I have had to renew my passport, my passport that I have travelled extensively on for the last five years… To pay homage to the places I have been, I photographed each page of the passport. I plan to go through them all and share one or two funny/strange/awkward stories relating to the stamps on that page.

The Solomon Islands. Papua New Guinea. There are so many things that could be said about both of these places. We got a rat in Honiera, Guadalcanal, Solomons. We saw lots of flying foxes in Madang, PNG. We built a canoe in PNG. We dove in the Solomons.

I thought of telling the story of Danny, the corrupt Aussie expat who has the town officials wrapped around his fingers in Gizo. Except that is a sad story and Danny is probably in jail now.

I enjoyed Gizo for another reason. I managed to connect with a group from one of the local churches when I was there. I was walking through town on my day off and stumbled across a church sports day. One of the youth teams invited me to join them and I spent the day playing volleyball and soccer with them. It was a lot of fun. I’m pretty sure I was the only white person there, but that wasn’t anything that I noticed or that seemed important at the time. The sports day was made even better by the quality music they were playing. Most of it was “worship” music from about five to ten years earlier. Some of it was “classic” Christian stuff from the 80’s. The best song was off of Petra’s 1987 album This Means War That was a summer roadtrip staple for many years when Jen and I were picking music; I believe I still have the cassette tape.