Sep 2024 – Apr 2025

We’re in Korea.

Pokin had just wrapped up her forum in Seoul, and Nicholas flew in to meet her. With fresh stitches in his knee. From a bunny slope. You may recall.

Our base was The PLAZA Seoul, which sounds fancy because it is. From there, the plan was simple: walk up to Namsan Tower, take in the views, explore the city.

Walk. With the guy who just had his knee reassembled by a Utah emergency room two weeks ago.

Up the trail we went. Nicholas hobbling like a man with a peg leg, refusing to acknowledge that any of this was a problem. The trail up Namsan is pretty. Brick paths, bare trees, spring just starting to show up. But it’s also uphill, which is not ideal when one of your legs is held together by medical thread.

The view from up there, though. I’ll give Seoul that. The whole city just spreads out in every direction with mountains behind it. You can see why people climb up here.

Made it to the top. N Seoul Tower. Big tower. I’ve seen towers. This one’s got a good location, I’ll say that.

Now. Here’s where the day got interesting.

A friend of ours had heard about this pizza place, Spacca Napoli, supposedly the best pizza in Seoul. Pokin had the bright idea that we should walk there from the tower. More walking. For the man with the peg leg.

We thought it’d be a quick jaunt.

It wasn’t.

We wound through these steep hillside neighborhoods, down narrow streets, past tiny shops. Seoul is a city that was apparently designed by someone who had never heard of level ground. Every block is either straight up or straight down. Nicholas’s knee had opinions about all of it.

We got to Spacca Napoli at 2:58.

It was closed until dinner service.

So we had to kill two hours. More walking. We popped into some Pop Mart stores to look for Labubus. No luck. Nicholas’s knee was filing a formal complaint.

We got back to the pizza place at 4:30. Line out the door. Forty-minute wait.

Our friend was thrilled. I felt about the same.

One thing worth mentioning about Seoul: Google Maps doesn’t work here. Not properly. South Korea restricts mapping data because they’re technically still at war with North Korea, and the border is right there. So you have to download Naver, the Korean navigation app, to actually figure out where you’re going. Google will show you streets but it won’t give you directions. We learned this the hard way. Several times.

Eventually we got pizza.

It was good. Proper Neapolitan. Puffy charred crust, fresh mozzarella, basil, the works.

Was it worth walking what felt like the entire city of Seoul on a stitched-up knee to eat at a pizza place that was closed, then waiting in line for forty minutes?

I’ll let Nicholas’s knee answer that one.

We went to Brian Head to ski.

Pokin grew up in Canada. You’d think skiing would be in her blood. It is not. She never learned. So they decided to take a green run. You know, the ones designed for children and people who have recently discovered that snow exists.

So we went to the bunny slope. For Pokin.

Guess who wiped out.

Hint: not Pokin.

My bud, who I’m told is a “great skier” and was “definitely not hot-dogging,” somehow launched a ski off his foot with such precision that it sliced his knee open like a samurai katana. On the bunny slope. The one we were on for Pokin.

He didn’t even feel it. Just kept going until he noticed the blood on the lift.

I have questions. Several of them. But I’ll save those for later.

Ski patrol showed up with the toboggan. Three of them. For a bunny slope injury. I’m sure that wasn’t embarrassing at all.

They got his boot off in the patrol room and had a look. His sister Julia stood there with the expression of someone who’d just watched her brother get taken out by the tutorial level.

The verdict: stitches. A lot of them.

Now here’s the thing about Brian Head. It’s a ski resort in the middle of nowhere, Utah. The nearest ER is about forty minutes down the mountain. And we drove there in the Cybertruck.

Nobody else knew how to drive the Cybertruck.

Not Julia. Not Pokin. Just Nicholas. The guy who couldn’t bend his leg.

So the truck drove itself down the mountain. Forty minutes of autonomous driving through Utah canyon roads while my bud sat there with a sliced-open knee trying very hard not to move. I sat in the bag trying very hard not to think about it. Technology!

They stitched him up at Intermountain Health. He survived. The whiteboard behind him says his nurse’s name was “Sunshine.” Even the hospital was mocking him.

The bunny slope remains undefeated.

Now. Pokin’s response to all of this was… interesting.

She went to the store and bought him a strawberry-scented Easter Peep. As “emotional support.”

An emotional support Peep. For a ski injury. On a bunny slope.

I want to be clear: we already have a Peep. One Peep is already too many Peeps. That yellow menace has been stowing away on trips since 2015 and contributes nothing except chaos and the word “Peep.”

And Pokin’s solution to Nicholas’s suffering was to bring home another one.

I didn’t know whether to smack him or feel sorry for him. Pokin made the decision for me by handing him a scented stuffed animal in an emergency room.

Bunny slope.

Ulgh.

After eleven hours of canal transit, Cartagena was our last real port day. Old stone fortresses, colonial courtyards, streets painted every color, and 32 degrees in the shade. We hired a private driver for the day.

First stop: Castillo San Felipe de Barajas. A 400-year-old Spanish fortress built on a hill to defend against pirates. Tunnels running through it in every direction, walls thick enough to stop cannonballs.

Next: Convento de la Popa, the highest point in the city. A monastery from 1607 sitting on top of a 150-meter hill. The courtyard inside is full of bougainvillea and colonial arches, and the terrace looks out over the entire coastline.

Then we drove down into the Old City. Narrow streets, massive wooden doors with iron studs, walls in turquoise and yellow and coral. Every corner looked like a postcard someone had over-saturated, except it actually looks like that.

We stopped at a park on the way back. And there, among the trees, were macaws. Bright red, blue, yellow. Giant beaks. Massive wingspan. Colorful and winged.

Like me.

I liked them. They had good energy. Wings used for looking incredible. We understood each other.

That evening was New Year’s Eve. Which meant another formal night. Nicholas broke out the tuxedo. I wore my suit again. We looked sharp.

We counted down at midnight somewhere in the Caribbean Sea. Another year. Another set of adventures logged.

A few sea days later, we pulled into Fort Lauderdale. Sun, palm trees, flat ground that doesn’t move. Strange sensation after two weeks.

I got a custom suit, a canal crossing, and a friend who was a macaw. Not a bad way to end the year.

Now if someone could explain to Nicholas that cruises count as vacations and not floating offices, we’d really be getting somewhere.

I woke up in the dark.

Not because anyone asked me to. Not because there was an emergency. Because today was the day. The Panama Canal. The full crossing. Pacific to Atlantic. And I was not about to let some family of early risers steal my viewing spot on deck.

It was 5 AM. The ship was still. Nobody else was out here yet. Just me, the warm tropical air, and the faint glow of the canal infrastructure somewhere ahead.

Eventually the sun came up, the coffee appeared, and everyone else finally dragged themselves out.

Then it appeared. The Bridge of the Americas. The Pacific entrance to the canal. Once you pass under that bridge, you’re committed.

The scale of this thing hits differently in person. The canal is 82 kilometers long. Ships have been transiting it since 1914. Over a million vessels have made this crossing. It took 75,000 workers and ten years to carve through the Continental Divide. The French tried first and failed. The Americans finished it by building the world’s largest dam, flooding an entire valley to create Gatun Lake, and engineering a lock system that lifts ships 26 meters above sea level and then drops them back down on the other side.

We’re doing that today. On a cruise ship. With a buffet.

The approach to the first locks was slow and deliberate. You could see the system from a distance. Massive concrete chambers, steel gates, railroad tracks running along the sides.

Then we were in. The lock gates up close are enormous. Each leaf weighs 700 tons. They swing open and closed on hinges like a door, no wheels, no tracks. Just hinges and gravity. They’ve been doing this for 110 years.

The locomotives running along the sides are called “mules.” They don’t pull the ship. They keep it centered in the chamber using steel cables so the hull doesn’t scrape the walls. Each one weighs 50 tons and costs about $2.4 million.

Then: Gatun Lake. The artificial lake at the center of the canal, 26 meters above sea level. Created by damming the Chagres River. When it was finished in 1913, it was the largest man-made lake in the world.

The crossing from Pacific to Atlantic takes about 11 hours total. You rise through the Miraflores and Pedro Miguel locks on the Pacific side, cross Gatun Lake, then descend through the Gatun Locks on the Atlantic side.

We made it. Pacific to Atlantic. 82 kilometers. Three lock sets. One full day from the pre-dawn darkness to late afternoon sunlight on the Caribbean side.

Nicholas was right to want to do this. It’s one of those things where seeing it on a screen gives you zero sense of the actual scale. The weight of those gates. The precision of the mules. The sheer audacity of flooding an entire valley and building a staircase for ocean ships across a continent.

I sat on that deck for eleven hours and didn’t once wish I was somewhere else.

Costa Rica wasn’t on the original itinerary as anything special. Just another port day. But it turned out Nicholas’s family has old friends originally from here, and they offered to pick us up and show us around.

Cristina and her family met us at the port and drove us around for the day. It’s a different pace down here. Green everywhere, tropical rivers, actual wildlife just… sitting there.

The bridge was specifically for watching crocodiles from above. Not behind glass. Not in a zoo. Just a river full of prehistoric murder lizards doing their thing directly below us.

The day ended at Cristina’s home. A real home-cooked meal, good conversation, the whole group together in one place. The kind of stop that makes a cruise feel less like a floating resort and more like actual travel.

Back on the ship, the food situation had reached a new level. Pokin had been ordering every dessert on the menu every single night. Not sampling. Ordering. Full portions. Multiple.

And then there were the lumpia. One of the Filipino waiters Nicholas and Pokin befriended had been sneaking us homemade spring rolls from the crew kitchen. Not on the menu. Not available to other guests. Just for us.

The next morning I woke up on the balcony and there it was. The skyline getting closer. Panama.

Tomorrow we cross.

Christmas at sea. Two weeks of me claiming the best spot on the balcony. I’m in.

The Coral Princess, departing Fort Lauderdale, heading south through Mexico, Central America, and then the main event: the full Panama Canal crossing.

Nicholas picked this one specifically for the canal. He’s convinced it might close someday, or at least become inaccessible to cruise ships, and he wanted to do the full transit while he still could. Pokin was on board (literally) because the engineering of the thing fascinates her. Naturally, I was coming too.

The first few days were sea days, which suited us fine. Nicholas colonized the balcony with his laptop immediately. I supervised.

We docked somewhere in Mexico and Pokin found a spot to relax with me while Nicholas went exploring. Some things never change.

Meanwhile, back on the ship, a gingerbread house competition had been organized. The family got very into it.

I did not participate. My paws aren’t built for frosting work. But I did judge silently from afar. Solid effort. Could use more chocolate.

Then came Christmas, which on a cruise means one thing: formal night.

Nicholas made me a suit. A proper grey pinstriped blazer. Custom fitted for a 186-gram bear. I looked incredible.

Not a bad start. Mexico was fine. The balcony office was productive. The suit was a hit.

But the real reason we’re here hasn’t happened yet. Next stop: Costa Rica, and then south toward the canal.

For Christmas this year, Uncle Charlie sent us a gift.

Not just any gift. A set of custom ceramic coasters, each one featuring a photo from this very blog. My face. My adventures. My legacy. Ready to protect our coffee table from condensation rings.

Uncle Charlie has always understood what matters. When we visited him in Boston, he took us around Oak Square like we were royalty. He bought Nicholas a brick with his name on it (I’m still waiting for mine). He sends us gifts every year, and every year they’re good. But this one? This one is permanent.

Every time someone sets a drink down in this house, they see me. As it should be.

These are the main coasters at Bear Falls Resort now, by the way. Not because the old ones broke. Because these are better.

Thank you, Uncle Charlie. You always did treat me right.

As you know, I’m a big fan of space.  As evidenced by my multiple times playing Commander Sumi Shepherd for Mass Effect.

You may also know that I’m a big fan of SpaceX and real space efforts and I would do anything to live out my commander space fantasies on Starship.

Today I feel like I’m on paw closer. My bud and Pokin took me to see the Starship 5 Test Flight in Boca Chica Texas.

We flew a red eye late at night, got in at 5:30AM to Brownsville Texas, and rushed to the launch site. Along the road were lines of cars with photography gear stationed to capture the moment. En route, cars snaked, bumper to bumper, headed towards a viewing spot.

We get there as the sun is above to rise.

The crazy engineers at SpaceX were going to launch Starship and then attempt a landing back on it’s own pad catching it with these new experimental ‘chopsticks’ named Mechzilla. This shouldn’t work, not first try with so many potential things to go wrong. We fully expected the landing to be aborted, or if attempted, a giant fireball to destroy the landing pad. The launch was originally scheduled for 7:15, and then they pushed it to 7:25AM. I knew they only had a short launch window. I was nervous. They decided to go for it.

They started counting down. It’s going to be a go! My bud gets his camera in place.

It takes off!

We cheered as it went into space, performed the separation.

It was time for the booster to return. Were they going to try the maneuver? It wasn’t automatically scheduled and they were going to make a game day decision.

And they announced they were going to go for it! 😮

They went for it! The booster comes back like it’s falling out of the sky and then right as it looks like it’s going to just plummet into the ground the boost-back burners fire back up straighten the booster, and then just slides in place to be caught by the mechanical arm.

We cheer, we go mad. It landed it’s first try!!!

!!!!!!

! This is history!

We did not expect that everything would go perfectly, absolutely nailing every last aspect and maneuver, making history in the process.

This was SO COOL. The rumble of the ship, watching it go up and back down in the sunrise, the sonic boom and sticking the landing… It doesn’t get better than this! Mars, get ready for a future with bears!

So my bud goes and makes this epic cinematic video of our Greenland trip — dramatic music, sweeping landscapes, icebergs, the whole deal.

And guess who wasn’t in a SINGLE FRAME?

This bear.

Not one shot. Not even a cameo. Not a wing tip in the corner. Nothing.

You’d think he went to Greenland alone. With just Pokin and a camera. As if I wasn’t RIGHT THERE the entire time.

I WAS THERE, NICHOLAS. I was there for ALL of it.

So here’s my proof.

That’s me. On the tundra. In Greenland. Right there between Nicholas and Pokin while enormous icebergs float by in the fjord behind us. The autumn colors were actually kind of cool — reds, oranges, browns — if you could ignore the fact that it was freezing and also basically surrounded by water.

The Ilulissat Icefjord. Massive icebergs calve off the glacier and just… sit there. Packed together like a frozen traffic jam. It’s impressive, I’ll give it that. Even if it is just a lot of very cold water.

Not that you’d know I was there to see it, from that video.

That’s me and Nicholas on the water. There’s a red-sailed boat behind us, and behind that, an iceberg the size of a building. The water was weirdly calm. The light was doing that golden thing it does when it’s trying to show off.

I mean, come on. This is better footage than anything in that video, Nicholas.

OK I’ll give him this — Greenland at sunset does look ridiculous. The sky went all pink and peach, the sailboat was just cruising through floating ice, and the whole thing looked fake. Like a screensaver someone would sell you.

I guess he can be forgiven. A little.

But next time, the bear gets screen time. Non-negotiable.

From Copenhagen we’re flying to Greenland. Wait - What? Greenland? Isn’t it cold there?

Either way, we’re going with our newly acquired camera gear.

I was going to write all about our trip to Greenland – but let’s be honest, I’m a lazy bear. My bud decided to show off his video editing and music production skills and made a video that recaps the situation pretty well, so I’ll just post that instead.

Sumi’s note: Hey wait, LAZY BEAR? Who wrote this stuff? Nicholas stop editing my posts!