• Category Archives Travel

  • Clear Skies and Bright Stars

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    New Day in Paradise    Clear, sunny with clouds over Molokai.  Little breeze at this hour and the Pacific is calm. 

    Kate’s got a cold, a version she got from some kids at work before she left.  She’ll have to rest today and tomorrow at least. 

    Hard to believe I’ve only been here a day.  The jade guy I  mentioned yesterday also told me how great it was to live here.  If there were a practical way to do it, I’d jump on it. 

    At night the skies are clear and the stars shine bright without the light pollution so endemic to the continental U.S.   It gets hot during the middle of the day but the morning (now) and the evenings cool down and breezes blow off the ocean. 

    Gonna get back to my workout routine this morning.  Got to because this ol’ body collects aches and pains if I don’t stretch it out every day.

    See you later.


    Travel 📎and tagged

  • Lahaina Town

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Maui night  A crescent moon hangs over the Pacific. The northstar, what I think of as our own Polaris (in Minnesota) shines even here in the moist tropical dark.   Clear

    Kate drove us into Lahaina Town.  I’m not on the rental car contract.  We wandered through the streets, looking into jewelry stores, art galleries, clothing stores.  A lot of people on the sidewalks, too many for my taste. 

    In Whaler’s Market (they like Whaler imagery here, in spite of the darkness in the history) I met a guy who works and sells jade.  I replaced my broken jade ring and bought a spare.  The owner thought I lived on island.  We struck up a conversation.  He buys his jade by the wheelbarrow load from Burmese families who carry across the Thai border near ChingRai.  He grew up in Rangoon, his parents worked for the Ford Foundation.

    By walking a block off mainstreet we escaped the crowd and found a quiet restaurant where we ate supper, macadamia nut crusted Mahi-Mahi.  At the bar a few locals bellied up to the bar,  bellowed greetings and exhibited much of the false bon’homie that drunks often think they enjoy.

    Back now in room 853 at the Westin.  Both of us still have a little travel fatigue.  Should get better tomorrow.


    Travel 📎and tagged

  • Tommy Bahama, Reyn Spooner, Maui Dive Shop

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Maui weather 80 degrees and sunny 

    Ate breakfast at the hotel…not again.  Way too expensive. I knew that but I was not awake.

    Wandered over to Whaler’s Village and bought a new hat, looked in the windows.  There’s a scrimshaw shop that has objects inspired by netsuke, only about twice as large.  Well done, though.  Tommy Bahama, Reyn Spooner, Island Living, Maui Dive Shop, Honolua Surf Shop. 

    Noticed the palm trees around the resorts all have piton marks.  To prune these trees little guys clamber up the trunk with piton’s attached to boots and a leather belt around their waist.  The trunks have the scars.  Looks like abuse.

    A lot of people here.  More than I remember from previous visits.  Not as many Japanese, though they are still here.  The frontdesk has  a Japanese language newspaper and there is a concierge for Japanese speakers. 

    Kate and I are off to Lahaina Town.  There is a banyan tree there that spreads out over half a city block.

    Aloha.


    Travel 📎and tagged

  • Just Another Day In Paradise

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Weather:   Another Sunny Day in Paradise!   8:13 AM Maui Time
    Aloha , all you wind-whipped, wind-chilled center of the continent land lubbers!

    As I write this, the Pacific washes up on a white sand beach, birds gibber in the palms off my 8th floor lanai and the temperature heads toward 80 degrees.

    Thanks to my recent work in Taoism, I’m trying to reframe my expectations of air travel.  I now consider it a sort of gauntlet or trial by combat necessary before one wins the hands of the fair lady, the Islands.  All in all the trip was not bad, save for an hour and a half spent wandering among slot machines, blinking lights, hurried travelers trying to find the ATA counter, which was, as in O’Hare of old, the maximal distance from I came in and resulted in an equally long trek back to get the gates.  Sigh.

    Got to Maui at 7:35 PM Maui time, 11:45 PM CST.  There is nothing else on the planet like the smell of Hawaii.  It caresses  you the minute you arrive and lets you know you’ve come back at last.

    Had a strange experience about a half hour out from Maui.  I begin to feel I was coming home.  You know this feeling, the warm secure sense that a place of safety and comfort awaits you, a place where are you are welcome and where you belong.  Don’t know what to make of it, except that I liked it.

    In order to connect to you, dear reader, I spent 20 minutes with the Bangalore cyber connection goosing the net to the room so I could finally get on the web.  Now, I’m going to breakfast.  Catch you later.


    Travel

  • From Football Genius to Dastardly Spymaster

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    26  92%  28%  0mph WWN bar30.10 steep rise windchill26  Imbolc

                Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    Today I reap the benefits of advanced preparation.  None of that running around trying to get stuff together at the last minute.  I always forget important things when I do that.

    Got another batch of ping backs today.  Seems like they’ve picked up in volume in the last week.  Don’t know why that should be.

    Noticed Bill Bellichik of the Patriots has gone from football genius to dastardly arrogant spymaster in two days.  Shouldn’t lose.  It does bad things to your winning reputation.

    My sense of anticipation rises about a month on different ground than home.  Much as I love our home, the chance to get away, find other experiences ranks high on my list.  A retreat with my brothers in the Woolly Mammoths and then three weeks in Hawi’i will scratch some of that itch.  Went to sleep last night imagining early morning workouts on the beach.


    Travel 📎and tagged

  • Mulberry Trees in Armenia

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    31  91%  26%  3mph N bar29.80 steady windchill29  Imbolc

                  Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    This snow has a lot of different forms: sleet, snert, wet snow, less wet snow.  At least it didn’t plug the snowblower.  As I followed the snowblower down the driveway and back up, I had these background/foreground visions:  background–I’m layered up, in swiftly falling snow and operating a loud orange machine; foreground–I’m sitting on the lanai of our oceanview room in the Westin looking out toward the western horizon of the Pacific ocean as the sun begins to set. 

    The snow makes the transition from Minnesota to Hawai’i a nice contrast. 

    Getting stuff done today and tomorrow since on Wednesday I leave for Dwelling in the Woods.  My day without the guys I plan to snowshoe and read about Taoism, prepare for my workshop.  During the retreat I plan to snowshoe at least once a day. 

    Picked up some dried mulberries today at the co-op.  Sweet, but not local.  Not hardly.  From Turkey.  It just occurred to me that I read an article this afternoon about silk scarf makers in Armenia, next to the Turkish border.  They had a historic industry, but the Armenian genocide wiped it out.  This town had just received a grant from the EU to grow, mulberry trees!


    Travel Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • The Moratorium Years Didn’t Work Out so Well for Me

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    29  90%  26%  5mph NNE bara29.84  falls windchill25 Imbolc

                     Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    In spite of the fact that this is Minnesota, how soon we forget, I had REI all to myself this morning.  Monday morning shoppers scared back into their easy chairs by, gasp, SNOW.  OK, I did think about turning around and heading back, then “I am a Minnesotan and I am not afraid,” soared through my mind and on I drove.  Slippin’ and slidin’ to the mall.  Just like when I was a kid and we had to walk four blocks all the way downtown to buy a pair of shoes.

    Anyhow, a helpful young lady, blond and cheerful, quite normal except for the hoop through the right nostril, which, I suppose, makes her normal in that world formerly inhabited by adults now over 60, guided me through the hiking/walking show selection process.  The first pair pretty much fit me, though they were a little snug.  Then, “Oh.  These are a women’s 8!”  Wouldn’t you know?  Still we did find an appropriately masculine pair of Keens, “They started out making water shoes so they know slick rock.”  One of the problems in hiking Hawai’i is water slicked rock;  I’ve learned this with bruised ankles more than once.

    Nearer to  home at the Anoka Co-op I went searching for Minnesota cheese (Bongards, in this case) and Minnesota bread (oddly, Holy Land Pocket Bread, made in Minneapolis) for my presentation at the Woolly retreat.  Then, sliding my way back home.

    All the while I listened to Tom Wolfe’s  I Am Charlotte Simmons.   Anyone who encountered college after academic stardom in a small-town high school, like me for instance, can identify all the over place with Charlotte Simmons, the little mountain girl from Sparta, North Carolina and a Presidential Scholarship.  Well, I never had a Presidential Scholarship, but there’s some connection, anyhow.  Wolfe has made a living out of closely observed novels of manners of our time, a sort of Dickensian project in hip, post-modern tongue in cheek prose.  This one may not be great literature, but it’s a great time-machine back to those magic years when everything seemed possible, if only you could figure anything out. 

    Those moratorium years didn’t work out so well for me.  Instead of sticking to my guns or buckling down with heroic intention fortified by small town common sense and parental support, I got drunk, wasted, started smoking and wandered without purpose for so many years I don’t even know when I stopped.  Sigh.  Oh, I did fine academically, but not as well as I might have without the marijuana and hash–yes, I inhaled–the LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, beer, 151 rum, cognac and single-malt scotch.  I floated out of college and stayed afloat all through seminary and well into my first years in the ministry. 

    Treatment.  Second divorce.  Flounder around.  Discover writing and Kate in the same year.  Now, in my final third of life, I’ve picked up steam and gotten the ole head and heart straightened out.  Thank Mother Earth.  Still, it is really better late than never.  I’m living proof.


    Memories Travel 📎and tagged

  • Bloggin with Palm Trees

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    18  89%  28%  0mph NNE  bar 30.12 steady windchill17  Imbolc

                  Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    Opened up my e-mail program today and had 29 messages.  A big morning for me is 5 or 6.  What the hell? 

    Another lesson in the cyber world.  There are bots that crawl the web seeking out certain words or phrases, then link their source to another web page.  In some instances that’s google and can help others find your website if the title words you use resonate.  In most instances and certainly the most annoying instances the links go back to such intriguing locations as Addiction Levitra, Texas Facts Auto Insurance, Mexico Amoxil and HCL Dosing Tramadol.  Each one linked by some $%#@! algorithim to the words I had inadvertently used as the title for a post:  damn it!   A month or so ago I had a post that had the words body and flesh in it.  This was about the earth and her products.  You can imagine the links I got then.  Cyber world folks call these ping backs. 

    I have had three ping backs out of hundreds that I kept, that is didn’t delete as spam.  One came in from a website for the Teaching Company from whom I buy the occasional lecture course, another from the NFL website and a recent one from Paul Douglas, the WCCO weather guy and his Climate Change website.  It’s a good thing wordpress has a straightforward, if not quick, way of eliminating ping backs.

    In case you missed it–like you live in Singapore or Bangkok for instance–today is Super Bowl Sunday.  I tried to find out much beer we consume on Super Bowl Sunday but according to the Beer Institute (I know, but there really is one.) it’s not possible to track single day consumption.  A spokesman did say, “the Super Bowl is a good event in the ‘off season’ (cold months) to drive volume”

    Each year I wonder why I watch football, yet, somehow, I’ve developed an interest and now have enough years watching to have a sense of historical perspective.  That makes it, for me, much more interesting. So, yes, I’ll be there in my seat, though sans beer, sans snacks and sans favorite, though I lean toward the Giants just because they’re the underdogs.

     Allison wondered if I plan to blog while in Hawai’i.  Yep.  Like football I’ve developed an interest in blogging, though this interest predates my football jones by quite a few years.  I have three bookshelves of journals of various types and sizes.  I imagine this habit came with mother’s milk, or should I say father’s ink and lead.  Dad wrote a weekly column for the Alexandria Times-Tribune, Smalltown USA, for many, many years. 

    There is something about being able to read the breadcrumbs of your life, sprinkled out at various ages and stages.  In some instances it’s revelatory, in others it’s “Oh, my god.  What was I thinking?”  I suppose its a similar feeling artists get from paintings and sketches made over many years.  Or photo albums and all those home movies.


    GeekWorld Memories Travel 📎and tagged

  • Braised Shortribs

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    27  75%  24%  0mph SSW bar30.02 rises wihdchill27  Imbolc

                   Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    Made braised shortribs in the slowcooker this  morning.  They should be done soon.  Not our usual fare these days, but we plan to eat a small meal from them and take the rest to the neighbors I spoke about yesterday.

    Began sorting out packing chores for Dwellin in the Wood and Hawaii.  Kate will take clothes and a few other items for me; I will take the computer, DVD player, meds, books and files to read on the plane.  Not quite finished, but I’ve chosen my bag and have much of it done.

    Tomorrow I’m going to head over to REI and by a pair walking shoes designed for back country trails.  Then, later in the day, along with 1 billion people or so, I plan to watch the superbowl.  I’ll work on my hour long presentation for the retreat during the timeouts and commercials.


    General Travel 📎and tagged

  • Just Another Day in Paradise

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    12  73%  19%  0mph EEN bar30.06 falls windchill 11  Winter

                     Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    “Paradise is here or nowhere: You must take your joy with you, or you will never find it.” – O.S. Marden

    Salient advice as Kate and I prepare for Hawai’i.  “Just another day in paradise,” is often heard when there, from tourists and locals alike.  There’s another one, too, “Lucky we live Hawai’i.”  Marden echoes Emerson, who said he didn’t need to go to Italy to see beauty, because he found beauty wherever he was.  

    “Wherever you go, there you are,” from the world of AA makes the same point.  We take our conclusions, biases, and perceptions with us wherever we go.

    A trap into which I have fallen in the past and no doubt will fall into again measures home against the temporary pleasure found in any distant destination, from Ely and Duluth to Kauai and Angkor Wat.  Home will always come out second best, because by definition it does not have what Ely does, ready access to the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area.  It does not have the perfect, year round temperature of Hawai’i, nor does it have the ocean.  It does not have the howler monkeys and ancient temples of Angkor.  The Napali Coast fires the imagination in a way different from the drive up Round Lake Boulevard.

    True.  All true.  Compare these far away places, however, to home from home.  Hawai’i does not have my friends.  Angkor does not have the Minneapolis Art Institute and my docent work.  Ely does not have easy access to theatres, orchestras and the Walker.  Kauai, though it is the garden isle, does not have the garden and grounds on which Kate and I have worked for over 14 years.  None of these places have our house, adapted to our creative work and the daily life we live.  Could these other places accrue amenities like these?  Friends, maybe, over years.  The peculiar blend of artistic life enjoyed here in the Twin Cities?  Probably not.  A house like ours?  Probably not.

    Also true.  All true.  Still, we also have, for balance, the testimony of Mark and Elizabeth, who cast off their worldly belongings (ok, they stored some of them.) to travel the globe.  So far they’ve hit Buenos Aires, Peru, Shanghai and head out next week for Bangkok.  Their home is where they are, though they return here episodically to unite with family and friends.

    I had a peripatetic 20’s and 30’s after 16 years in Alexandria, Indiana.  I lived in twelve different cities and rural areas until coming to the Twin Cities metro area.  Even after arriving in Minneapolis and St. Paul I lived in twelve different apartments and/or houses in both cities and two suburbs. 

    The 14 years in Andover has come close to setting a record for personal stability.   The minuses are written in the script of every foreign or domestic destination that has called to me.  They are also painted in lost opportunities to experience other cultures and locales. 

    The pluses though are profound.  Daily life has a routine that frees the mind for creative work.  I know the microclimates and the soil conditions of each inch of our 2.5 acres.  Our dogs and our children have lived their lives here, the dogs their whole lives, the children important parts.  Kate and I know each other as stewards of this land, this house and these memories.  Lucky we live Andover.


    Memories Our Land and Home Travel 📎and tagged