Chris & River Europe Adventure Spring 2022

April 25: We’ve been in Crete one full day. Wow.  Just walking to breakfast was so amazing. My body felt so deeply relaxed and free from all pressure. All around me were beautiful wildflowers - yellow, red, purple - and beyond them (on one side) the blue of the sky meeting the blue of the sea, and (on the other side) mountains. Butterflies fluttering around. A few people pass and say “kalimera” - Greek for good morning, but literally beautiful morning.  I kept pausing to take photos hoping that somehow they would convey the body feeling of peace and ease that being here gives me. When I took this photo, I pictured you sitting on the bench gazing out at the line where the sea meets the sky.  When I took this next picture I hoped you would feel the same relaxing of all the little muscles behind your eyes and in your gut that I feel when I gaze on all those different shades and transparencies of the blue of the sea.  We’re on the south coast of Crete - out in the middl...

Today is April 24. We are on the airplane about to depart from Cologne Germany to Heraklion, Crete, Greece.  I write this very aware that I will probably be unable to post it at least until our return. I have been blocked from my Google account (my blog is on the Google platform) and despite diligent efforts and research I will probably be unable to access it until I get home and try to sign in from a familiar computer. I may have permanently lost access to my email and my blogs. (This is sad but of course the troubles others face in our troubled world put my hardships - however difficult for me - into perspective. ) I lost my iPhone on the bus ride from Ekenas Finland to the next town where we were to catch the train. We searched the bus thoroughly and repeatedly and it was not to be found. I noticed it missing just before Cookie and I took a farewell selfie at my request.  We missed our train and took a costly taxi to the airport in Helsinki. Most of the time since then I h...

It is Wednesday afternoon, April 19. I am sitting in Ekenas, in my room in this 200 year old building built originally probably as a room for livestock. It is made of rough hewn wood. Here’s a photo of Cookie Monster in the room. You can see the cavelike feeling.  Monday I got to tag along as Cookie did documentary photography of early planning and rehearsing for a musical called All Shook Up, which uses 27 Elvis Presley songs. The play is in Finnish but the songs are sung in English. We went first to the outdoor theater (beside a picturesque castle from when the area was controlled by Sweden). Here is the flyer for the musical. (The poster itself was not blurry - I must have been “all shook up” when I took the photo) Here is Cookie photographing the planning process - this is an early meeting including the director, the stage set designer, the stage set builder, the stage manager and another woman whose role wasn’t clear to me. I liked watching them and thinking about how much ti...

Dear Companions in Adventure, Today is Monday April 13 and here I am In Ekanas on the Baltic Sea west of Helsinki (we are located at the blue spot on the map) So much has happened since I left Dublin that I hardly know where to start.  My friend Chris Senn aka Cookie Monster met me at Helsinki airport and together we rode the light rail train into the city. We stayed at a very modern Scandia hotel in the Kampii neighborhood (with the most overwhelmingly generous breakfast buffet I’ve ever been offered - I was so overwhelmed with the abundance of choices I was practically unable to serve myself anything - sorry I didn’t get a photo though it would have taken at least five photos to give any sense at all of the extent of it). As many of you know, Chris is a long ago former client who joined us for Chris’s 80th birthday in Venice in 2011 and took photos of her party there (the photo below shows Sabine and Agnes, the friends Chris is now visiting in Cologne, who have just passed out s...

Today is April 13. It is Wednesday night. I wrote last April 10 from Killarney. Here’s a photo of a rare moment of sunlight in the entryway of our arbnb building here in Dublin.  We got on the bus Thursday April 11 at the Killarney Hotel - though through a series of mishaps and misunderstandings left more than an hour behind schedule. It was interesting - the gathering had been beautifully organized but no one seemed in charge of departure buses. No lists were checked, no announcements made. Everything was haphazard.    We were concerned about the protest by truckers that was happening in Dublin (a protest against gas prices which threaten truckers livelihood, as well as quality of life for all people with limited income) but the protest did not end up affecting us much - except emotionally. I was very affected by a trucker interviewed for Irish Times who said something like this: “We don’t know if this protest is the right thing to do, we don’t know if it will help, but...