay as much or as little as I liked. How lovely! When planning my trip I decided to head to Zurich from Senegal, to stay perhaps 4 nights. After that I thought I might go to Italy, and I started my trip without a solid plan for my return - I just knew I’d be home before American Thanksgiving in late November   After over 3 weeks in Africa, I was looking forward to the more familiar-feeling world of Europe. I didn’t know anything really about Zurich and had no solid plans for my stay - I figured with a home base amongst friends, I could wing it a bit. Unfortunately a few days before my arrival, my hosts came down with Covid! BUT amazingly my friend’s friends agreed to host me - a total stranger! - at that short notice. I wasn’t really sure what it would be like, but I sure didn’t want to pay for a hotel in notoriously ...

 For my final night/weekend in Senegal, my friends and I took a trip out of town. They don’t have their car yet, so we hired a driver & car to pick us up, bring us to a small town, and bring us back north again. They dropped me at the airport on the way home. For all that - and his overnight stay! - we paid something like $160 USD. Senegal is pretty inexpensive to visit! Our trip took us to a pair of towns called, jointly, Joal Fadiouth. Our first trick was getting out of Senegal - traffic was awful even at 2pm on a Friday, and it took us 90 minutes to go about 5 miles. We had AC in the car but I could see the outside temp hit well over 100 - the hottest temp the car showed was 45c, or 113f, while we were stuck on the road. Once we cleared town it was another 90 minutes, but much more interesting views!  We stayed in a nice little hotel that had ocean/beach access (through a gate in the wall; I suspect the wall is necessary to hold back storm water and high tides) and a po...