It´s good see the next stop on the road is

After spending a couple days hanging out in Salinas I decided to start making my way up the Ruta del Sol. I still had over a week before I needed to meet my sisters in Quito and figured I should see what kind of trouble I could get myself into in the meantime. I was originally thinking about heading to the surf center of Montañita but then I remembered that Charlie don´t surf, and neither did Kashif. Sure it´s on my list of things to get around to one of these days, but I was enjoying swimming up and down the Ecuadorean coast-line and saw no reason to stop.

So I hopped on the first bus I found heading north and got off at Puerto Lopez. I heard it was a beautiful city set on a nice horseshoe shaped bay. I figured that meant I could escape the waves all the surfers came to Ecuador to find. The bus terminal didn´t look like anything too special but after spending a day swimming down the beach and walking around the Malecon I´ve decided I love this little pueblito.

It´s touristy but not too touristy. It´s peaceful but not too peaceful. It´s clean and friendly and cheap. There is a wonderful ratio of inhabitants to hammocks. And it´s got a line of fruit juice stands that goes half-way down the beach. Mangoes are out of season but the pineapples are fantastic and the strawberries are to die for.

When I was in Salinas I met a guy working on the beach named Patricio. He told me he used to finanace car loans in Guayaquil but about 6 years ago he decided to move to Salinas and has been giving tours and rides on his boat ever since. He told me that he hated working in an office and would never go back again. He said that when he´s on his boat he feels free, he´s his own boss and now he finally is motivated to get up and go to work every morning.

I thought back to the answer I kept giving everyone when they asked me what I was going to do when I was ready to return to the real world, ¨I don´t know, maybe open a juice stand on the side of the beach.¨ Like most jokes there is a kernel of truth in there somewhere. It still does sound like a cool idea. I think I first came up with it on my trip to the Bahamas, but it´s evolved over time. My juice stand would have kick-ass sammiches and a shot of rum to go with your smoothie would only cost $1 extra. And there´d be free Wi-Fi and salsa dancing.

But the truth is I don´t think I´ll ever get around to opening that juice bar (it´s called Zak´s Juice Shack, btw). I miss the software industry. I miss conjuring up a straight-forward solution to a really hard problem. I miss the elegance of a finely crafted design, the beauty of layered complexity composed of individual simplicity. I´m actually almost 100% convinced I´ll go back to software when I´m back in the States, the only question is where.

I´ve had about 1000 people tell me that they think I should find a start-up to go work at, and that doesn´t sound like such a bad idea. And I´ve even got my resume pretty much all written. So if you know anyone that needs a highly-skilled and newly re-motivated software engineer let me know, you just gotta wait like 2 (uh, better make that 3) months.