Category Archives: Travel

Commentary on the news, Family, Travel

arriving only as one has to go

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Summer                                      New (Hiroshima) Moon

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.” – Anatole France

Visiting grandchildren, Ruth and Gabe, and their parents, Jon and Jen, underline the truth of this France quote.  To leave the days of kindergarten and pre-school, to venture off even to elementary school puts us in another world than the one left behind.  Anyone who has ever become a senior in high school or college can attest to the bitter-sweet feeling of arriving only as one has to go.  Sort of like becoming a senior citizen.

Jon and Jen were shaken by the news from Aurora this morning.  The shooter lived three blocks from Montview Elementary where Jon teaches still and Jen used to teach.  They do not know yet if friends or students or former students got shot or killed, but they know it’s not only possible, but likely.

Let this serve as a reminder to us.  Often we read of these acts and shake our head.  How could he?  Then, have a cup of coffee, a final bite of bagel and get ready for the rest of the day.  But, in each of these, someone’s friend has died.  Someone’s brother or sister.  Someone’s son or daughter.  These are people loved and loving, this morning’s news for a brief window, but dead forever.

However, as the world is, we got our things together and headed into the Rocky Mountains to the small, quaint former mining town of Georgestown, drove up a windy road and parked in the Georgetown Loop Railroad parking lot.

I picked up the reserved tickets and we rode this short rail line across a photogenic trestle bridge, up threw sweet smelling pines, beside rushing mountain streams.  Perhaps predictably the adults had a great time.  Gabe spent much of the ride with his fingers in his ears.  A steam whistle.  Ruth huddled next to me off and on.  She feared falling out of the train.  It has open to the air cars which offer an immersive ride, but do not provide the safety of windows and walls.

We had pizza at Beaujo’s in Idaho Springs afterward, a Colorado sacred spot for pizza lovers and I now know why.  Get there if you’re out here.  I had the sicilian.  Wonderful.

Bees, Translating Metamorphoses, Travel, Writing

When It’s Time to Live, Live.

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Summer                                                          Under the Lily Moon

“When it’s time to die, go ahead and die, and when it’s time to live, live. Don’t sort-of-maybe live, but live like you’re going all out, like you’re not afraid.”

Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

With Paul and Sarah on the road, this quote jumped out at me. (oh, toby, too) I so want to live on the very edge of my life, risking it all, trying to be the best me that I can be.

It probably doesn’t look like it from a moving to the wilds of the Maine coast position, but for me learning Latin and keeping bees put me out there, in a place no longer familiar, on lands foreign and challenging.

If I’m honest, and why wouldn’t I be, the big challenge for me is getting my work out there into the world.  It terrifies me and excites me, just not in equal measure.  The terror easily swamps the excitement.

Those of us with quiet treks, ancientrails walked alone or in private, can fall prey to adventure envy when the adventure has a physical component.  Climbing.  Skiing. Moving. I’m acquainted with this envy and envy is bad for the soul.  It diminishes the envier and the envied with a false comparison, a comparison between different journeys, neither more nor less profound or difficult.  Just different.

Traveling fills that adventure component for me, but I like returning to the familiar.  In fact, for me to walk my own ancientrail, I need a quiet home, peace during the day and a place to work.  With Kate I’ve found all these things.  A blessing in my life.

Now there’s that submitting my writing.  That’s an adventure.

Travel

An Undiscovered Country

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Beltane                                                         Garlic Moon

Almost done with The Hundred Days, a novel about the last months of the Ceausescu regime in Romania.  I read it of course with my recent trip in mind, hoping to gain perspective on this country which seems so far away from the world seen from a North American perspective, invisible like Bulgaria and Montenegro.

The novel paints a bleak picture, playing up the gray monotony of the apartment blocks thrown up on the perimeter of Bucharest, like rings around Saturn the author says.  It paints, too, a picture of life under a security state, an oxymoron of stunning power.

Overall, it portrays a country torn by admiration for collective values, fear of the state’s surveillance and pushed down by material lack, a country with little confidence and little sense of itself.

Lay this image against what I saw.  Nicoleta’s town of Mihailesti has many, perhaps most, of its citizens living in what we would call severe poverty.  Yet, the emphasis seems not on lack but on abundance:  family, extended family, neighbors, the food they have–not what they don’t have.  In two evening meals and a few conversations with Nicoleta I did not learn what their dreams are, though Nicoleta clearly wants family, wants to have what she already has.

The assistant manager at the Best Western, his dream was to come to America, saw Romania as lacking, in beauty, in wonderfulness, in those things he sees in the U.S.  There were in the time of Ceausescu many who wanted to leave Romania and paid a terrible price when trying to do so, so his dream is not unusual, I imagine.

Romania is a country in need of discovery.  Its own citizens need to discover it; its intriguing and deep past; its fertile farm lands; its picturesque Carpathians; its Black Sea shore in the Slavic influenced Dobruja region.  This is a country of which a person can be proud and a place that has rich possibilities.

I’m not saying what I want to here.  I’ll try again. Later.

Travel

Air Travel. Sucks.

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Beltane                                                                    Garlic Moon

Started back up on the exercise.  Gently.  I always need to ease myself back into the routine after, this time, almost two weeks off.

My mind and body have both returned to Minnesota, the fuzziness now a memory.

The truism is that we cannot remember pain and I find that true of solely physical pain.  I remember, for example, that my leg hurt like a son of a bitch after my achilles tendon repair, but I don’t recall the pain itself.  Only the event.

A different sort of pain, however, sticks with me.  That is, the hassle and discomfort of days like last Friday.  The accumulation of those, that flight back from Istanbul that also vectored through Schipol, the smaller insults that begin with booking and paying the add-on fees, that escalate with the TSA check, then the crowded planes and the uncertain take off and landing times.

You may say, this is not real pain.  And maybe it’s not.  Let’s call it aversive conditioning. What ever it is, it makes long plane rides, even shorts ones, something I will go through a great deal to avoid.  Give me a car.  A train.  A ship.  If I can make any of those work for a particular trip, I’ll take them.

Big air may have financial problems, I can’t tell the obscurantism from the truth with them, but I do know that they have consistently up priced their product while down sizing their service.  This reality of airline travel then has nested inside the airport reality of security checks and in the case of international flights, passport and custom controls.  The sum of these is an experience, at least for us coach class customers, that has little difference from self-induced and expensive torture.

What would it take to fix it?  World peace.  Wider seats.  An attention to customer needs as  opposed to airline needs.

Whatever the ultimate solution, air travel, once something I cherished, has become a sinkhole of time wasting and money covered over with active irritations.

Travel, US History

From the Outside Looking In

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Beltane                                              Garlic Moon

The U.S. looks different from outside its borders.  Of course, that’s a truism, but, it is also true.

The guy who worked at the Best Western Stil said it was his dream to come to America.  I would say it a bit differently, I believe America was his dream; that is, a place to lodge, for him, a wonder, a hope, a promise of a life he for some reason cannot find in Romania.

No different, psychically, is the dream the Islamists have of America.  Again, their dream is America, but this time it is a nightmare of Islam hating, God denying, capitalist entranced monsters whose hope is to remake the world.

As world hegemon we have become a global Rorschach, an actual physical place and a real nation on which many project their most fervent inner hopes or fears.  In this sense I suppose we’re not much different from the cult of celebrity or the faded past of monarchy, people in seemingly untouchable realms whom we can imagine as the embodiment of good or evil.

Have we a sort of free market in which irrational entrepreneurial exuberance can catapult a power to Trumpdom?  If that’s what you really, really want, then, it could happen.  Have we a legal system that honors and defends the individual against oppression by others or the state?  Yes.  No.  Sometimes.  Is this a beautiful, varied land filled with the best and the harshest and gradations between?  Yes, the natural beauty of the USA matches that anywhere.

What it is and what it is not, this is home.  And I’m glad to be back in it.

Family, Humanities, Politics, Travel, World History

The Sunnier Side

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Beltane                                         Garlic Moon

OK. I may have tilted toward the darker side in the post below.  It’s here, all right, and dominant in much of what I’ve personally experienced of Romania this week.

However.  If this were a movie, the weather would have started rainy and cool, which it did.  We might say, the Romania I reported on in the post below.  Then, as the week went on, the rain would lift until a pleasant, sunny, mild day ended the visit.

The Romania which I saw, for example, as I took a walk around the hotel’s block.  There apartment buildings of modest heights, 3-6 stories, hide behind vine covered fences, a small pocket park has a shady place for children from the Mikos child care center.  Two backyards (all the backyards) have well-tended plantings and fountains.

A couple sat on their balcony four floors up, smoking, drinking morning coffee.  And, of course, there are homeless people on the streets and under the bridges of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

There is, too, the land, a beautiful land with mountains, picturesque villages, good train service and a friendly population.  And Bucharest has many, many trees and beautiful parks, wide streets and a safe feel so often not present in US cities.

This is a country, I believe, that awaits its vision of itself as a free people.  I can imagine one though.  It roots in millennia of settled history, linking this land to the greatest of early Western civilizations, Greek and Roman and makes the remains of those two a vital aspect of a new future.

The difficult period after the fall of Rome adds great texture to current Romania as Mongols, Magyars, Russian and Turks fought back and forth over this rich land at the nexus of so many ambitions. Those eras, though painful, also enliven a sense of Romania as a place desired by many; many who contributed cultural legacy to the present, like the Saxons around Brasov, the Slavs on the coastal regions of the Black Seas and the Hungarians in northwestern Romania.

The 19th and early 20th century had some stirrings of a free Romania, then world war II came and after that the fall of the iron curtain.

Now there is a country just waking up in its own home, a home with a past, and now one with a future.  I hope this is just the first visit for me.  Nicoleta’s brother and his wife have a baby on the way, naming ceremony in October.

 

Humanities, Latin, Literature, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Travel

Searching for Ovid

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Beltane                                    Garlic Moon

Ovid on the third phase:  At times it is folly to hasten at other times, to delay. The wise do everything in its proper time.

Searching for Ovid.  Gone now.  2000 years ago.  An unhappy man, yet he went on, did not stop, wrote, lived.

Of course, his statue is here.  He looks suitably serious, dignified, the man some Romanians take as their first national poet.  But what of the man, not bronze?

If I limit myself to the Roman mosaic, the material objects in the museum, the remains of the wall across from Hotel Class, the ruins of the homes and the butcher shop, the promontory views from the high coastline overlooking the Pontus Euxinus, the Marea Negra; if I image Ovid carrying a small oil lamp to light his way and his night, drinking from the glass vessels in the museum, turning a cynical educated Roman eye towards depictions of gods and goddesses; getting water from the clay and lead pipes also on display, walking over those intricate mosaics while looking out at the sea, a slave stigiling off his sweat and dirt with the small curved tool I saw here, then I have begun to see him.

To populate this place in the very early 1st century a.c.e., to get the small things right and the people and the matters under consideration, I wonder how much that would take, how much research?  A lot, I imagine.  Still, it would be worth it, if the time was available.  Why?  Oh, for the same reason, evoking 2012 Bucresti is worth it.  Because we’re strange creatures, but often the same and we can reach across time and space to be with each other.  That’s a gift and it makes us more.

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Travel

Be Glad to Exist

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Beltane                                         Garlic Moon

A Greek bowl in the alternately wonderful and frustrating Constanta musuem of archaeology and history had this inscription:  Be Glad To Exist.  Those Greeks.  Had it going on so early.  And now?

Be glad to exist and carpe diem amount to a satisfactory life philosophy.    I finished the book Masters of the Planet, an excellent summary of current findings and theories about human evolution.  The author added this to a summation of cognitive theory:  “We are ruled by our reason, until our hormones take over.”  Fits with the Greco-Roman fortune cookie life path.

While on my way to Constanta Tuesday, I returned to Bucresti Nord and ate breakfast there.  As usually happens to me at some point on a trip like this, I do something I never do at home:  eat at McDonald’s.

It felt like being in American terrarium, eating a sausage McMuffin and drinking the still not very good version of coffee.  Inside the terrarium I looked out at a Romanian world:  a board of all the departures and arrivals for Bucresti Nord, a currency exchange shop, Schimb Valutar, Romanians going about their mornings off to work, running, sitting, waiting, flirting.

The cut of the suits, the occasional very Slavic physiognomy: eyebrows, squared off jaws, thick necks, serious all remind me of the latter days of the Soviet Union when apparatchiks still roamed the countryside, conducting the business of a centralized state and a planned economy.

It occurred to me, as it has before and like my hero Scott Nearing proposed, that the middle way would be best, a place between the grim and often inefficient (therefore grim?) Soviet communism and rapacious, winner take all, screw the little guy late stage capitalism now regnant.

In other words, let capitalism have the non-essentials designer cloths, fancy watches, restaurants, but not groceries, hotels but not homes, minute clinics but not personal health care, boutique education but not public education, a gated community or two, but not urban planning.  Give capitalism the margins and let the money enchanted compete and scrabble and become rich there.

The rest of us, whose lives themselves are our focus, those of us glad to exist, could read, write, paint, sculpt, build cars, houses, care for the health of others, teach, grow and distribute healthy food.  We might, probably would, have less material wealth, but we would have life itself.  And think how short that is.

 

 

Family, Travel

La Revedere

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Beltane                                                           Garlic Moon

Checked in for my flight, boarding passes printed out for the journey to Bucharest.  Bit of a bump.  The Delta website said, Visa required.  Have proper documentation.  Whoa.  I thought…  So, I checked again.  Nope.  No visas required.  Romania requires one after 90 days.  But, passport’s good until then.  Geez.  Don’t scare me like that.

Bags are packed, I’m ready to go.  Well, almost.  I haven’t quite finished Pentheus and I want to do that before we leave for the airport.  That’s next.  Last few things go in the pack and in the checked baggage just before I leave.  That sort of thing.

My plan right now is to update from Romania.  Perhaps starting Saturday since I get in at 3:05 pm Bucharest time which is 11:05 pm here.  Updates always depend on finding wi-fi but I anticipate it will not be a problem, at least not too much.  So, if you’re interested, tune in again on Saturday when we’ll be reporting live from the home of the 5th Romance language.

The header is from a small village in rural Romania.   Oh, and la revedere is good-bye in Romanian.

 

Travel

Happy Feet

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Beltane                                                     New Garlic Moon

In case you wondered, the header up now is a vertical slice of the Romanian flag.  The time till departure grows short and that tingle before a new, interesting trip has begun to make its way up and down my spine.

Kate and I know that our travel budget during retirement is anemic, not a good thing for us.  There are those trips to Denver, to Georgia, and vacation like journeys.

This morning in our business meeting we discussed ways of adding money to the travel line item and came up three or four different things we can do that will increase it, some additional money per month and adding certain larger cash amounts we might get from roll-over funds after she retires completely, plus a few thousand from the last days of her working life.

All the world is an interesting place as far as I’m concerned.