Ornoth

If you’ve spent much time with me, you probably discovered that I mark my paper money and track where it goes using the Where’s George? website. And you’ve probably asked yourself, “Why?”

There’s no good answer actually, other than boredom and curiosity.

In 2004 I was between jobs and had nothing better to do, and I remembered having seen one of the very first Where’s George? marked bills at work back in 1998. I thought it might be interesting to see where my cash went, so I registered and started entering the serial numbers of all the currency that passed through my hands.

However, I quickly learned that doing it ad hoc would be a huge pain. I found it much easier to make one trip to the bank every month or so, pulling out $200 in $1 bills and another $200 in $5s. In order to get more bills into circulation, I tended to avoid using $10s and $20s, but I did drop a fair number of $100 bills off at casinos!

Whenever I traveled, I’d spend the bills I’d entered in Boston, so that someone who found my bill in Las Vegas or Pittsburgh or St. Thomas could see where it had come from. Then I’d pick up more cash to bring home, since it would be equally interesting for people in New England to receive bills from faraway places.

Over the past ten years, I entered 17,600 bills, 95 percent of them $1s and $5s, totaling about $64,500 worth of currency. Most of those were entered in Boston or Maine or Pittsburgh, but I’ve entered bills in many other locations, including Las Vegas, St. Thomas, the Caymans, Puerto Rico, Korea, Scranton, and Boise!

Out of all those bills, 1,450 of them have been subsequently entered (1,600 times) by someone else, which is about a 9 percent hit rate. On average, I get a hit every other day. Since I don’t mark my bills very conspicuously, few of my bills get hit multiple times; only 14 of them have been entered by three different people after my initial entry.

My bills have been hit in every county in Connecticut and Rhode Island, but I still haven’t gotten the needed Martha’s Vineyard hit to complete my home state, or the one remaining (Coos) county in New Hampshire.

My bills have been hit in every US state except five obscure ones: Alaska, Arkansas, Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota.

Beyond our borders, my bills have been re-entered in Canada, Puerto Rico, the US and British Virgin Islands, Anguila, Bermuda, England, Ireland, France, Germany, the Philippines, Cambodia, and Australia (my farthest traveler went 10,500 miles to Melbourne).

My longest “sleeper”—a bill that resurfaces after a long time with no activity—was spent at a restaurant in Scranton in 2006 and showed up at a grocery store in the same town around Christmas 2013, more than seven and a half years later!

If you really want to know more, here’s a link to my Where's George? profile.

While all this was going on, I discovered that the most active Where’s George? users get together in regional “gatherings”. I attended a number of local meet-ups in the early years, and got to know Hank, the site’s irascible creator. But there haven’t been any gatherings in Boston for years.

Over the past six months, I’ve been looking critically at where I invest all my time, energy, and attention, and I decided to stop entering new bills into Where’s George? on March 25th, my tenth “Georgeaversary”. The date was convenient, and the decision pretty inevitable.

Why inevitable? Well, it’s like this… When you first start “Georging”, all kind of interesting things happen. The first time one of your bills gets “hit” (entered) by another person. Your first out-of-state hit. Your first hit in another country. Getting a hit in every county in a state. And so forth. But over time, those milestones become less and less frequent. And as I said, it no longer offers the social opportunities it once did.

Plus it’s a bit silly. It’s not the kind of hobby that would impress a girlfriend or your co-workers; yet it can be a rather difficult one to hide from them, if you ever go out to lunch together!

Ultimately, it came down to whether I was getting enough entertainment out of the hobby to make it worth the investment of time spent entering and marking bills… And in the end, that answer was unequivocal.

So now it’s on to other things.

Despite this being Boston’s second least snowiest year on record, Inna and I had planned a week at a resort between Cancún and Playa del Carmen.

This was my first trip to Mexico, and it was perfectly timed. Two weeks before we left, the State Department issued a major travel advisory which greatly expanded an earlier warning about travel in Mexico.

The trip was planned a week and a half after a date I had for jury duty. As you can imagine, I was immediately empaneled on a trial considering 11 counts of indecent contact with a minor. Cutting an *extremely* long story short, after spending two days in the empanelment process, the judge asked the jurors whether anyone had issues with a trial lasting a week or so, and I informed him about my trip. He eventually dismissed me, much to my relief.

And a few days before the trip, I came down with a head cold. Fortunately it didn’t seem to bad, but it was perfectly timed to peak on the travel day.

And as if those omens weren’t bad enough… My alarm went off at 4:50am so that I could make my flight to Cancún. On one final check of the internet I learned that there had been a fire less than a mile from the airport. Coincidentally, the alarm had come in at 4:47am, just three minutes before my phone woke me up. Better still, it was in a small restaurant named “Rosticeria Cancún”!

After a quick flight to Charlotte, NC, I met up with Inna, who had just arrived from Pittsburgh. Waiting in the international departures area, we considered flights to St. Thomas or Montego Bay before finally boarding our flight. Fortunately, the dry atmosphere of the cabins allowed me to travel without too much discomfort from my cold.

Arriving in Cancún, we snaked through the immigration and customs mazes and received our “cheese”: the first stamp in my renewed passport. We stepped out into the warm sunlight and hopped the van that drove us 24 miles south to Punta Maroma and down the long, bumpy dirt road to our hotel: the Catalonia Playa Maroma.

Full Photoset

The nice thing about Punta Maroma is that it’s small and somewhat isolated. There are only three or four small resorts, rather than the tourist hell that is Cancún. Although it’s only a few miles from Playa del Carmen, we never did get off the tourist reservation and into town.

Having let Inna plan the trip, she’d opted to go the all-inclusive resort route. Although since neither of us drink, we really weren’t able to maximize the value for the all-inclusive price. Normally I prefer to go independent and not be stuck on a tourist reservation, but I was willing to give it a try, since I wasn’t real comfortable as a gringo wandering around Mexico alone.

One reason why I don’t like the resort experience is that I feel very uncomfortable in the role of the privileged white foreigner. I don’t like being waited on, I don’t like haute couture, and I dislike the impression of being the elite, with the locals there only as servants. It’s really distasteful to me.

On the other hand, it also afforded me a uniquely multicultural experience. Naturally, I picked up a lot of Spanish, which I’d never studied before. Since most of the guests were French or Quebecois, we heard a lot of French, and used some ourselves, since we’ve both studied it. We also heard a lot of Italian, plus some Russian and German as well.

Inna and I both enjoyed the more relaxed relationship Europeans seem to have with their bodies: her because of the diversity of body shapes and swimwear, and me for the occasional topless sunbather.

We checked in and settled into our room. The grounds were very nice and generally not too noisy except around the beach and the pool. The decor was very attractive and the room thoroughly clean and comfortable. We had a very large balcony that overlooked the building’s courtyard. The beach was very nice, and supplied with ample chaises, palapas, and hammocks.

The weather remained the same all week: sunny and mid-80s, with an occasional puffy cloud to decorate the sky. There was a constant wind, which contributed to much larger than expected breakers. I’d estimate the swells at 3-8 feet, which were fun to float in (initially).

The main negative about the resort was the food. Since we’d already paid for our meals, there was no pretense of serving quality fare. While there was a wide selection, the fare was usually comprised of a few mediocre-grade raw materials. Basically, we could eat there, but by the end of the week the low quality and lack of diversity had us longing for something else.

Another annoyance for me… I had planned to spend a bunch of my “Where’s George” marked dollar bills down there, as well as some bills from other folks, just to spend them somewhere interesting. And I’d brought a handful of bills to enter down there, as well. Well, as it turns out, the guy who owns Where’s George has blocked pretty much the entire country of Mexico from using the site, so there’s virtually no chance that any of those bills will ever be entered again, and certainly not in Mexico. Thanks, Hank. Way to ruin the whole point of WG?.

On the positive side, we had some awesome animal companions. The long, jungle-lined walkway between the buffet and the beach was the home to a couple dozen coatis (video), whose presence and antics were the highlight of each day. In the evening, the little plaza with shops was the abode of a rough-looking but quite outgoing grey and white cat whom we befriended. And we enjoyed seeing the pelicans diving into the sea and the frigatebirds soaring above the beach.

My cold quickly melted away, and we settled into a daily pattern which involved getting up pretty early to reserve our spot on the beach. We’d hang out there until the sun grew strong in the late morning, when we’d have a snack and retreat to the room to relax and maybe snooze. We’d return to the beach mid afternoon, and stay there until the sun fell behind the coconut palms lining the beach. Then we’d go to the room to shower and visit the buffet or one of the “restaurants” for dinner before turning in.

One of my goals for the trip was to help Inna learn to snorkel. She’d never done it due to wearing glasses, but her lasik ended that excuse. After days of postponing it, we took her to the resort’s pool and she donned my mask and snokel. After months of protest, I’d expected to have to handhold her through getting used to breathing through the snorkel and putting her face in the water, but within three minutes she was floating around exploring the pool and its “ecosystem”, much to her own amusement.

After about ten minutes, she proclaimed herself ready to try snorking the reef that was about a half mile offshore. We booked a time we thought was for snorkelers only, but wound up being a mixed group of six snorkers and another eight or so SCUBA divers.

However, because of the divers, we were dropped off on the ocean-side of the reef, rather than the lee-side. That meant rougher seas, which forced us to stay in deeper water to avoid being thrown onto the reef by the surf. So we never got shallower than about 20 feet. We saw a few fish, but really nothing interesting. Furthermore, our guide kept us moving, giving us no rest and exhausting some folks as he dragged us into ever deeper water with less and less stuff to see. Overall, I found it a very disappointing experience.

The high seas also made for a lot of up-and-down motion, which wasn’t a good choice for Inna’s first snork. She wound up being nauseous and aborted her swim, climbing back up onto the boat, whose up-and-down action wasn’t any better. She was pretty green until we finally picked up the divers and got her back to shore.

Basically, it had been a very unpleasant experience for her, but she hadn’t complained at all. While I felt really bad for her, I was also incredibly proud of her for being game to try it, for bravely jumping off the boat a half mile from land, and for sticking it out despite being sick, all without a single complaint. She really surprised me and showed a reservoir of hidden strength I hadn’t known before.

Fortunately, that happened when we only had two days left, because after that experience Inna (understandably) had absolutely no interest in swimming in the ocean. At the same time, she was studiously avoiding exposure to the sun, since she’d gotten a serious sunburn on our first day. A seaside resort really isn’t much fun if you can’t stand either the sun or the ocean, and mediocre food on top of it all, so after that our vacation kind of lost energy and trailed off.

The flight home was a bit of a challenge. The leg from Charlotte to Boston was delayed by an hour, then we dealt with constant turbulence due to a large storm. Although Boston’s forecast predicted about 5 inches of snow, we really only got a dusting, but it certainly was cold, wet, and dark, and stayed that way for several days.

Although we were pretty much ready to leave at the end of the week, it was a very good vacation. It was great seeing Inna and creating some new shared memories. It was fabulous being away from work, back in the Caribbean again, and having nothing to do but enjoy the warmth and strong sunlight and our animal friends. Aside from a couple minor annoyances, it was pretty damned nice.