​              The 2015 trip visiting the gardens of England was a triumph for Sherrill after the difficult time she'd had the year before—and the cancellation because of her illness of our long-anticipated trip to Norway.  She had recovered well enough to manage fine as we walked through the gardens in both the countryside and London.   
              The following spring, we joined a garden club trip visiting Bay Area gardens and nurseries and later our daughter and son-in-law took us on a North Bay trip riding a restored old train through sea-like fields of wild flowers, their blossoms tossing on waves of wind-blown grasses.  Sherrill enjoyed those excursions, but insisted that she wasn't finished exploring the larger world. 

​              She often had surprised people with her adventurous spirit.  She'd driven across deserts and through mountains and on crazy foreign freeways.  She'd wanted to experience an erupting volcano, see whatever was above the Arctic circle, get up close to both Victoria and Iguassu Falls, explore behind the Iron Curtain, travel on every waterway possible.  She'd collected files and boxes and drawers and cupboards of photographs and clippings and brochures and notes about places on the planet that she wanted to see, experience, get to know.  Sooner or later, she often had said, we'd get to all of them. 
              We weren't traveling, now, but we still were seeing family and friends and occasionally went out to a play.  When she felt like it, we worked together in her garden.
              "Look," she said, one evening, after several months, "I want to go someplace."  

​              That someplace turned out to be a nine-day September trip to the Southwest that she had found.  She'd loved desert country since she was a child, when she'd lived on the Nevada-California border with her mother, step-father, and step-brother.  Over the years, we'd seen quite a lot of the southwest corner of United States, but had missed some major sites.  More than that, this trip would keep us busy exploring beautiful places and meeting interesting people.  And it would be easy.  Everything would be taken care of for us. 
              The tour began in Phoenix, the desert city named after the beautiful bird that never died, that forever flew ahead, scanning the horizon, exploring distant worlds, the bird that symbolized our ability to extend our lives by opening up to the world around us—and even beyond.   

​              We were excited to be letting part of the world reveal itself to us again.  We'd been doing it for fifty-two years and weren't ready to quit.  At the heart of every trip we took was the shared passion to plunge into a new adventure, a new place, a new way of looking at life, and we hadn't lost it.  After a night in Phoenix, we joined the group, then drove beside the evocative shape of Camelback Mountain and through Scottsdale.  The town had been much smaller when Sherrill and I drove through the area on our way to Mexico in 1964 and stopped briefly to visit Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and school, Taliesin West. 
              "Nothing stays the same," I commented. 
              "Not even us, sweetie."  

​              The high-altitude desertscape of dry hills, cacti, and rust-hued rock formations led us to the 12th and 13th century sandstone cliff dwellings known as Montezuma's Castle, although they weren't a castle and had nothing to do with the Aztec emperor.  Teddy Roosevelt, nevertheless, dedicated to preserving both nature and history, had made the area a National Monument.  It was here that Sherrill and I established a routine that carried us through the trip: we'd walk to a point where we could see and enjoy the site together, then we'd find a place for her to sit and rest, while I explored a little more.
              "I don't want to spoil it for you," she told me.
              "Don't worry, you're not."
              "Well, I don't want to," she insisted, tugging at the hairs on the back of my neck.  "And you need to use your razor back here."
              We could see why the five-story complex of 20 rooms wedged into a niche in the massive cliff face seemed wondrous to the Europeans who discovered it.  Even to our eyes, with the early afternoon sun glinting off the wind-and-storm-shaped golden stone, it seemed almost miraculous.  

​              The tour continued to the artist colony of Sedona, surrounded by towers of red rock, rugged buttes, steep canyon walls, and scattered pine forests.
              "I love this," Sherrill murmured, as we watched light moving across the landscape, changing color from shades of orange to red.
              We glanced into a few of the art galleries and shops that lined Sedona's streets and bought lunch in a restaurant with a view of the precipitous sandstone cliffs.  Then we rejoined the group and drove through the deep gorge of Oak Creek Canyon, continuing to its much bigger cousin, the Grand Canyon.  Back in 1967, on our way home to California from the Expo '67 World's Fair in Montreal, we'd stopped at the Grand Canyon for a couple of days, but hadn't been back since.  This time, we stayed in a modern section of the lodge on the canyon's south rim, with our meals in historic El Tovar, a short walk along the rim. 
              The seven-thousand foot altitude made it difficult for Sherrill to explore for very long at once, but we did it in stages, resting whenever we felt like it.  As the sun moved, changing the views of the canyons and rock formations in front of us, it almost seemed as if we were hiking along the rim, ourselves.  We had the next day to explore on our own, taking a shuttle bus to specific lookout points.  

              Sometimes, Sherrill sat on a bench looking out to orange cliffs tiled with patterns of erosion and history while I hiked further afield.  Often, I sat next to her for a while. 
              "You don't have to stay," she'd tell me.
              "I know."
            Occasionally, when I returned from a walk I brought something to eat from one of the cafes or restaurants nearby.  Best of all, we watched two Grand Canyon sunsets and two sunrises.  

            Sherrill was pleased to see a pair of exhibits in the Bright Angel History Room of the Lodge that focused on the thousands of young women who over the years worked in the Fred Harvey hotels and restaurants — the famous Harvey Girls — and the architectural pioneer Mary Colter, who designed, decorated, and furnished his buildings in parks across the west, including the Grand Canyon, beginning in 1901. 
          Monument Valley, where John Ford filmed many now-classic western films, starting with Stagecoach in 1939, had long been high on our list of places to see.  At last, we got there.  Navajo guides took us in jeeps into the restricted backcountry of the Valley, now a Navajo Tribal Park, among the buttes, arches, and dramatic red sandstone formations.  We'd brought masks to cover our noses and mouths, because the jeeps stirred up thick waves of orange dust as we careened over the meandering dirt roads.  Even through a fine curtain of dust, the scene around us was more spectacular than we'd expected.  This wasn't the first time that we felt as if we'd wandered into an old movie, but it was one of the most memorable.  

​              From the valley we drove to Lake Powell, created by the massive Glen Canyon Dam.   If we'd been older and aware of what was happening back in the 1950s when the dam was built, we probably wouldn't have approved of flooding the deep sandstone gorges along the Colorado River.  The resort hotel where we stayed sprawled at one corner of the lake.  The views were beautiful, but the dining room was too far from our room for Sherrill to walk, so that evening I went out and brought food back to our room.  The next morning, a hotel shuttle took us down to the dock area, where we boarded a boat for a cruise through Lake Powell's Antelope Canyon.  
              Variegated red sandstone cliffs rose on both sides as Sherrill and I peered down into the reflecting blue waters toward the bottom of the drowned canyon.  As spectacular and beautiful as the canyon we could see was, we saw that it plunged much deeper below the water.  Slowly, our boat navigated the hairpin turns, sometimes the jagged cliffs above us almost touching.  Other times, sunlight streamed through places where it looked as if a gigantic hand had scooped away fistfuls of the rust-colored rock.  Shadows sank deep into the water, at one point even the moving shadow of our boat. 

​               After breakfast the next morning, we followed the dusty road into Utah to the little town of Kanab, red sandstone outcroppings and gullies dotting the dry, sagebrush-strewn hills along the way.  Although hardly more than a wide spot in the road, Kanab liked to call itself "Little Hollywood" because over the years more than a hundred western movies and television shows had been filmed there.  We stopped at a funky little Hollywood museum and trading post crowded with souvenirs, memorabilia, and pieces of old movie sets.  For some of us, the restrooms were the main reason for stopping, although the place did sell pretty good root beer floats. 
              Kanab's other claim to fame was as the gateway to Bryce Canyon National Park, which was spectacular in a different way than the Grand Canyon.  Actually, we learned, Bryce Canyon was not a canyon, but a collection of giant natural amphitheaters stretching side by side for more than 20 miles.  Each of the amphitheaters reached out for 8, 10, or more, up to 18, miles of variegated sedimentary rocks, all of them crowded with eroded rock columns known as "hoodoos" or "fairy chimneys" that stood elbow to elbow like commuters on a train.  Some of the columns stood as much as 200 feet tall, flaunting their red, orange, white, and pink stripes.  I'd been there with my family when I was young, but this all was new to Sherrill, although we'd seen hoodoos in the Cappadocia area of central Turkey.  

​              From the lodge where the bus dropped us, we hiked slowly out to the rim, pausing once for Sherrill to rest on a log.  Then, for a while, we sat on a bench facing the colorful panorama in front of us, Sherrill looking, I thought, quietly satisfied.  From time to time, skinny lizards that seemed three-quarters tail skittered over and between the red rocks at our feet, vanishing so fast that I couldn't see where they'd gone. 

​              "You don't need to stay with me," she told me.  "I'm a grown up."
             Finally, to show her that I wasn't worried about her, I left her on the bench, gazing at the riot of red and orange hoodoos and explored farther afield, among family groups and couples who were taking each others' photographs with the hoodoos, brightly lit by the afternoon sun, stiffly posed behind them.  A few times, I was afraid that a tourist taking a "selfie" was going to back up right off the side of the cliff. 
             As often happened when we traveled with a group, Sherrill and I became friends with another couple during the tour, short as it was.  Easy-going and fun to be with, they were from Oak Park, near Chicago, where Hemingway spent his youth.  As it turned out, the wife also was a writer.  After Sherrill and I returned home, I ordered her book, a tightly written historical novel that I enjoyed.  When Sherrill felt up to socializing, the four of us had meals together.  Other times, I ate with them and took food back to Sherrill in our room.     
            The Lodge where we stayed in Zion was perfectly located on the valley floor, surrounded by the massive ramparts of towering cliffs, and a short walk to the dining building.  An elephant train took us around the valley, stopping at strategic points so that everyone, even those who didn't feel like hiking, could experience the spectacle of the enormous sandstone cliffs and rocky peaks.  Later, while Sherrill rested in our room at the Lodge, I indulged in an independent walk, past the rock monoliths, cliffs, and streams.  

​              The day we drove from Zion to Las Vegas to fly home to the Bay Area was the 52nd anniversary of the day Sherrill and I were married in the Cupid Drive-In Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas.  Although we'd returned a couple of times since, when the chapel still stood on the Strip, it was gone this time and the Strip was much larger and busier, lined with flashy new towers, including one with the name Trump in huge letters. 
              "The Trump Hotel," our guide told us, "is the only hotel in Las Vegas without a casino.  They weren't allowed to put one in because Mr. Trump had filed for bankruptcy."
             Although some of buildings looked familiar, many of them were new to us.     
              This was the last trip that Sherrill and took together, but we had fifty-two years of exploring the world behind us, fifty-two years of turning to each other and asking, "What do you think of that?"  Fifty-two years of sharing everything.  

​Sherrill and Bruce, 1965

   ____________________________________

                                                                             Now, I'm developing the 81 blog posts about our 
                                                                              travels and life together during the 52 years
                                                                             of our marriage into a book.  I'll let you know
​                                                                              when it is published. 
                                                                               _____________________________________
​

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 80 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 




Sherrill and Bruce with robot friend who, oddly enough,
seemed to be the mascot at Runnymede,
where the Best of English Gardens tour began.

​              Norway, where the Northern Lights flirt with the midnight sun and blue ice glaciers feed the bottomless fjords, was going to be our big trip for 2014—Norway and tiny Andorra were the only countries in western Europe that we'd missed.  We planned it detail, made and paid for all the reservations.  After a day in London, we'd fly to Oslo, look around for a few days, then take the Bergensbanen railway line past mountains and waterfalls, seven hours on one of the world's most scenic train rides, to Bergen on Norway's western coast, where we'd board a ship for the journey north, in and out of fjords, past the Arctic Circle, then back down, visiting different fjords and towns on the way south.  It all was arranged, a perfect trip.  

​              Then Sherrill's doctor discovered that something wasn't right with her.  Tests revealed that cancer had, in fact, been secretly, stealthily, invading.  Surgery was next, instead of Norway, followed by a year of radiation and chemotherapy.  That took care of 2014.  She handled it well, all things considered.  Family and friends helped with driving her to treatments.  A kind friend gave her a wig when her hair started falling out, folks brought meals and helped out in many ways. 
​              As she gained strength after this year-long ordeal, she discovered a Best of English Gardens tour that she wanted to do to celebrate her recovery: visiting some of the most famous and iconic gardens of England, ending with the annual Chelsea Flower Show in London.  Her oncologist said that there was no reason why she shouldn't take the trip.  
              "I can do this," she told me, as we packed.  "Don't worry." 

​              As we'd traveled around the world, we'd prowled through many gardens: from lush tropical gardens in Asia and Latin America to austere French gardens with broad paths, topiary trees, and precise flower beds; from walled Moorish and Spanish gardens, often hidden in courtyards, to the rambling countryside gardens of the British isles; from stylized Japanese gardens with carefully raked gravel riverbeds and perfectly placed rocks to the delicately hued gardens of old China. 
              Sherrill's favorite gardens, the ones most congenial to her, were the deceptively casual-appearing gardens of England, with their planted "rooms" of different colors and textures and their herbaceous borders that offered unexpected delights to the eye.  This was the style that had influenced Sherrill when she designed and created her own garden in Berkeley.   

​              For centuries, gardens had inspired, teased, and charmed British writers, painters, and lovers.  Even in lousy weather, the British pulled on their boots and slickers and energetically mucked about in the flowerbeds.  Everyone had a theory about gardening and shared it, if given a chance.  They were generous with their experience and knowledge, offered advice, and wished you well with your own gardening efforts.  
              Gardens, I think, gave Sherrill hope.  These living, growing, places of beauty promised that there would be a future.  Seeds would germinate, plants would grow, flowers would blossom.  They attracted and nurtured birds, butterflies, and bees.  The tour visited many of the most famous and influential English gardens, ranging from very personal ones such as Wendy Dare's little hillside terraces next to an old Gloustershire mill to the large, formal, gardens of Stourhead in Wiltshire and Hidcote Manor in the Cotswolds to the eccentricities of writer Vita Sackville-West's garden rambling among the ruins of a castle.
              We allowed ourselves time in London, both before and after the tour, to visit other gardens in the vicinity, as well.  A short trip on the Underground took us to Hampstead, where we walked up a curving hillside road to Fenton House, a 17th century red brick National Trust mansion with a terraced walled garden, topiary shrubs and trees, sunken garden, and rose garden. 
              "I've seen this before," Sherrill said as she sat on a bench beneath a purple wisteria on the upper terrace, looking toward the house.
              Then we both remembered where: The gardens had been one of the locations in a BBC miniseries about a 1930s jazz band, Dancing on the Edge.  It projected the posh yet stylish atmosphere needed for the scene.  

​              Even more exciting for Sherrill was a visit to Eccleston Square, a large fenced garden for the early 19th century homes surrounding the square, opened to the public as a fund raiser once a year.  The garden had been redesigned by a well-known author and gardener Sherrill had seen on television.  We wandered along the garden paths and peered into a large potting shed, Sherrill making notes, enjoyed tea and cake under an arbor, then by chance met the old fellow, now in his eighties.  He and Sherrill immediately were friends, talking about the garden, his books, and his  ideas about gardening.  

​              A visit with our friends David and Catherine had been high on our list, so we took a train out to see them in Richmond.  After drinks in the secret garden behind their house (tulips and ceanothus still in bloom), followed by lunch, they drove us to vast Richmond Park nearby, where we spied grazing deer among green fields and trees before reaching a section known as the Isabella Plantation.  A stroll among blooming trees and shrubs left us goggle-eyed: giant azaleas and rhododendrons of startling shades of red, pink, white, yellow, and peach—even purple and blue—as far as we could see in every direction.  Apparently, the deer knew that they all were poisonous.  

​                We joined the Best of English Gardens tour at Runnymede, where we saw brightly painted narrow boats cruising along the river, then headed off with the group into the Cotswold hills.  The plan seemed to be two great gardens a day, with lunch in between.  Sherrill had managed quite well so far with walking, but we hoped that the garden visits would give her opportunities to rest, now and then. 
              Rosemary Verey was a formidable name among serious gardeners, so Sherrill was pleased when we began with gardens that Verey designed in the 1950s for the 17th century manor, Barnsley House.  Following the paths leading from the mansion, we discovered lawns framed by topiary plantings, herbaceous borders in full bloom, knot gardens, a laburnum walk, and ornamental fruit and vegetable gardens, each section rich with gorgeous, sometimes whimsical, surprises. 
              Of course, Sherrill pulled out her notebook and pen and began jotting down ideas.  She soon made friends with other gardeners on the tour, especially a woman from Massachusetts who had two homes with gardens and a landscape gardener from Grass Valley in northern California.  

​              Mill Dene, the afternoon's garden, was completely different, built on a steep slope cut into many terraces, above a stream and historic mill.  Wendy Dare, who created it, led us around, stressing that she and her husband had built every part of it by hand, themselves. 
              "Every terrace, large or small, every path and step, all the plantings and beds.  We weren't rich, so we couldn't hire it done, but we loved doing it." 
              "Sounds familiar," Sherrill smiled. 
                                                         *              *             * 

​              Within the golden walls surrounding Hidcote Manor, we discovered a variety of linked gardens.  Joining our new friends, we made our way through doorways cut into hedges and brick garden walls, past rows of precisely pruned trees, along brick and gravel paths, and up and down flights of steps.  These were the much-copied garden "rooms" created by Lawrence Johnston beginning around 1900.  We'd pass through an arch cut into a yew hedge or through a wrought iron gate and discover a Fuschia Garden or Poppy Garden or his famous Long Walk.  These different growing spaces, Sherrill told me, had been designed to slowly unfold, revealing a new vista or atmosphere at each turn.  She had read Johnston's books and tried some of his ideas in her own much smaller Berkeley garden.
              "He was influenced by Gertrude Jekyll," she reminded me, with tap of her notebook on my shoulder.
              To a gardener, that was like saying he was influenced by Leonardo or Rembrandt.  

​              After lunch, we saw something totally different: a grand house and its hillside garden in what once was called the "Indian style."  Sezincote House, designed by Samuel Pepys Cockerell in 1805, was built when British India was becoming the "jewel in the crown" of the empire, flaunting a Mughal-style dome and arched windows, with gardens that showed the Hindu-style influence of natural-looking ponds and walkways with spots to sit and meditate, a temple withthe goddess Souriya, a pavilion curving from the house.  When the Prince Regent visited, he liked it so much that he changed his vision for the Brighton Pavilion from Chinese to Indian. 
              "You're not making notes, now," I mentioned to Sherrill. 
              "Nothing here inspires me."                                

           Then there was Stourhead, on our itinerary, but more vast park than garden.  It had more in common with Richmond Park than any manor.  Its meadows, forested hills and paths, lakes and streams, were speckled with classical temples, grottos and follies, classical statues and bridges, even a weathered water wheel.
              Once again, Sherrill didn't bother to make notes. 
                                                          *            *             *

              The day we returned to Sissinghurst clouds were bumbling across a blue sky overhead.  We'd been here in 1968, but had been eager to see it again.  Walking through the arched brick gate into the first garden "room," we stopped to catch our breath.  The years had given the garden a new polish.  It had seemed more of a work in progress, before.  Of course, we reminded ourselves, all gardens were a work in progress.  Nothing alive was static. 
              Novelist and gardener, Vita Sackville-West, with her diplomat husband, Harold Nicolson, created a unique world when they transformed the ruins of a fortified manor house into their personal retreat and garden. 
                  Climbing to the top of the sixteenth century tower, we could see the garden's various "rooms"— the "white garden" and other beds with spring blossoms opening, tulips, bluebells, wisteria, roses, azaleas, and more.  Our garden didn't have a moat to cope with, as Vita famously wrote about in one of her gardening books, but Sherrill did pick up some ideas from the planting arrangements and color combinations.  Maybe the most important lesson was to be fearless.  If something doesn't work, change it.  

​              On our way to the Royal Horticultural Society Gardens at Wisley, we saw a sign next to a private driveway warning "Trespassers Will Be Composted."  The society, founded in 1804, developed, tested, and gave advice about flowers and plants, helped educate gardeners, and promoted gardening with flower shows—a very English kind of organization, it seemed to me.  Walking among the Wisley gardens gave Sherrill lots of good ideas, but the place was vast.   After a while, we relaxed and just enjoyed the beauty. 
              Sherrill particularly had wanted to see Great Dixter, a 15th century house and garden to which gardeners from around the world made pilgrimages.  She'd read the books by Christopher Lloyd, who'd spent more than 40 years transforming the garden, experimenting with ideas about plant combinations, colors, scale, and texture.  Although she didn't always agree with his theories, she'd incorporated some of his ideas into our garden—especially about herbaceous borders. 
              "They really should be called masala borders," Sherrill said, with twinkle, using the Hindu word meaning "a mixture."  

              Lloyd had been dead almost seven years when we were at Great Dixter, but with his head gardener, Fergus Garrett, he had created a program of young gardeners coming from around the world for two years each to learn gardening the Christopher Lloyd way.  One of the young gardeners gave us a tour.  Even more exciting for Sherrill, she managed to talk with Fergus Garrett about how he was using and adapting Lloyd's ideas. 
              Back in London, we spent most of a day at the Royal Horticultural Society's Flower Show in Chelsea.  The day before, the Queen had officially opened it and the next day it would be opened to the general public.  Some people had dressed up for the occasion, as if they were going to the Ascot races, others not so much.  Although there were a number of large indoor pavilions, the big garden displays that competed for prizes were outside.  The grand prize went to a garden sponsored by the Chatsworth Manor estate.

​              "That just shows the power of money," Sherrill said.  "Those huge rocks brought all the way from Chatsworth.  Not what I call a garden."  
              However, she did collect a number of ideas from the display gardens.  This was the end of our tour, so the next day the two of us took a train to the coastal town of Rye, which she had wanted to see for a long time, particularly Lamb House and garden, where Henry James had lived for several years.  The Chelsea Flower Show wore her out, so a train ride was a chance to rest. 

​              A little town clinging to steep streets above the English Channel, many of its buildings from the Middle Ages, Rye was a good place to relax after more than two weeks on the road.  Our hotel, the Mermaid Inn, was 500 years old, but comfortable—despite creaky floors and groaning stairs.  A short walk away, we found the brick house where Henry James had lived and its walled garden.  We even indulged in tea and cookies while sitting among the spring blossoms. 

​              We ate the best meal of the trip—a fusion of south Indian, English, and French cuisines—the next day in a little restaurant on a side street.  We enjoyed the wonderful food while looking through a window at the remains of a medieval monastery next door.  When we toasted each other with glasses of wine, the waitress got the idea that it was our anniversary and at the end of the meal brought us a "present" from the chef: a little cake on which he'd written "Happy Anniversary." 

​              On the train back to London, we shared a compartment with two French couples drinking champagne from wine glasses and their three kids.  One little girl stared at us, when she wasn't licking the window.  One morning in London, we took the Tube to the Canal Boat Museum.  One of our favorite trips had been when we rented a narrow boat with Simone and Paul and guided it along the Llangollen Canal from Chester into Wales.  After a couple of hours exploring the museum, we took a narrow boat tour into the Regents Canal and through the second longest tunnel in Britain, built in 1820. 
              "I love this," Sherrill whispered, squeezing my arm.  

               ​Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill House and gardens in Twickenham was a surprise to Sherrill.  A strange place of witch's hat-topped towers, arched windows, turrets and battlements, and other gothic nonsense, it was appropriate for the author of The Castle of Otranto—plus an array of strange cat statues posing in the "garden."
              "Maybe, if you call a place a garden," Sherrill said, staring at the human-sized cats frolicking on the grass, "it is."  

​              The next day, Sherrill got a longer boat ride when we took a ferry from the Embankment Pier in central London along the Thames all the way to Canary Wharf in London's East End to see the London Docklands museum.  The area, called Poplar, for decades a slum, had been transformed into the new financial center of London.  We had lunch at an outside restaurant, surrounded by the glittering banking towers that now stood where docks, warehouses, and slum apartments used to sprawl. 
              Two more days in London took us to William Morris's Red House at Blexleyheath and Kensington Palace and Gardens, all enjoyable, but we were ready go home.  It had been a good trip, even though a lot of it was a challenge for Sherrill.  Nevertheless, as the weeks and months went by, we started making plans for more trips and good times together.  

              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.    
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 79 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 



Sherrill, Ukraine, 2013

​              The two girls might have been sisters, just out of school, pink-cheeked, one blonde, one brown-haired, sixteen and seventeen in their first jobs as waitresses on the Lomonosov as it maneuvered along the Black Sea coast and up the Dnieper River, their clever smiling faces bright with ambition and optimism.  They had grown up in a better, more promising, world than their parents and grandparents had known and, using their language skills and wits, were eager to make the most of its opportunities.  I often wonder about them when I remember the trip that Sherrill and I took through Ukraine in 2013. 

​              Ukraine Airlines ferried us from London to Odessa, then—with the help of a young woman who saw that we were struggling to communicate—we took a taxi from the tiny airport to the 19th century Ayvazovsky Hotel in the old part of town.  The next morning, starting at the wide hill-top square that overlooked both the bay and the gawky hotel planted by the Communists at the end of a graceless pier, we hiked down the broad, profoundly evocative, 192 stairs that descended to the port—the Potemkin Steps made famous in Eisenstein's epic film Battleship Potemkin.  We might have been transported to another world, one accessible only in black and white movies.   Then we discovered a bizarre statue of a muscular baby ripping its way out of a concrete shell, supposedly representing the birth of a "new era."   

​              At the ship, Sherrill and I met our friend Tom, who had traveled with us in 2007 along the Dalmatian Coast from Slovenia to Athens, and now had joined us again.  That earlier trip also had been through countries adjusting to a new, recently liberated, society.  Some, such as Croatia, were finding it easier than others, notably Montenegro and Albania, and, as always seemed to be the case, young people found it easier than the older folks.   
              The 200 year-old Odessa catacombs that hid resistance bands during World War Two could have been from another old movie, but even more fascinating to us were the great caves at the Black Sea military port of Sebastopol, still the biggest maritime base for the Russian and Ukrainian fleets—and Russia's only warm water port.  Deep underground, we explored huge caverns that had been a secret nuclear submarine installation during the Cold War, even a vast underground dry dock for submarines.  Although these caverns no longer were used, the port still was an active military base, so we weren't allowed to take photographs outside the caves. 

​              We sailed from Odessa to Yalta's wide bay, forested mountains descending in front of us to the blue-edged white crescent of the city—a resort town of 80,000, rather like Santa Cruz, but with a port for ships.  We toured the bulky white palace built for the czar in 1911 where the final World War II conference was held in 1945 and heard a lot about how Roosevelt was so sick that he gave in to Stalin's plotting and lying.  The Ukrainians still resented that they ended up part of the USSR.   Then Sherrill, Tom, and I took a taxi to a small graceful house surrounded by gardens in the low hills above the city—where Anton Chekhov spent his last years, writing some of his most well-known plays and stories, still crowded with his furniture, clothing, and random possessions.  We could feel that his spirit lingered there, that it might even pick up the pen resting on the stained desk blotter. 

​              Across the garden, in a discreetly tucked away visitors' center, a large room displayed historic photographs of the playwright and his life in the theater.  A group of women visitors sat on folding chairs while a plump middle-aged woman gave an impassioned presentation in Russian, shawl draped dramatically around her shoulders, describing and acting out with great emotion scenes from the plays.  On a screen behind her, large letters declared in both Russian and English: "Chekhov—the Tennessee Williams of Russia."
              Sailing on the Black Sea and up the Dnieper River through the heart of Ukraine was the best part of the trip for Sherrill.  The stops along the way to visit various towns, churches, palaces, and historic sites were interesting, but moving along the cloud-speckled water under the transparent blue sky, watching the variegated colors of the shore pass by, feeling the caressing motion of the four-deck river ship, made her the happiest.  The river flowed down to the sea, but—passing through five locks—we chugged against the current all the way up to the 1,500 year-old capital city of Kiev, called in Ukraine "the Mother of Cities."  

​              During the trip, Sherrill, Tom, and I became friends with a couple from New Jersey with whom we instantly felt at  ease.  A year later, Sherrill and I had dinner with them at a restaurant overlooking the San Francisco waterfront and expected to get together with them in the future.  However, shortly after that Sherrill became sick, changing our plans.
              The names of the cities along the way sounded as exotic as the sights we discovered in them.  Two that I especially remember: Kherson , founded by Catherine the Great and home to the fabulous Cathedral of St. Catherine, and Zaporozhye, where we discovered Neolithic goddess figures displayed in a park and where the Cossacks stunned us with their skillful, frantic, insane horsemanship.  Every town had raised a huge monument to the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis and Lenin's stolid bulk was on display more often than we'd expected.  

​              The sun was shining and autumn leaves glowed red and orange gold.  The young parents romping with their kids on a Sunday afternoon in a Kiev park, taking photographs with their mobile phones, could have been in California or England.  However, this new, free, society was hard for older generations who struggled to survive in it.  I remember robust older women, red-cheeked in their kerchiefs, reduced to selling lottery tickets or their family treasures, even sweeping and raking in the public park.  They missed  the old ways, but admitted that the new world was better for young people.  
              They remembered that although the Ukraine was considered the bread basket of the Soviet Union, 7 million of its people, mostly children, had died of malnutrition because Stalin insisted that the grain it produced be exported.  Peasants were shot if they hid grain for their families.  One old lady in Kiev, her little body hidden under her kerchief and raincoat, constantly rearranged her treasures to tempt people who might pass—bulky socks and scarves that she'd knitted, an old table lamp, several ashtrays of varying sizes and shapes, dishes and glassware that had survived from once complete sets, small figurines, a bust of Lenin, Communist medals.  We didn't need any of it, but Sherrill and I wanted to give her a few hryvnia.
              "Okay," Sherrill told me, tugging at my shirt collar. "but not Lenin."  

​              Our hotel was wedged into a corner of a steep, twisting Old City street among art nouveau and neoclassic buildings and some gold-domed churches.  Despite the bombing during World War II, a lot seemed to have survived.  We visited a large museum dedicated to Ukrainian history and several small museums, including one focused on the eccentric history our hotel's hillside street.  
              Walking along the city streets and boulevards, sitting in a basement cafe, exploring shops and museums, we were struck that the people of Kiev dressed almost entirely in black, often black leather (or faux leather) jackets and dark blue jeans.  For the most part, the clothes were of cheap fabrics and badly made, but the large men we saw standing in small groups near expensive black automobiles wore the real thing.  In smaller cities we'd visited, we'd noticed thirty year-old Russian Lada cars, often decorated with dents and rust, but here we saw shiny Mercedes, Porsches, and BMWs, although ordinary people crowded onto antique buses and streetcars.  Kiev was a city of contrasts, rich or poor, new or old, powerful or weak, ordinary citizens or those with "contacts." 

​                 Despite all this, we often were told that "life will get better.  It just takes time."
              Maybe a woman we met outside a small chapel near the Yalta waterfront best symbolized this optimistic spirit.  When we peered through the open door into the ornate Orthodox chapel, she rushed out, showing her single tooth and gums in a smile and asking in simple English where we were from.  When we said America, she grinned even more broadly.
              "Amerrrica!" she shouted.  "New Yorrrk!"
              And she told us that once upon a time she had danced at Radio City Music Hall.  Did she expect us to believe that she'd been a Rockette in her youth?  Well, why not?  Her husband was dead, now, and her children were gone, but she insisted that life was good.  

                                                      Woman selling aprons, Kiev

​              Ukraine, like Russia, was filled with widows because men there died years before their wives, chiefly because they smoked and drank so much.  Independence from the Soviet Union created hope for the future, but also hardship.  The change was especially hard for men, women told us.  Suddenly, they didn't have jobs and couldn't support their families.  Women frequently became the major providers in their households, which drove the men to drink even more.  We saw posters urging men to say no to drink, but the campaign didn't seem to be working.  The average Ukrainian male died before reaching sixty.  



No vodka!  poster, Kiev

​              When we were there, Ukraine presented two faces, like those ancient Greek masks, smiling toward western Europe on one side and toward Russia and the east on the other.  Everyone was equal under the Soviets, but—as George Orwell pointed out—some were more equal than others.  Most of those under 40 wanted to embrace the West, now, abandon the patronage of Russia, and escape the corruption still plaguing their country by joining the European Union.  Some older Ukrainians, though, feared the materialistic values and lack of morality in the West.  In Kiev, we saw a parade of priests, nuns, and Orthodox church members carrying banners denouncing homosexuality.  Earlier, we'd discovered that orthodox Ukrainians did a lot of crossing and candle burning, although not as much as we'd seen in Bulgaria.

                                                    "Taking Care of the Hungry Man"

​              "When it was obvious that the Soviet Union was collapsing," somebody else told us, "the Communist party bosses here were the first to love the free market—and were all for business and industry to go private, as long as they got their share."   
              Several times, talking with people in Ukraine, we heard how the former Communist leaders quickly dominated the new government and snatched control of major industries and utilities during the privatization process—embracing the future by using tricks from the past.  This was an irony that the great Ukrainian satirist Mikhail Bulgakov would have appreciated. Bulgakov struggled against Soviet censorship though his whole career.  His greatest work, the novel The Master and Margarita, wasn't published until 26 years after his death in 1940.  

​              When we visited Bulgakov's house, number 13 on a winding hillside street in upper Kiev, we saw a parade of young men and women not only visiting the rooms in which he lived and wrote, but also taking photographs of the house, the plaque on its facade, and the life-sized statue of the writer in a small garden.  They took turns posing with Bulgakov, their arms around his shiny bronze shoulders. This rebel from a bygone era spoke to young Ukrainians all these years later. 
              Before we left Kiev, Sherrill, Tom, and I gave ourselves a splendid, typical Ukrainian dinner at a hillside restaurant in a wooden 19th century building with traditional scalloped trim that looked out over much of the city.  It probably was overpriced, but still was an enjoyable way to say goodbye to Kiev and Ukraine.  I'm not sure which of us ordered what, but I remember green borscht with nettle, dumplings with mushroom sauce, goose pate (that was Sherrill), duck breast, and Chicken Kiev.  Plus a local wine and to finish local cheeses and Cake Kiev.  

​              Soon after we returned to California, Russia invaded the Crimean peninsula and eastern Ukraine, claiming that they were there to protect the rights of Russians who lived there.  The scenes flashed across the globe: the massive police and military reaction against the citizens who dared raised their voices against the Ukrainian Old Guard.  Independence Square in the capital of Kiev was transformed from the bustling center of a busy city that we saw in October into a potential battle zone. 
              For more than 20 years, Ukraine had struggled to get its arms around its new independence—the first time in its long history that it had been independent.  Or was it independent?  That was the question that many Ukrainians were asking.  Was the country a province of Russia—or was that where it was headed?  Despite the corruption and threats, the Ukrainian population seemed determined to pull through, this time.  
 

​To be continued.... 
 
              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.    
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 78 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 


​
Sherrill, 2013

​              As fascinating as the West Bengal tribal area of Eastern India was, exploring it wasn't easy.  The terrain was difficult and often undeveloped and most of the people there weren't used to foreigners, so we couldn't predict what might happen.  However, our group was small and our local guides spoke the dialects so we were allowed into tribal villages and even watched ceremonies outsiders had never seen.  However, curious villagers staring and pushing to get close—especially the young people—could be difficult and exhausted Sherrill.  Being stared at by strangers made her very uncomfortable.
              For four hours, our SUV bounced and lurched over narrow, crumbling, mountain roads to a remote village in a forested area where the people still lived as they had hundreds of years ago.  When I checked the car as we got in, I couldn't find any seat belts where Sherrill and I were going to sit.  I asked our handsome, dark-skinned young guide about it.  He just smiled.
              "We never use them."
              "Well," I told him, "we're not going anyplace without them." 

                                                             Tribal village man showing
                                                                 charms to keep away
                                                                 evil spirits

​              He looked at me with disbelief.  A nice fellow and an excellent guide, but obviously we were from two very different cultures.  Apparently, they trusted to the will of the gods, to chance, while Sherrill and I preferred common sense.  Finally, reluctantly, he took apart the seats, found the seatbelts, and fixed them so we could wear them.  He and the driver, however, never did wear theirs.  

​              Once again, we parked up the road from the village.  It was market day, so the narrow dirt streets were filling with people who had hiked down from even more remote villages higher in the mountains.  Unlike other places we'd visited in this part of Eastern India, foreigners weren't particularly welcome.  We did our best to wander discreetly among the villagers who were buying and selling local produce and other wares.  People from the most distant villages had walked barefoot as far as 20 kilometers through mountainous jungle, despite snakes, leopards, wild boar, jackals, and other wild animals.  Tigers weren't usually seen in that area, but there were no guarantees.


Bathra tribe villagers

​              The women of that mountain tribe were unmistakable when they walked into the hillside market: small, dark brown, with delicate features, different from the women of the other tribes who already had put out their eggplants, cauliflowers, tomatoes, and other produce in baskets on the well-trod dirt.  These tiny women wore their fortunes on their bodies, starting with two large twisted aluminum rings around their necks and two huge brass earrings.  Their shaved heads were entirely covered with many coiled strands of small beads until they seemed to be wearing colorful, close-fitting hats.  

​              They used to be entirely naked except for their ornaments, but now they wore pieces of cloth called lungis wrapped around their hips and sometimes short capes to protect their backs from both sun and jungle.  Their almost naked flat chests were more or less covered with many strands of beads, often enhanced with bits of glass and small seashells, that reached below their waists.  Bracelets of multicolored beads covered their skinny arms and decorated their ankles.  They carried whatever they intended to sell in bundles on top of their bead-wrapped heads.  We also saw women wearing large brass nose rings.  None looked like the tribal women we'd seen elsewhere.  Very few men from any tribe were visible. 
              "Probably back home drunk on mahua," our guide said.
              This was a fermented drink made from a local tree, although they also brewed beer from rice or palm sap.  As in many tribal societies, the village women did most of the work.              
​             Sherrill shook her head.  This pattern may have been traditional, but that was no reason to approve of it.  
                                                                     Tribal man collecting sap to make
                                                                          an alcoholic drink

​              The home villages of the mountain tribe were spread over a jungle area of more than 15 square kilometers, their total population not more than five or six thousand.  None of these people wanted the outside world to come to them.  We'd been warned that they didn't like cameras in their faces.  Were they happy?  Who could say?  Could they say?  They'd never known anything else, until now.  Maybe that concept wasn't even relevant. 
                                                 *            *            *

​              The priest—or shaman—tucked up his dhoti—a long skirt-like garment, usually white, worn by Indian men—and knelt on a cloth spread over the dirt in front of a low altar he'd pieced together against the hut wall.  We had come to a small Bathra tribe village in another remote corner of West Bengal and, thanks to our local guide, had been invited to witness a spiritual "cleansing," a process that could take a number of forms—some of them, we'd been warned, violent and bloody.  Sherrill chose to wait outside the palm leaf-roofed hut, where almost naked children were playing in the dirt. 
              Shoulders hunched forward, the shaman chanted prayers while burning incense and arranging orange marigolds.  He was trying to communicate with some of the hostile spirits who roamed beyond the material world and enjoyed tormenting human beings.  Behind him, wearing only an orange dhoti, waited the village man he hoped to cleanse of spirits that had "possessed" him.

​              The shaman rested his hand on the naked brown shoulder of his kneeling "patient."  Chanting and sprinkling "sacred rice," the priest began the ritual process of saving the man from whatever demons had invaded his body.  The man began to sway and shake, his head, arms, and legs moving independently, sounds tumbling from his lips in hoarse growls.  With an artful blending of gestures, words, and nonverbal sounds, the shaman/priest guided him into this other sphere until he lost control of his thoughts and actions.  We might have been watching a form of hypnosis or something else, but whatever it was the patient's writhing grew more intense, his babbling louder and wilder.  As his body shook with increasing violence, the beat himself with closed fists and slammed his limbs and head against the earthen floor until another villager had to help restrain him.   
         The shaman chanted louder, scattering more rice grains over the afflicted man, who doubled over, legs twitching, clutching his abdomen.  The shaman and his helper could hardly control the flailing, retching, patient, his legs now doubled back under his writhing body.  He might have vomited blood (as people say sometimes happens) or have bitten his tongue, but blood there was.  Carefully, the shaman straightened the man's twisted, knotted legs and, at last, the man lay flat on the dirt, whimpering.  Slowly, with assistance, he managed to stand.  Whether or not evil spirits had been expelled from him, we had no way of knowing. 
                                                                 *           *           *

​              Our SUV passed scores of men, women, and children hiking in the dirt at the edge of the narrow road, many barefoot, most carrying burdens on their heads, on their way to the Full Moon Harvest Festival.  By this time, we'd spent several days exploring this remote tribal area.  In one village, we'd seen a traveling herb and medicine man spread his wares on a large cloth on the ground, while the villagers eagerly gathered around.  He had remedies for just about any ailment, he claimed, all natural, of course.  

​              When we reached the festival, the crowd had grown to several hundred, pushing between market stalls selling everything from vegetables to freshly made snacks to replicas of tribal and Hindu deities.  Sometimes, a Hindu god and a tribal one had been united—similar to what we'd found in Cuba, where Yoruba gods and Catholic saints had been merged.  Animal figures suggested that the old animist-based religion still lingered in some areas.  Toys, flags, and bright fabrics also had been arranged to tempt a few rupees from the crowd.  We tried not to call attention to ourselves, but people gawked at us and whenever we hesitated gathered around
              "I feel like a moth on a pin under a microscope," Sherrill whispered.  

​              Moving through waves of bright saris and men in white dhotis, we reached a large wide-armed tree worshiped by local people for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.  Furled banners on long poles leaned against the dark trunk: white for purification, red for perfection, black for knowledge.  Skinny dogs roamed freely, foraging for whatever they could find.

​              Bare-chested priests, dhotis tucked to their waists, took up the banners and, as others beat drums and played horns, marched through the still-growing crowd, between vendor stalls and piles and baskets of produce.  We struggled to stay near each other as we followed, along with hundreds of others.  People stared and crowded against us so that sometimes we could hardly move.  The men with the banners circled through the market, then entered a ceremonial area filled with spectators.  Our group found positions facing the open space.
              As drums beat louder, one of the almost naked priests thrust his banner into a bamboo framework, then, moaning, let himself flow into the rhythm of the drums, rocking his head back and forth, body swaying as he slid into what seemed to be a self-induced trance.  His eyes rolled, his mouth opened and closed, he fell and his body spasmed and convulsed on the hard-packed dirt.  Beating himself with a flail, thrashing his bare back furiously with the many small whips of the flail, he fell to his knees, just a few feet from Sherrill and me.  He seemed to be trying to rid himself of his physical body—or to drive evil spirits from it.  I wondered how much more this thin brown-skinned man could take of this self-exorcism.  Eventually, two other men in dhotis took the flail from him and led him away, despite his writhing and struggling.
              One by one, each of the ten priests hurled himself into a trance that culminated in frantic flailing of his flesh until he was dragged away.  These rituals, we were told, probably came with these tribes to the Indian subcontinent from Africa thousands of years ago.  Would they, I wondered, survive in a changing world?
                                                          *            *            *

​              The next day, we drove to a second Harvest Festival in a village in another corner of Eastern India—one that was surprisingly different from anything we'd already seen.  The market leading into it was smaller, without the carnival atmosphere.  Women sat on the ground with simple displays of vegetables and fruit.  We weaved through the market to a gate into a ceremonial area, where we found a spot near a small band of drums and a curved brass horn about three feet long.  Women usually weren't allowed in, but none of tribal men said anything.  Later, we were told that because the women were foreign and wore trousers nobody thought of them as female. 

​              A scrawny man in a filthy Dhoti staggered in, babbling at the band.  Two village men quickly got rid of him.  The men in these villages made booze from anything that would ferment, especially the sap of a certain palm tree.  The women did most of the day-to-day work, so the men had time for making and drinking their homemade brew.  Women didn't participate in religious ceremonies and rituals—especially this one, which, we discovered, was a coming of age ritual for young males. 

​              About a dozen bare-chest youths in tucked-up dhotis marched into the open space, then sat on the bare ground.  As the musical beat of drums grew louder, they began to sway and move their heads sideways, apparently sliding into trances, their lean brown bodies shaking.  One by one, priests dressed them in special ritual costumes, colorful vests over their torsos, then capes, and finally a squarish multi-colored crown decorated with pieces of mirror was placed on their heads.
              As each youth went deeper into his trance, his body shaking, a priest completely covered his head with a white cloth.  When it was removed, a needle-sharp bone spike now pierced both of his smooth brown cheeks, running through his mouth.  How this was done without us seeing, I don't know, although we were only five or six feet away.  Supposedly, because he was deep in his trance, he felt no pain.  We didn't see any blood, either. He was lifted onto a decorated throne and carried in circles around the ceremonial area. 
              After all of the young men had been transformed and enthroned, they were carried in a procession through the gate, accompanied by the musicians and the rest of us, and through the market, avoiding stray cows, piles of small purple eggplants, green okra fingers, and baskets of tiny red tomatoes.  Now, the village women could see the transformed youths on their dazzling thrones.  

​              I tried to tell myself that the business with the needle-like spikes was fake, but it looked awfully real.  Our guide told us that we were the only foreigners ever to witness this ceremonial entry into the adult world.  A member of our group told Sherrill and me later that she had seen almost the same ritual in Benin, Africa. 
                                                       *              *              *

​              The princess was young and beautiful and welcomed us for tea with English as perfect as Maggie Smith's.  Simultaneously traditional and modern, the India we saw in 2013 was a country of both extreme poverty and new millionaires, most of them from the high-tech boom.  At the same time, some royal families with vast real estate holdings still controlled great wealth that allowed them to live in traditional splendor.  For hundreds of years, the subcontinent was divided into almost countless kingdoms, each ruled by its own monarch.  This huge country was littered with palaces, castles, and fortresses built over the centuries.  The surviving maharajas, princes, and princesses were still respected and deferred to by local people.
              Our clever young guide had arranged for us to visit one of the reigning royal households in Eastern India.  Although India was a democracy, the young unmarried Maharaja of Y still thought of himself as a king.  He was away on royal business, so we were received by his sister, the princess, a poised young woman of twenty-five.  The sprawling white palace, with its columned arcades, wide terraces, arched windows, and ornate architectural details was built early in the 20th century, but designed to look older.  One wing had been turned into a school, other sections also put to new uses.  The entire walled complex had been swallowed by a growing provincial city. 
              The princess strode into the high-ceilinged room wearing a mix of traditional and Indian styles, a smart phone in one hand, greeted us, and urged us to feel "at home."  She told us about her family's colorful and noble history and how hard her brother worked for his people.  Sherrill and I looked at each other, but of course didn't say anything.
              "They love him," she said. "When he sits on his throne in the public audience room downstairs, many come—not because they want favors, but because they want to see their beloved king."  She gazed without irony at each of us.  "They are happy with their lives and everything my brother does for them."

              What he actually did sounded vague, but no doubt the royal family was busy with a variety of good works.  The hills and mountains around the palace and city were home to several ancient tribes that lived much as they had for a thousand and more years.  Even nearer the city, we saw mud bricks being made by hand, rice being threshed by hand, sugar being boiled out of cane in large vats by bare-chested and bare-legged men, and women walking barefoot along roads, huge bundles and heavy pots on their heads.  Change was everywhere, even in Eastern India, but poverty and stifling tradition coexisted with smart phones and hopes for a different future.  

​              Driving again deep into the jungle to another remote village, we watched a ritualistic hunting dance seldom seen by outsiders.  During the month, we came to admire our guide's skill at arranging these events for us—whatever his attitude about seat belts.  The steep, muddy so-called road may have been one reason why no one else ever saw this village.  As we left afterwards, our two cars became so trapped in muck and rocks that we nearly had to spend the night there.  
​                                                            *               *                *

              Finally, we flew to Hyderabad—an historically powerful city, home to regional princes, now including "Cyberbad," India's Silicon Valley.  From here, we continued our explorations, visiting some of the greatest palaces and fortresses we'd seen anywhere in India, but also passing modern high-rise buildings and glossy malls.  The city, with a population then of more than nine million, also was building a much needed elevated metro system. 
              Our Hyderabad hotel required everyone entering the building to pass through an airport security style screening and all vehicles driving onto the grounds were checked for bombs, mirrors even slid beneath each car, truck, or bus.  The new shopping centers and some famous historic sites also required security checks.  This seemed to have become routine after the deadly bombings in Mumbai a few years earlier.  Two weeks after our return from Eastern India, two bombs exploded in Hyderabad, killing sixteen people and wounding scores.  
​               However, the lasting impression of this part of India wasn't only of violence.  We also remembered the mother tiger exhausted from her effort to feed her cubs, colorful harvest festivals, private morning rituals along the streets of Kolkata, students in a village school, and a barefoot man wearing only a ragged dhoti sleeping on the side of a flower-strewn overpass above the Kolkata flower market, a chaos of fading petals for his pillow.
End of Part Two, Eastern India.  
​

​To be continued.... 
 
              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.    
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 77 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 

​              "Why?" friends asked Sherrill and me, when we told them that we going to India for the third time.
              The short answer was that India was the most fascinating country we'd ever visited.  It wasn't easy, it could be harsh and upsetting, but it was never boring.  Sherrill and I didn't exactly love it, but we couldn't resist it.  Our first visit was to the northwest part of India, Rajasthan, where many of the famous sites, such as the Taj Mahal, were.  

​              Our second trip focused the extreme south of the subcontinent, which was complex and colorful in a different way.  Now, thanks again to our friend Hala, we were entering a very different realm, the northeast corner of that huge country, where we'd experience the extreme contrasts of Kolkota (Calcutta), India's largest city with its population of more than 16 million then, and remote areas of tiny villages and dense jungles, where the local people had never seen foreigners, especially the part of Eastern India known as West Bengal. 

​              Morning in Kolkata: A man sat on a low stool while another hunkered next to him on the sidewalk, lathering and shaving his face.  A shoeshine man was setting out tins of polish and brushes on a square of cloth and positioning the foot rest for his customers.  A sidewalk barber was giving a squatting customer a haircut, his fingers expertly manipulating the scissors as hair fell to the pavement.  I passed these scenes and others like them as I maneuvered through central Kolkota at nine in the morning.  Half a dozen men in loose loincloths washed themselves with water gushing from a pipe.  Men and women on the way to work and students in uniforms hurried past.  Sidewalk vendors set out newspapers and used books, lottery tickets and cheap jeans.  Shopkeepers with stubby brooms swept in front of their shops, debris piling at the curb. 

​              Not once did I see a Western face, either a tourist or a business person.  No one was shouting or arguing, fighting or acting crazy.  Our hotel was in the old British section of Kolkota, the so-called "White Town," so I didn't see any beggars, only individuals trying to survive.  The capital of British India for 138 years, until the government moved to New Delhi in 1911, Kolkota was a rich stew of human beings and architecture.  As Sherrill and I explored further during our visit, we discovered that, yes, another 6 million people came into  the city every day to work and, yes, 40,000 people did sleep on the streets, and we did see people pawing through trash for whatever they could sell, but the overall impression we got was of determination and energy, not despair.  It was a young population, 50 percent were 25 and younger, hopeful for the future.

​              One reason I was there was a boy called Apu and his creator, the great Indian filmmaker, Satyajit Ray.  At nineteen, I'd spent my entire life in three western states, then one day I took a Greyhound bus from San Jose to Bengal to meet Apu and his family.  In that distant time of no DVDs, VHS tapes, cable TV, personal computers, or internet, only two ways existed to see old or foreign movies: the late show on television or one of the flea trap movie houses found only in big cities.  Two college friends joined me on an expedition to San Francisco's North Beach, where we sat in a cold dark room filled with metal folding chairs to see all three movies of Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy—the story of a Bengali boy, his family, and his journey through life.  

​              Several years after that, Sherrill and I saw that other classic Indian film epic, Mother India, with the great Indian actress Nargis as Radha, a village woman who struggled to raise her sons through poverty, disasters caused by both nature and men, and the difficult times India faced after independence, an Indian Gone with the Wind and then some.  It took a few more years, but we finally got to India and even to Kolkata and rural Bengal, to the world of Apu.  


                                                                 Poster for Mother India.
                                                                     starring Nargis

​              Early in 2013, the year we visited Eastern India, the magazine India Today published a cover story about how "angry and disillusioned with the passive ruling establishment" the Indian people were.  They probably had reason to be angry, but we didn't see any demonstration of it.  Kolkata may have been a city in decay, but it also was a city of resilience. 
              We soon realized just how huge the city was.  We drove out to the Maidan, a vast park area near the colossal white Victoria Memorial, which looked more like a palace than a monument.  It was no wonder that Indians who visited it often thought that Queen Victoria was a goddess.  Across town, we visited the enormous central flower market by the Hougli River, a branch of the sacred Ganges in which we saw people at their ritual prayers and baths.  

​              The so-called "Black Town" was the part of the city left by the British for the Indians, now a strange mixture of decaying mansions and slums.  Some of the Indian merchants became very wealthy and built homes to rival any owned by the British.  One of those, built in 1835 by a Bengali merchant, blending neoclassic architecture with traditional Bengali, came to be called the Marble Palace.  Tucked into the crumbling glory of "Black Town" we found one of Mother Teresa's centers for orphaned children.  Nuns showed us through the facility, rooms with many small beds in which the children slept, and school rooms.  This also was the part of the city revealed in the book and movie "City of Joy," based on real people in this section of Kolkata.  

​              Sherrill was not a sentimental person, but she was moved by the small children in their  cribs and in their classrooms.  After all, for many years she was a children's librarian. 
              A "Grey Town" sprawled between the "White Town" and the "Black Town," an area in which we found a Muslim district with several mosques, a Chinese section, synagogues that remained from when a large Jewish community had been there, booksellers, and workshops where religious statues were made.  Although we were in Kolkata several days, we could have spent much more time there, once the second city of the British Empire.  We could have applied to Kolkata what Dr. Johnson said about the first city of the old empire: "When you're tired of London, you're tired of life."  I may never return, but I can imagine myself there again, experiencing the pulse of its life and savoring its mysteries. 

​                                                       *               *              *
              "She is the grandmother of all tigers," Jai told my friend P. and me, as we gazed from the top of our elephant on the gold and black tiger reclining in the tall grass.  Jai, the son of the Lodge manager, and the two of us had ridden with the mahout into the forest near one of the swamps in the Kanha National Park, one of India's foremost wildlife preserves and a sanctuary for the majestic and elusive Bengal tiger.  

​              After we settled in at the camp the first day, we walked into the forest with one of the local guides and Jai.  Along the way, Jai pointed out the massive brown mounds with soaring spires that oddly resembled the Gaudi church Sherrill and I had seen in Barcelona.
              "Termite mounds," the handsome brown-skinned boy explained, in his rather formal Indian English.  "They have rooms inside.  The termites drag in leaves that rot and make soil so mushrooms will grow for them to eat."  Some of the mounds were torn apart by wild boar and other animals seeking a termite dinner.  "Wild boar is the tiger's favorite food," Jai added. 
              Termites—wild boar—tiger: the natural cycle.  
              Early the next morning, we drove in jeeps from our cabins much deeper into the forest.  

​              We heard the tiger, but only glimpsed it once, crossing the road far ahead, pausing to let out a roar, and vanishing into the trees.  "It's a female," the driver/guide told us.  "talking to its cubs in the forest over there."

​              Two days later, we had the opportunity to ride an elephant to seek tigers and other wild animals who usually managed to avoid detection.  
              "I hope you enjoy it" Sherrill told me.  
              None of our friends except P. wanted to ride the elephant, either.  So the two of us and Jai climbed up a ladder to a small wood shelf on the elephant's back, behind the mahout.  Sherrill and I had ridden on an elephant twice before, but in a box on the elephant's back that we entered from a platform.  This felt much more precarious. 
              We passed clusters of monkeys, a grumpy black boar, colorful kingfishers, peacocks, and other birds.  I had no doubt that all around us the forest undulated with astonishing varieties of life.  Then, as the elephant's great feet crunched through the grass and bush, we spied the body of a freshly killed brown swamp deer with an impressive rack of antlers in the grass between slender crocodile-skin trees.  

​              I started to exclaim, but the mahout sitting in front of me put his finger to his lips.
              "Shh!"  He pointed ahead.
              The elephant crunched forward, my legs swinging near the rough-barked trees.  Then we saw the tiger, partially camouflaged in the tall grass, recuperating from the massive effort of bringing down the deer.  Raising her huge head, she glared at us, her striped white, black, and orange face a pattern of disdain and distrust.  We knew that she must be the female tiger we'd spotted from the jeep the day before, communicating to her cubs.  No doubt, the deer was to be a meal for them.  She let out a low growl and slowly lifted her body until she was standing.   Shrugging her powerful shoulders, she stretched her long body and ambled away, escaping our scrutiny, to a spot in the grass a few yards away.  Our mahout gave a command to the elephant, directing it past the tiger, watching us from her new place. 
              Afterwards, I told Sherrill about the experience: elephant ride, deer, tiger, all of it.  It felt very natural, riding the elephant with the boy and our friend and looking down so closely on the dead deer and the exhausted mother tiger, just part of the natural order of things—although a wonderful, exciting adventure
              "I'm glad you did it," Sherrill told me, "and that it all worked out okay.  As long as I didn't have to do it." 

​               A day or so later, we drove into a newly formed state, Chhattisgarh, a section of Eastern India dense with mountains and forests, where many ancient tribes still lived, separate from the rest of India and the world.  We stayed in an old, almost deserted palace, full of antique furniture from different eras, not very clean, rather spooky.  We kept expecting Bella Lugosi to appear in one of the shadowy hallways. 
              Our room, clean or not, was huge, the bathroom, too, with the toilet and shower on a 15 inch high platform.  If a vampire didn't get us, Sherrill and I decided, we'd break our necks in the bathroom.  The lounge, downstairs, was full of dilapidated, moth-eaten stuffed animals, including a pathetic tiger in danger of losing both its head and its tail.  Our host, who may have been a prince down on his luck, sometimes ate with us.  He always looked hung over at breakfast and drunk every other time we saw him.  
                                              Palace Hotel lounge
                                                 with old hunting trophies

​              On the way to the palace, we stopped at an ancient temple.  Local people gathered around, staring at us with undisguised curiosity.  Apparently, they had never seen foreigners.  The next day, in fact, when we were in one of tribal villages, our guide told us that they thought of us as if we were shamans or priests dropped from the heavens, maybe to bless them.  Small children, though, ran away from us crying—because, he said, the only people they'd seen in trousers had come to give them shots.  A few times, to avoid alarming people, we parked our SUVs on the road some distance from the village or market we were going to visit and walked to it. 

Temple caretaker

​              This was an exciting time to visit Eastern India, a period of transition.  Some of the tribes had begun to assimilate together, our guide told us, unintentionally blending their customs.  The government programs and schools were starting to have an influence, too, for better or worse.  Children often were sent to school, he said, just to get the free lunch they were given. 
              "Whether we like it or not," he said.  "The world is changing."  

End of Part One, Eastern India.
 
To be continued....
 
              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.    
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.
​

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 76 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 

​              "We don't always have to go far away," Sherrill told me.  "There's plenty to see in this country.  We don't need to save it for our 'old age.'"
              Although we'd talked about saving places relatively close to home for when we were 'old,' we'd already taken mini-trips to see fall foliage in New England and to explore various cities, including Las Vegas, Chicago, Portland, and Seattle, but she was thinking of something more ambitious.  As usual, she had a specific adventure in mind.  

​              Salt Lake City, poised between the Rockies and the great Southwest, had changed since we'd last been there.  The downtown area was circled by a ring of office towers that hid the Victorian granite spires of the Mormon Temple (for generations, the tallest building in town), the dome of the tabernacle, and the old LDS church headquarters.  A new streamlined light-rail system also cut through the city, now.  We'd flown to this pioneer metropolis of wide spotless avenues embraced by the forested Wasatch mountains—the western edge of the Rockies—to start our exploration of the Canyonlands area of Utah and neighboring states.   Once again, we were traveling with Cathy and Larry, two good friends we'd hit the road with several times before.
              The next morning, we set off with a local guide and her group to the old Mormon town of Moab, gateway to the red rock world of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, a land of deep canyons, tall mesas and buttes, and landscapes eroded into fabulous, unexpected shapes.  It even was possible that we'd stumble over petrified dinosaur tracks.  In a Moab pub I bought a bottle of Polygamy Porter, which on its label asked "Why have just one?"  Clearly, Utah now was less strict about alcohol than we remembered.   

​              Part Grand Canyon, part Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands was awesome, terrifying, and beautiful all at once, a vast wilderness of rock with views of the twisting Colorado River and thousand foot drops down variegated cliffs, past orange and red spires, into canyons that opened out farther than we could see or probably imagine.  As the light moved during the day, the rock formations shifted and changed shape and color, from rusty red to glowing orange and yellow to salmon with streaks of bloody purple and combinations of all of them.  A detour took us to Dead Horse Point, atop a 2,000 foot peninsula.
              "Herds of wild horses once roamed here," our guide told us.  "Close your eyes and you'll hear their hooves."
              That evening, overwhelmed by this endless grandeur, we were treated to a "cowboy" barbeque dinner cooked in Dutch ovens and then a boat ride on the Colorado River through an illuminated red rock canyon.  We agreed that it was hokey, but fun, and when the artificial lights were turned off the black sky above the canyon walls exploded with stars. 

​              Another day, another national park: miles of red rock arches sculpted by millions of years of erosion.  Set off by a vast blue sky, the red-orange arches—some long and slender, others thick and sturdy—opened up to picture-frame views of rocks, mesas, pinnacles, other arches, and distant mountains.  They looked as if they had been there forever and always would be, but we knew that weather and erosion still were, slowly but relentlessly, working on them.  Most animals probably were waiting until the cooler night to come out, but we did spy several lizards, a couple of them sporting beautifully mottled jackets. 

​              A picnic lunch by the Colorado introduced us to a delicacy called "Navajo Tacos" -- a kind of tortilla/puff pastry covered with chili.  Sherrill and I almost choked with a fit of giggles, but ate our share.  And I had more Polygamy Porter to wash it down.  Sherrill soaked off a label for us to save. 
              "Nobody will believe it, otherwise."
              Our appreciation of the absurd had helped bring us together decades before and it still was alive and kicking.  
              During lunch, we started talking with some of the other members of the group, including a middle-aged couple originally from Bangalore, where Sherrill and I once had quite a different kind of adventure.  

​              We might not have felt so light-hearted at lunch if we'd known that we were near the remains of a uranium mill that closed only in 1960.  We passed a small mountain of the dregs from the uranium mined and processed around there and saw it being loaded into barrels and put on trucks to take to a train that would carry it to bury someplace else.  We weren't surprised to learn that most of the men who had worked there in the past had died of cancer. 
              Decades earlier, the U.S. military conducted secret above-ground atom bomb tests in a remote area of southern Nevada at the Utah border.  Fallout from the tests blew across the rocky desert and several towns, causing dramatic increases of different types of cancer in the population, especially in children.  In 1956, a John Wayne/ Susan Hayward epic was filmed in the desert there.  By the end of 1980, 91 of the cast and crew had developed cancer and 46, including Hayward and director Dick Powell, had died of it.  The red rocks and desert were beautiful, but were they still deadly?

​              Nearby, a panorama of petroglyph designs stretched along a canyon wall, the elegant figures chipped from the age-darkened sandstone canvas revealing a lighter orange color underneath: bighorn sheep, writhing snakes, deer, lizards, arrows, hunters, and large-eyed, wide-shouldered spirit creatures marching in militaristic rows.  From time to time, we discovered other petroglyph pictures, but not as many on one stone wall.   
              Back in Moab, we visited a museum of local history that took us from the dinosaurs up to the John Ford western movies made there, then we dropped in on a few art galleries.  After our long day of hiking over rocky trails and Moab pavement, we relaxed in a local dive, "Eddie McStiff's," with drinks and then dinner.  Of course, I had another bottle of Polygamy Porter.
              "Don't get addicted to that," Sherrill warned me.
              "Too late!" 

​              Much ado about very little was what the four of us decided the next day about the Four Corners National Monument—even if we could stand in the four states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah at the same time.  Mostly, it seemed an opportunity for somebody in the middle of nowhere to make money selling souvenirs.  We were fascinated that so many tourists made a point of going there and taking their photographs standing at the spot where the states met.
              "Well, we're here!" Sherrill pointed out.
              There was no denying that we were there. 
              The lady from Bangalore (now from San Diego), short and somewhat plump, but very charming, had learned that I was a writer and approached me across one of the state lines with questions, her dark eyes bright with polite curiosity.  She belonged to a book club, she said, and loved to read and made me give her the names of my books.  Months later, I got a note from her that she had read one.

​               We escaped from the Four Corners, driving on a steep, twisting road up the mountain toward Mesa Verde National Park—into a sudden, if brief, rainstorm followed by intense fog.  The driver was skillful enough to get us through both storm and fog to the historic site at the top.  Then, while we ate lunch, the skies suddenly cleared so that we visited the cliff dwellings under a blue sky.  A surprisingly perfect afternoon was reinforced by the guide who took us around the site.  A small trim man with white hair and moustache in the khaki uniform of the park guides, at least seventy-five years old, he launched into a fascinating account of the ups and downs of Mesa Verde.
              The site, he said, had been left to crumble until the Civilian Conservation Corps that President Roosevelt established during the Depression set to work on it. 
              "They saved Mesa Verde," he stated, looking around at all of us.  "And now President Obama's stimulation package is saving it again.  Over the years, it had been ignored and allowed to fall into disrepair, but now it will last for future generations to discover and enjoy."

         ​              I remembered the stories my father told about when he worked in the CCC during the Depression, doing forestry work in Utah.  Not only did the CCC save natural resources and historic sites, it also saved thousands of young men who couldn't find work because there were no jobs for them. 
              Then, as we followed the white-haired guide up the steep sandstone steps to "Spruce Tree House," he segued into the story of the native Americans who lived and flourished there for more than seven hundred years.  "Archaeologists called them the Anasazi, but today we call them Ancestral Puebloans."  When the house was discovered in 1888, a large Douglas spruce was growing in front of it.  Although the tree is long gone, he explained, the name stuck to it.
                                                    *          *          *

​              Sherrill and I had been looking forward to riding on the historic Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad.  Pulled by the original coal-fired, steam-powered locomotive on the same tracks that miners and settlers took west more than a century before, the train carried us through spectacular tree-studded canyons into the wilderness of the two-million acre San Juan National Forest.  The tracks were originally laid in 1870 to move the silver from mines in the Rockies and were narrow gauge (three feet between the rails instead of the standard gauge of four feet and eight inches) so the trains could make tighter turns while climbing the mountains.
              "Don't look," Sherrill told me, as the train shook and rattled, swerving around sharp cliff-top curves above a rushing river. I started to protest, but she added, "And don't fuss, Wart."  Her abbreviated nickname for her "Worry Wart." 

​              Yes, I was terrified, but had to look, anyway.  I didn't want to miss anything.  And, of course, we survived.  The boom town of Silverton died long ago, after the silver market collapsed, but tourism had revived it, somewhat.  It reminded the four of us of an Alaskan mining town we'd once visited, with its wide dirt streets and nineteenth century wood buildings surrounded by snow-topped mountains.  

              We didn't enjoy leaving the hotel at 6:00 am the next morning, but we had to do it to  experience another historic narrow gauge steam train: a ride on the original Rio Grande Line into the Rocky Mountains aboard the Cumbres and Toltec Railroad—only fifty miles, but a long trip through some rugged territory from Chama, New Mexico to Antonito, Colorado, the same route that gold and silver miners and loggers took in the nineteenth century.  That steam locomotive did seem to be working hard as it pulled us up steep grades, over terrifyingly high trestles, through tunnels, and along narrow shelves balanced above wide-open gorges. 
              "I can't imagine anyone building these tracks," I told Sherrill, gazing out at the tops of trees.
              "Be glad that you didn't have to."
              "I am!"

​              Sherrill and I had been to Santa Fe several times before, but the little town still charmed us—even though it had grown over the years and acquired a self-consciously "picturesque" veneer.  We happily remembered when we visited there in 1995 with Simone and Paul and baby Leo.  We took turns watching him, while the others explored.  This time, we saw some of the more famous sites of the city, ranging from the town's east side with its "million dollar mud houses" to the Cristo Rey church, the largest adobe structure in North America, and a walk along the Old Santa Fe Trail to the San Miguel Mission and famous Loreto Chapel.  However, we had someplace else in mind that we didn't want to miss: 109 East Palace Street. 
              This was the address of, as a plaque now read, "The Santa Fe office of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory."  The little storefront office was the place from which the people who worked on the atom bomb at Los Alamos left on their way to the project—the place from which they disappeared.  They went in the front door and left by a secret back door to an alley and waiting vehicles. 
              The plaque continued: "All the men and women who made the first atomic bomb passed through this portal to their secret mission at Los Alamos.  Their creation in 27 months of the weapons that ended World War II was one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time." 

              The Southwest was one of those areas that always seemed to hold back some of its secrets, a world that both dazzled and taunted you.  It seemed inevitable that we were here again, just as it seemed inevitable that we'd come back someday, at least one more time. 
​
To be continued....
 
 If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories. 
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  
 

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 75 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series.
​
          Our doorway to Europe, and other destinations, from time to time, was London.  Often, either before or after continuing on, Sherrill and I explored the big city and went to a play and a museum or two, depending on how much time we'd allowed ourselves.  After our mop-up trip to southern Europe, we indulged in a couple of days in the great gray city.  Wonderfully imperfect as it was, we never got enough of it.

​              We'd been reading in the newspapers and seeing on CNN and the BBC News while we were traveling about the Wall Street/Big Corporation protests in New York and other cities across the globe, including London—in front of St. Paul's Cathedral in the heart of the City, the financial center of London and Great Britain.  According to the news, the area at Paternoster Square in front of the Bank of England and the Royal Stock Exchange was too small for the protestors to set up their camp and had been blocked by police, so the Occupy protesters had asked for permission to use the larger square in front of the cathedral.  Surprisingly, the Dean of St. Paul's gave them permission—with the understanding that all protests would be strictly nonviolent.  So, on our last evening in London I decided to go see for myself.  

​              "Okay," Sherrill told me, turning down the volume of the television in our hotel room.  "If you have to do this, go ahead, but be careful.  Don't get mugged.  Don't get killed."
              "I'm always careful.  I haven't got mugged or killed yet."
              "Well, see that you don't.  And don't lose your passport or anything else."
              "It's all under my clothes."
              "Don't lose those, either."
              I kissed her goodbye and left, walking from our hotel down the hill to Paddington Station a block and a half away, where I boarded an Underground train (very crowded, because it was the weekend) to Charing Cross at Trafalgar Square, planning to walk from there.  Busy gazing into store windows, admiring the old buildings, watching double-decker red buses and tall black cabs pass by, sometimes I forgot to walk on the British side of the sidewalk, weaving carelessly among the rushing bodies.  Suddenly, two or three crashed right into me, almost shoving me into a red post box.  They were young, I saw, stumbling ahead laughing along the busy sidewalk, apparently not caring who they bumped into.
              Or was it on purpose, I wondered?  Discreetly, I felt for the shape of my valuables under my clothes.  Still there—not that I expected them to be gone, but you never knew.  Pickpockets could be very clever and skilled, as I'd learned in Italy. 

​              Earlier on Sunday, when we went to the National Gallery, we saw that a circle of tents had been set up along the perimeter of Trafalgar Square in front of the gallery and a stage erected opposite the museum, but this had nothing to do with any protests.  It was going to be a celebration of Indian Festival of Diwali.  Several years earlier, Sherrill and I had been in northern India during the Diwali festival, which was celebrated widely in both villages and cities.  Huge quantities of marigold blossoms lined the city streets so people could buy them to take home.  In one village that we visited, families had decorated the paths in front of their homes with elaborate flower designs made from colored rice powder.  Our guide and friend had opened his home in Agra to us so that we could experience the celebration authentically with him and his family, even indulging in homemade sweets.  
              I was pleased to see that London had decided to recognize its large Indian population in this way.  A large flower-bedecked figure of Ganesh, the elephant god, sat serenely at the base of Admiral Nelson's column, his trunk resting with self-satisfaction on his big belly.  A few hours later, when Sherrill and I passed by again, a security guard told us that sweets, food, and drink would be on offer later—plus live entertainment.
              "Come back," she grinned, a gap between her two front teeth.  "Check it out."

​                That evening, when I reached the square, festivities were in full swing.  A great crowd was gathered, eating Indian snacks and watching a Bollywood-style show on the stage—ten young women in colorful costumes dancing, swaying, gesturing, their elaborate routines simultaneously projected onto a large screen.  Indian families, tourists, curious passersby, all were getting into the spirit of whatever was going on. 
              From Trafalgar Square, I set out to walk along The Strand to St. Paul's Cathedral.  The sky was darkening as I passed the shiny silver marquee of the Savoy Hotel and Theatre, then other theatres, a Boots drug store and other stores, restaurants, and fast food cafes.  Gradually, the avenue grew less crowded as I reached Fleet Street and the ornate buildings of the old newspaper offices and the massive Victorian blocks of the courts and legal buildings.  Down one alley, in the midst of all this, I remembered, was the little house where Samuel Johnson worked on his famous dictionary.  Most of the big newspapers had moved to other parts of London and no longer were produced here.  

​              I also remembered hiking along here with our three year-old daughter on our first trip to London while Sherrill was across town at the Chelsea Flower Show.  We passed one of Christopher Wren's beautiful little churches erected after the great fire of 1666.  It had suffered during the bombings of World War II, but still stood, a blackened shell, waiting to be restored, even as late as 1968.  Now, the elegance and fine architectural details of Wren's churches glowed almost like new. 
              Finally, I reached the old financial district.  Although even in 2011 many of the great banks and financial institutions were busy building new headquarters out in the fast growing East End/Canary Wharf area of London, the general public still thought of this district as the financial center of England and the empire.  Eight mounted police clopped past in the Day-Glo greenish-yellow vests that they all seemed to wear then.  I was sure, odd as it seemed, that I heard a lone trumpet playing in the distance, maybe one of protesters. 

​              At last, I saw the bulk of Wren's masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral, the great dome silhouetted against the darkening sky.  It had survived the Blitz and would survive these protestors.  As I came closer, I discovered the hundreds of protesters gathered on the square directly in front of it.  There must have been nearly 200 tents of different sizes, shapes, and colors.  It almost looked festive.  Dozens of police in their familiar Day-Glo vests stood around in clusters of two or three, looking more bored than concerned or amused.   
              Around the Queen Anne monument directly in front of the cathedral flapped handmade signs, posters, and banners protesting the corruption of big business and the financial industry.  On a large black and white drawing of the earth was neatly printed in scarlet capital letters: CAPITALISM & RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM = POVERTY, CUTS, WAR, TYRANNY, FAT CATS, ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTER.
              CAPITALISM IS CRISIS proclaimed the largest banner, red letters on black.
RESPECT EXISTENCE insisted another sign, OR EXPECT RESISTANCE.  

​              People were taking photographs and videos, using cameras and cell phones.  The Occupation, because it was peaceful, was becoming a tourist attraction.  Some of the protestors, themselves, were taking photographs and shooting video clips, commemorating this historic event and their role in it.  Parents even had brought their young children.  One nicely dressed mother with two preschoolers sitting on the bottom step of the cathedral told her boy and girl to look up at the man in front of them with the big video camera on the tripod and smile for him.  The atmosphere was beginning to seem like a carnival—what the British called a fete—although the serious purpose of the gathering and demonstration remained clear, so far.  No one seemed afraid or nervous that anything violent would happen.  Except for an occasional cheer in the half-dark, all seemed quiet but for the melody of the one trumpet circling like a lament above the tents and banners. 
              I walked around the area, watching and listening, and took a few photographs, myself.  An idealism that I hadn't seen for years hovered over the steps and square.  I remembered Berkeley in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies.  The innocence of those young people soon collided with an establishment that refused to hear their pleas.  I saw it happen on the University of California campus and on Telegraph Avenue and in People's Park.  My daughter and I had even been sprayed with tear gas as we crossed the campus.  Protestors were injured, one blinded by a gunshot.  However, I felt optimistic that violence could be avoided here.  This was, after all, civilized London, where people simply didn't behave like that.  

​              I chatted a bit with some of the protesters.  
              "How long will we stay?" replied one young man.  "That's the million pound question, isn't it?  It'll be hard in the winter, but hopefully we'll stay 'til we get our message across."  His gravelly voice sounded both sincere and sentimental.  He was very young.  "All this and the other occupations in the UK were inspired by the protests in America." 
              "The bankers gambled with the economy," interrupted a friend with him.
              "The financial system is unjust," added a young woman.  "I have a student debt of 20,000 pounds.  But the police here are great.  Some of them are showing a real interest." 
              One man in a suit, maybe fortyish, said he had "quite a lot of sympathy for their message."  
              Eventually, I walked back out Fleet Street to the Strand, now much quieter than it had been just an hour earlier.  On the way, I passed a dark van parked at the curb, from the back of which three people were handing out cups of hot soup to several dozen street people and unemployed who had gathered for what apparently was a nightly ritual.  Silently, as if in a scene from a nineteen-thirties Depression movie, they shuffled up to get their steaming cups of soup.  
              Sweating a little by now, I continued on, past Trafalgar Square, now quiet except for a few people dismantling the remains of the Diwali festival, and walked up the Haymarket, past the Theatre Royal, where a somber poster of Ralph Fiennes as Prospero stared out at the street, and on to Piccadilly Circus, now almost as busy and loud as it had been on Saturday night, when Sherrill and I ate there before going to a play.  This was a world quite different from around St. Paul's Cathedral.  Here, everyone still seemed intent on having a good time.  

                From there, I braved the crowded Underground station and found the train to Paddington, near our hotel.  Sherrill and I had been surprised by the huge numbers of young people with Eastern European accents that we encountered on this trip.  London's population definitely was evolving in new and interesting directions.  On our first trips here, we'd mostly heard the musical accents of newcomers from the British West Indies. 
              Finally, back at Paddington, I decided after my long evening and walk to stop at a pub.  The Dickens Tavern near our little hotel was like stepping back in time—not to the nineteenth century, despite the black and white Victorian prints on the walls, but to the nineteen-fifties or sixties.  The big-bellied pub keeper moved with pleasantly jovial efficiency behind the long bar, taking orders and dispensing beer and other drinks.  Football (soccer, of course) played on the television (now flat screen).   
              "You didn't get mugged!" Sherrill exclaimed from the bed, as I walked into our tiny third-floor hotel room a little later. 
              "Or killed."
              "Okay, tell me all about it."  
              The next morning, Sherrill and I rode the Heathrow Express from Paddington Station to the airport.  The occupying camps and protests continued in London, New York, San Francisco, Berkeley, and other cities.  The protesters all seemed to really believe that they'd have such an impact that right would defeat might and the power of the banks and corporations would suffer and the world would change forever.  
 
To be continued....  

​              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.    
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  
 

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 74 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 

​           "It's about time," Sherrill told me, "for our mop-up trip—it's overdue."
            We'd talked about this in the past.  We had traveled in Italy and France many times, but never got to either Genoa or Marseille.  And although we'd been to Spain three times, we'd missed the northeast corner with Barcelona.  A mop-up trip along the Mediterranean coast from Genoa to Barcelona, by way of Marseille and a stop in Montpellier in France would take care of it.  We'd allow time in each city to wander and explore. And, I promised Sherrill, no driving.  It would be easy and fun.  Well, that prediction was mostly correct.
       After a one night stopover in London, we flew to Cristoforo Colombo airport in Genoa.  (Heathrow was as chaotic as ever, but once again we survived it.  There was no point traveling, if we needed everything to be easy.)

           "Unusually hot," people in Genoa told us as we dripped sweat walking up and down the city's hills, heat reflecting off the cobblestones and walls around us.  The historic center of the city had been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which seemed to mean that nobody touched the broken cobblestones or the cracks and potholes in the pavement.  

​           Inside a couple of thick-walled palaces converted into museums, the temperature was much lower, plus we got all that art.  Our favorite painting was a Rubens king astride a remarkably alive horse charging out of the canvas.  We also kept cool for while making faces at specimens in the waterfront aquarium.  We weren't doing it on purpose.  It was an automatic reaction.  We knew those bug-eyed fish were staring at us.  Then, on a harbor cruise, the breeze off the water helped us survive the heat while we gazed up at the hillside apartment blocks, domes, and towers, the palm trees and the waterfalls of scarlet bougainvillea, the busy port, the ferries, fishing boats, and yachts, and even a replica galleon, the Neptune.  
          "This is the kind of day I like," Sherrill told me that evening, as we sat at an outdoor table at a small osteria hidden on a narrow hillside alley around the corner from our little hotel.  "No schedule, no place we had to be."  
           No menu, either, but a young girl brought us delicious dishes and carafes of cheap but good red wine.  Debris drifted on the cobblestone alley behind us and over nearby steps, but a little grunginess didn't kill the magic of the place.  Music floated out of an open door next to the osteria: a jazz club called Count Basie.  Later, four musicians wandered out and sat at the next table—one American, three Italians.  We talked with the American, a saxophonist who looked like a middle-aged Matt Damon in need of a shave.  As we left, Sherrill whispered that she was sure he was high on something. 
          "But he was good," she conceded.  "Very good."
          I trusted her judgment since she used to play both the clarinet and sax when she was younger and knew much more about music than I did.  

​               A ride up an "elevator" the next morning took us to the top of one of Genoa's hills, where we hiked along a little road to a bizarre nineteenth century castle that tried to combine several different styles and eras, now a "cultural museum" with stupendous views of the city and bay.  A woman guard from Chile took us to the roof so we could look across the city.  Sometimes, I wondered why people were so nice to us.  Often, they refused a tip—didn't even seem to expect one.  Genoa was full of surprises: a funicular used by locals to commute up the side of a mountain took us to the remains of a fortress where, below street level, we discovered four men playing tennis on courts framed by the fort's broken walls.
           Maybe what we liked best about Genoa were the people who came out every evening, strolling along the streets, dropping in at cafes, socializing.  We enjoyed the city, but decided to go further afield, at least for a day, so we rode a bus to a tiny train station in the hills, where we caught a narrow-gauge two-car train that took us over steep, winding tracks into the Apennine range to the north.  It was a treat to ride into the mountains, covered with green under the blue sky.  As much as we enjoyed Genoa, we could breathe better up there, in the light pure air.  At a village tucked into the hills at the end of the line, we got off and found a workmen's cafe, where we talked with a British couple from Wimbledon whom we'd noticed on the little train.

​              "Norman had to ride this old train," his wife told us.   She was the taller of the two, with a wide friendly face.  "Something about the 45 degree angle of the climb, I think it was."
              "It's a treasure," he interrupted, blinking his pleasure. 
          "Steam trains are his real passion," she persisted.  "He's always dragging me to ride on a train, someplace."
              Norman soon was telling us about the steam trains of England and Scotland. 
              We liked trains, too—especially when we could gaze out at the sea and distant mountains, which was what we did a couple of days later on our way to Marseille.  We'd heard that Marseille was a rough and rowdy seaport.  It still was a working port, but didn't seem dangerous to us, even though our cut-rate hotel was in an area of narrow, twisting, rather seedy streets on the hills below the railway station.  Sometimes, Sherrill found the hills hard for walking, but we still managed to explore the city, stopping along the way for some good meals.  

​          Dozens of cafes and restaurants lined the waterfront, so we indulged in the best bouillabaisse of our lives at a restaurant across from the Vieux Port, starting with a bowl of delicious soup with saffron that the seafood was cooked in, followed by a bowl of the seafood with more soup and toast spread with rouille mayonnaise.  Almost as much fun as eating the fish was watching the fishing boats unload their catches one morning.  Fishermen in long rubber boots carried in the fish (and several small octopuses) and women wearing heavy aprons spread them on tables.  It could have been a scene out of an old black and white French movie.
             To get a closer look at the seagoing world that had made Marseille great, Sherrill and I took a long cruise through the bay and beyond, passing between the two old fortresses flanking the port entrance, then sailing among several jagged limestone islands.  People once lived on at least a couple of them, since we saw several empty houses.  On one island the remains of the prison of the Chateau d'If, made famous by Alexander Dumas in The Count of Monte Cristo, still stood.  Then we sailed, among yachts, fishing boats, and small ships, along the rugged French coastline, broken up with small fjord-like inlets.  

       When finally we had to leave Marseille, we discovered that SNCF, the French train system, had collapsed into chaos.  No trains were running anywhere.  It looked as if we'd never get to Montpellier and Barcelona—at least, not by train.  Every time I went to the station, to find out what was happening, the system was still down.  Every now and then, an announcement crossed the board above the ticket windows or an official came out and said something to the crowd.  Since I couldn't understand any of it, I had to find someone in the crowd who spoke English to tell me what was happening.
          Eventually, I learned that a crazy guy had attacked and injured a train controller on the track between Lyon and Strasbourg, prompting all the SNCF train controllers to go on strike.  By late that night, oddly enough, a few trains had started up again, but not going our direction.  In the morning, however, our train was one of the few moving.  We never did understand the logic of what was happening, but it looked as if we'd get to Montpellier and even had hope that in a couple of days we'd reach Barcelona.  The SNCF people, of course, wouldn't guarantee anything, but we knew after all these years that the only thing we could be sure of when traveling was that anything could happen.  

​              "A pretty little city," Sherrill and I agreed, once we finally were in Montpellier. 
              It wasn't spectacular, like Genoa and Marseille, but was loaded with charm.  From its handsome Belle Epoch squares to the narrow winding streets of its medieval old town, the city quietly seduced us.  For such an old city, it had a surprisingly youthful vibe.  Then we learned that a third of its population was students attending its three universities.  Without even trying, we found our way to the beautiful Place de la Comedie, named after an old theatre on the square, and filled with sidewalk cafes. 
              "It must be time for lunch," Sherrill announced. 
              As a matter of fact, it was, so we sat at one of the tables and, while being entertained by some youthful street performers, ate a fine lunch. 
              "I could sit here all day," Sherrill told me.  "But I don't suppose you'll let me."
              "The restaurant might not let us."
              Around the corner, we discovered the headquarters for the French publisher Gallimard, which was celebrating its one hundredth anniversary with an indoor-outdoor exhibition of its history and the authors it had published, from Gide and Malraux to Sartre and Beauvoir, to Hemingway and Faulkner to Ionesco and the author of the Curious George picture books about a mischievous monkey. 

​              Almost next door, we found the city's art museum, which had a special show of more than two hundred works by the artist Odilon Redon, with dreamlike drawings and paintings from his entire career.  Just up the street, we came to a beautiful Beaux-Arts theatre that turned out to be the oldest movie house in France, built in 1909 and still in use.  For such a small city, a lot had happened there—and still was
              Despite the train controllers' on-again, off again strike, two days later we were in Barcelona.  We were lucky, our trains went through, although many did not.  When we arrived in Figueres, where we had to transfer, the Barcelona train even was waiting on the same platform.  

​              Our hotel was right on the Ramblas, the long avenue that runs up from the bay—pretty wild on Saturday night, we discovered. We found a good restaurant at the back of the big Mercat de la Boqueria, the market half way up the Ramblas.  Before long, we got to talking with a couple sitting at the next table who, we learned, were born in Tehran, although they left as children.  They were surprised and excited when we told them that we had traveled all over Iran.  He had lived for a while in Italy and now sold Italian pasta there in the market.  They both knew at least five languages, Farsi, of course, perfect English, and German, Italian, Spanish, and Catalan.  We promised to see each other again, when we parted. 
          "You never know who you'll meet," I said, as Sherrill and I walked down the Ramblas to the waterfront.
     "It wouldn't be a surprise, if we did."  
       We saw no tourists in Montpelier and surprisingly few in Marseille, but Barcelona was clogged with them, including a team there for some event—lanky young men in white suits who popped up everywhere.  Although Barcelona looked nothing like Venice, in one way it felt similar: magnificent and beautiful, but as if we'd arrived late at the party.  Despite that, we enjoyed the city.  Its weirdness appealed to us.  

            Barcelona's three creative geniuses, Gaudi, Dali, and Picasso, all excited us, but we started with Gaudi.  Even decades after he created his buildings they were attracting and challenging crowds of visitors.  People smiled with amusement and pleasure when they hiked across the rooftop of the Casa Mila apartment building among its chimneys like aliens just landed from outer space, but they were moved by the underlying beauty and by the grace and charm of the sample apartment open to the public. 

​          Other examples of the Catalan Art Nouveau movement known as Modernisme were appealing, too, but it was Gaudi's work that grabbed our imaginations.  Map in hand, we trekked to other houses that he designed and to the multi-towered Sagrada Familia, the massive church in the center of Barcelona that still wasn't completed long after he was crushed by a city bus, despite decades of work by his disciples.  We saved for the last the wonderful (and crowded) Parque  Guell, with its terraces, gardens, meandering foot paths, and serpentine benches and arcades studded with mosaics, broken ceramics, and bric-a-brac, all of it suggesting a quirky Alice in Wonderland world that we didn't even try to resist. 


Gaudi's Casa Batllo,
​Barcelona 

​              A stroll along the waterfront, walking among the festive crowds, lunch at a sidewalk cafe, and an afternoon cruise in one of the small boats we found there made a low-key change from hurling ourselves from one monument to another.  Barcelona, however, like Venice, was starting to be invaded by giant cruise ships, including the most hideous monster we'd ever seen, a top-heavy, graceless vessel that might have been a Communist-era apartment building turned onto its side and shoved into the water. 
              A splendid day wandering among the dark, narrow streets of the Gothic Quarter and in the Picasso Museum reminded us that although many people are talented very few are geniuses.  The astonishingly skillful and sophisticated work that Picasso produced even as a young boy, we saw, was the foundation for his later experiments.  Later, while Sherrill rested, I wandered through the Dali museum deep in the Gothic Quarter—two floors of paintings, drawings, and sculptures—tantalized by his ability to paint absolutely realistic objects and scenes that unexpectedly slid into the absurd.  His work gave the impression that he could do anything—if he chose.  Sherrill joined me for dinner at the 4 Gats restaurant in the Gothic quarter, the same place once frequented by the young Picasso, Gaudi, and other artists.  Walking through the curved arch of the entrance did feel like stepping into a lost, enchanted time.
              We'd been told that we couldn't visit Barcelona without going to the basilica and monastery atop the saw-tooth ridge of Montserrat.  The darkened wood statuette of the Virgin and the complex around it didn't particularly interest us, but we rode the train and cable car to the top. We conceded afterwards that the whole experience, including the all-boy choir and the crowds of pilgrims, was fascinating, in its way.  We watched and listened, hopefully respectful observers, but definitely on the outside.  Human beings were complex creatures, we saw once again, but that didn't mean that we had to share either their beliefs or experiences.  

​            Up the coast from Barcelona, a bus deposited us in a small town where we found a large castle-like red building studded with gold croissants and topped with giant eggs—Figueres, where Salvador Dali was born and, eighty-five years later, was buried in that building, the Dali museum, designed by the artist, himself.  We spent the good part of a day on a surreal journey through the world he created with his astonishing talent, flamboyant imagination, and gleefully perverse sense of humor. 
            The museum/theatre (as he called it) was, itself, a vast work of art, as well as filled with the world's largest collection of his art.  At least half of the time, if we looked closely at a work we discovered that it wasn't what we thought it was at first.  Either it had changed or our perception of it had changed.  To keep us off guard, he even had slipped in genuine paintings by masters ranging from El Greco to Marcel Duchamp.  The jokester artist never quit, never backed down. 

                                                                         To be continued....

​              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories. 
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 73 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 

              We landed in Beirut from Paris a day before our friends from the states arrived, so we began exploring on our own—discovering both the crazy traffic and the pollution it created, despite the winds from the sea.  Rebuilding was still in progress after the two wars: the civil war and the war with Israel.  We would get to know this constantly changing city because Lebanon was such a small country—wedged between the Mediterranean and Syria and Israel—that we'd start out staying in Beirut and seeing much of the country on day trips. 
              "It must have beautiful," I sighed, as we walked through the historic downtown area that, although recently devastated by war, still descended over gently folding hills to the sea.
              "Must have been," Sherrill agreed. 

​              Little was left from the days of the French colony, when Beirut was called the Paris of the Middle East.  New buildings of similar style in the same golden stone were rising, but they looked uncomfortably new and lacked the elegant details of the original buildings.  At least, now, some of the narrow streets were pedestrian only and made room for sidewalk cafes.  Many of the shops and restaurants, though, looked high end and expensive.  Was all of this intended for tourists, we wondered, or were there Lebanese who could afford such prices?  

​              Ah, but the food!  We'd learned to love Middle Eastern dishes when we visited Syria in 1994 and had enjoyed them since in other countries from Iran to Morocco.  Our first meal in Beirut was every bit as good as anything we'd had in Syria, especially the mezze: babaganoush, hummus, pita bread, tabouli, savory pastries, and more.  The Lebanese wine was superb, too. 
              "We're going to eat well on this trip," I told Sherrill, waving a piece of pita bread dripping with hummus over my plate.
              "Unfortunately."   
              We thought we knew what we were doing when we left the restaurant to walk back to our hotel, but became more and more confused.  The street signs were in Arabic and French and we couldn't find any of the names on our map.  We asked some people for help, showing them the map.  They were very nice, but didn't have any idea where our hotel might be.  The sidewalks and streets weren't easy to walk on, either, and traffic fumes were making us woozy.  Finally, a battered taxi stopped next to us, so we got in and hoped for the best.  The young driver and his pal with him in the front seat eventually managed to figure out where to take us.  Maybe the route was longer than it needed to be, but at that point we would've paid anything.  

​              The next day, we joined our old friend Hala and some other friends we'd traveled with over the years.  Together, we embarked on a more methodical exploration of Beirut and its environs, including some beautifully restored mosques and churches.  One imposing building that had not been restored was the old Holiday Inn, a gray concrete tower of 26 floors, once crowned with a revolving nightclub, built in 1974, just a year before the Lebanese civil war.  Foreign journalists hung out there as long as they could, although it was said that a thousand people died during what became known as the Battle of the Hotels.  It became a battleground again during the 1982 Israeli invasion.  Now, it remained, a rocket-pierced, shot-out, burned shell, a reminder of those bloody days.  

​              We couldn't get near the Holiday Inn, but did visit the square next to the classic 1920s St. George hotel down on the bay, a survivor of the Battle of the Hotels that was being restored when in 2005 a suicide bombing destroyed much of it and killed Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Harari, who had been responsible for rebuilding the ruined city center, along with his body guards and five hotel staff.  An elaborate shrine to Harari and the other dead had been set up on the square next to the hotel.  It was still there nearly five years later, when we were there, but someday, we were told, the hotel would be restored and then reopen.  We saw photographs of Harari all over Lebanon, rather like Kennedy after his murder.  

             Wherever we went, we were reminded of the never-ending conflicts afflicting this corner of the world. When we visited the National Archaeological Museum, which was in the middle of the war zone, we were shown a film about the efforts to save its treasures.  Moveable objects and artifacts were taken away or moved to the basement, but the huge ancient statues that couldn't be moved were encased in reinforced concrete.  Even so, shellfire destroyed the artifacts still in storage rooms.  Then the badly damaged museum had to be repaired and its collection inventoried and restored before it finally reopened.  

​              History may happen in chronological order, but often that's not the way we discover it, especially in these ancient cities.  The new and the incredibly old mingle incongruously, as if deliberately trying to confuse us.  We encountered plenty of this in Lebanon, even in the center of Beirut: the scaffolding and concrete forms of a modern apartment building rose next to a row of ancient Corinthian columns, while over on the coast a crusader castle jutted up from ancient ruins, surrounded by blocky 20th century buildings.

​              Several times, Sherrill pointed out to me (discreetly) young soldiers carrying machine guns.  If they noticed us looking at them, they aimed friendly smiles at us.  We couldn't escape this constant military presence—in the city and throughout the country.  On the outskirts of the city and on the roads beyond we saw billboards welcoming the president of Iran, who was coming soon on an official visit.  Were these armed soldiers because of this, we wondered, or were they always lurking nearby?

​              As we drove south to visit the ancient cities of Sidon and Tyre, we saw, behind a large fenced enclosure, a Palestinian refugee camp.  More than 400,000 Palestinian refugees still were living in Lebanon.  Questions being hotly debated at that time were whether or not they would be allowed to become naturalized Lebanese citizens or would have to return to the Palestinian territories—and what would be the impact of either option on them, on Lebanon, and on the Middle East?  

            An astonishing number of civilizations had existed on top of each other here: Phoenician, Greek, Roman, and Arabic cultures, and certainly more.  Some of the enormous archeological sites we explored impressed us with their beauty as well as their antiquity, rising out of the red cliffs and pomegranate bush-decorated hills next to the Mediterranean Sea.  Ancient monasteries, terraced vineyards, forests and canyons, seemed to whirl around us, a carousel of colors and history.  Although neighboring Syria, which is mostly desert, Lebanon's landscape seemed much more varied—but, we discovered, it could be dangerous.  We were told not to wander off on our own, especially in the south, because thousands of landmines, cluster bombs, and rockets remained scattered there.  In fact, more than 200 civilians had been killed or injured by them. 
              "Just like Cambodia and Laos," Sherrill commented.
              "And Croatia."
              Sometimes, it was hard not to become discouraged about human beings.  

​              People told us that women in Lebanon were equal to men in terms of education and career opportunities, however, they admitted, there still was no civil marriage in Lebanon—only religious.  It didn't matter what religion.  Most women now worked, they said, but mostly in low paying jobs, although a few did manage to become successful in business, medicine, higher education, law, and other professions.  

             Our last full day in Beirut, just the two of us again, Sherrill and I visited the American University of Beirut, where a friend had spent a year nearly fifty years before.  A student guide took us around the campus, which now seemed to have as many young women students as young men.  Some buildings, our guide told us, including the original one from 1873, were damaged or destroyed during the recent wars, but now the campus seemed like a green paradise overlooking the sea.

​              We both had the feeling that we were doing so much walking on this trip that we must be developing new leg muscles.  At least, Sherrill told me, her calves no longer hurt the way they had at the beginning.  North of Beirut, we visited the coastal village of Batroun, originally Greco-Roman, but—as in so much of the country—other cultures had crept in over the centuries.  Byblos, one of the world's oldest continually inhabited towns, dazzled us with its kaleidoscope of centuries: Roman remains, a crusader castle, a restored souk, Ottoman-era stone houses, and the dramatic terraced harbor crowded with new fishing boats and yachts—and those cruel cobblestones everywhere.  It was no wonder that our legs were stronger, although we still worried about breaking an ankle.  

                 As we often did when traveling, we encountered several weddings in Lebanon, including one in our Beirut hotel, where the wedding party posed for photos in the lobby.  Some of the women wore evening gowns and a couple of young women were in miniskirts and very high heels, but others managed to be elegant in outfits that completely covered them, even over the head.  The men ranged from formal outfits to Mafia-mod—and most of them needed a shave.
              "I told you," Sherrill reminded me, "wherever we go, we run into weddings."
              "I don't think it's our fault."

      Then there was Baalbek.  Trying to describe Baalbek is like trying to wrap the Grand Canyon in words.   It has been called the most important Roman site in the Middle East.  Its temples were built on a scale that surpassed anything in Rome.  The more Sherrill and I had learned about Baalbek, the more eager we had been to see it.  In 36 BC, Marc Antony gave Baalbek to Cleopatra.  What could be more romantic than that?  Emperor after emperor, including Nero and Caracalla, devoted massive resources to the city.  As fascinated as we were by the rest of Lebanon, Baalbek was the magnet that originally drew us there.
              Once again, the Roman city and temples had been built on top of Neolithic, Phoenician, Greek, and other ancient settlements, and was surrounded by later Byzantine and Moslem buildings, as well as a few pathetic modern structures. 
              "This puts us in our place," one of our friends on the trip commented.  "Hardly a blip in history."

         Whoever was already living in that area when the Romans came had to have been impressed by this great show of Roman civilization and power.  Our feet and legs were given a good work out with Baalbek's monumental staircases, immense courtyards, and gigantic temples.  We spent hours hiking over, on, and among the ancient stonework, the hot sun reflecting into our faces.  The only comparisons we could think of were Manhattan and the Grand Canyon, but it was foolish to compare Baalbek to anything else.  It was its own magnificent thing and it was remarkable that so much of it had survived so well for more than two thousand years.  



                                              Temple of Jupiter, Baalbek.
                                                 The tallest columns in the
                                                 world and once the biggest
                                                Roman temple in the world.

              Getting home from Beirut turned out to be more of an adventure than we expected.  Air France and other French workers were on strike, protesting changes to their pension plans.  We didn't know even that morning if our plane would leave on time.  Then it turned out that the arrival of the Iranian president on the same day was causing record traffic jams.  We left early enough to get to the airport before the worst of the traffic, but the plane was delayed anyway because the flight crew couldn't get through the traffic.  The flight, itself, was okay.  The French cabin crew kept passing out wine.
              The next morning, after a night at Charles de Gaulle, as our British Air plane for London was taxiing to the runway a man across the cabin from us had a heart attack.  The crew sprang into action, bringing out all kinds of equipment, but the plane returned to the gate and medics came on.  They worked on the man for about an hour.  Eventually, they took him and his companion off the plane—and their luggage, too.  The plane left an hour and a half late.  Passengers with connections were upset, but fortunately we were staying overnight in London before flying to San Francisco.   Besides, this trip had given time a new perspective for us.  In the great scheme of things, what did a few hours or days matter?
To be continued....  
​

​              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.    
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 72 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 

​              From Heathrow to Charles de Gaulle: it felt like cruel and unusual punishment bouncing from one of the largest, most confusing airports in the world to another.  Sherrill and I survived, slept in a cheap hotel at de Gaulle, and the next morning figured out the trains through Paris to Reims—this was the easy part.  We also had to work out when we could continue on trains, when we needed to switch to buses, and when we'd need a car.  French trains had an irritating habit of aiming back to Paris—like a pony who knew that there was no place like home.  The frequent local connections we'd loved in the Italian train system seemed to be missing here.  The entire trip felt like a circus trapeze act in which we might miss the next jump. 

​              We landed safely in the first town, Reims, a handsome little metropolis, with hotel, cathedral, and town center an easy walk from the station.  So far, so good, we congratulated ourselves.  Our view of the Gothic cathedral's gold towers stopped us as if we'd been socked.  We knew that for hundreds of years French kings had been crowned here, but its size and beauty were beyond anything we'd expected.  During the next few days, we hiked from church to palace to museum to Roman triumphal arch to the hotel de ville in which the Germans surrendered in 1945.  
              "We need to take a tour of a champagne cellar," Sherrill informed me.
              She had discovered that Reims was a center of the champagne industry.
              "Well, if we need to."
                We chose Mumm (pronounced moom, apparently) and made a reservation.  We were the only people who showed up, but a charming young guide still gave us an excellent private tour through the chalk caves and tunnels—despite her high heels.  Of course, the visit ended in a tasting room with an opportunity to buy.  

​              No train connected Reims directly to the next two towns we wanted to visit, Amiens and Rouen, without returning to Paris first, so in Reims we picked up a rental car that eventually we'd leave in Rouen.  Sherrill wasn't happy about this, but did acknowledge that the French freeways were good and the drivers superb compared to most countries where we'd traveled. 
              "They may go fast, but they're not insane."
              We'd admired Riems' cathedral, but the one in Amiens was even more spectacular. It could hold, we were told, two cathedrals the size of Notre Dame in Paris.  As a bonus, Sherrill added to her list of the body parts of saints with the reliquary of John the Baptist, which (supposedly) held the saint's head, brought from Constantinople.  As a "collector" of church mazes and labyrinths, as well, she was delighted by the 13th century labyrinth stretching across the fourth and fifth bays of the nave—the second largest church labyrinth in France. 
              "I want to take that home," she told me, gazing down at the black and white labyrinth.
              "Somebody would notice if you dug it up."
              "Maybe you could distract them."  

      Architecture and religious artifacts were interesting, but Amien's Floating Gardens and medieval Saint-Leu area known as the "little Venice of the North," appealed to us in a different way. 
        "Not another little Venice," Sherrill sighed.  "How many have we seen?"
            "A dozen, maybe?" 
            "At least."
            Although we'd encountered "little Venices" across the globe, we still couldn't resist them, just as we couldn't resist tromping through gardens, whatever shape and size they might be.  The medieval houses and shops along Amien's canals, with their half-timbered, brick, and stucco facades and overflowing flower boxes, were obscenely picturesque.  The houses lining one of the canals had been turned into restaurants and pubs, most of them specializing in mussels with French fries, just as if they knew our weakness for them, so a casual walk on the evening of our forty-sixth wedding anniversary turned into a search for the restaurant in which we'd celebrate with a feast of mussels and fries. 

​              "Do you mind eating outside?" Sherrill asked me.
              "Of course not."
              Did she think I was fussy, or something?
              The weather was beautiful, although it was late September, so we ate looking down on the blue and green water of the canal.  The waiter in his black suit and over-sized white apron was friendly and efficient and helped us choose a wine to go with the mussels.  We had no idea, however, how huge the servings would be.  We each got a large black pot of mussels in broth, a big dish of fries, and hunks of garlic bread. 
              "We should've shared one order!" Sherrill said, when she saw all the food in front of us.
              "Happy anniversary!"I replied, raising my glass.  
​              Amiens had turned out to be one of those unexpected delights that sometimes graced our travels -- and a surprisingly romantic place for our anniversary.

​              The next day, before leaving town, we dropped in at Jules Verne's impressive, although strange, house—the sort of eccentric home in which we might expect the author of Around the World in Eighty Days and Journey to the Center of the Earth to live: four levels, the top one where he wrote fitted out like the cabin of a sailing ship.  We skipped the tour conducted by a costumed guide pretending to be a character from one of his books, but the house was an amusing way to say goodbye to Amiens.
              The challenge when we reached Rouen was to find the agency to drop off the rental car.  This ancient city associated with Joan of Arc was a maze of narrow one-way streets.  We knew the address, but couldn't figure out how to get there.  Sherrill was ready to abandon the car on the street.  When we got close, I leaped out, ran around a couple of corners and into the agency, explaining where Sherrill and the car were trapped.  A fellow went back with me and drove us to the agency—in a convoluted route that we never would have figured out.  

​              Rouen probably had more medieval brown and white half-timbered buildings than any other place we'd visited.  We got a room at a hotel in a 17th century building where the playwright Pierre Corneille once stayed.  It had the quirks we'd come to associate with very old hotels: a huge fireplace in the dining room downstairs, uneven heat upstairs, wavy walls and floors, low beamed ceilings, lots of stone steps, no elevator.  We loved it.  Then, out for a walk, we encountered a group of students in costumes—seniors, we learned, the boys in wigs and improvised dresses because it was the first day of school.  Dressing up and acting silly seemed to be a tradition in European schools. 

​              Not far away, we discovered the medieval plague cemetery, surrounded by half-timbered buildings.  Huge-eyed skulls and crossed bones had been carved into their age-blackened wood beams.  A few blocks farther on, we came to Joan of Arc Square—the old market square—where during the middle ages prisoners were pilloried or executed and where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake on May 30, 1431, the modern Restoration Cross and church of Joan of Arc on the site.  Nearby, we came to the medieval tower where Joan was questioned and shown the implements of torture. 
              "I don't understand how supposedly religious people can do all this to other human beings," I muttered.
              "You don't need to understand."  
              A sleek modern train got us to the port city of Le Havre, almost completely rebuilt after World War Two.  The bold design of the new city, a vast pattern of broad spaces and grand buildings, most of it of concrete, was so impressive that UNESCO designated it a World Heritage Site.  Sherrill and I, however, felt that it was as cold and inhuman as similar postwar developments we'd seen in the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries—even if it was better designed and better built.  

​              We checked into a Novotel—nice, but like a place run by robots—near the monster-sized docks on a manmade peninsula, wandered over to one of the mammoth warehouse buildings, and slipped inside.  Far away, tiny people were doing something, but none of them noticed us.  The acre or so of polished concrete floor was so inviting that I couldn't resist launching into a tap routine and a bit of soft shoe. 
              "Idiot."  Sherrill rolled her eyes, but smiled. 
              The next morning, we were glad get on a bus to the tiny town of  Honfleur down the coast.
              Cozy between steep hills, a little port, and a yacht harbor, Honfleur's ancient wood buildings were more our style.  We arrived during the weekend market in the little square next to Sainte-Catherine's church, an all-wood masterpiece with a vaulted ceiling like the hull of an overturned ship.  It was no surprise to learn that it was the work long ago of local boat-wrights.  Our room in a little half-timbered hotel may have had a wavy floor, but we liked it, just as we liked exploring the town outside our window and hiking into hills behind it, from which we could view the entire area: water, land, and new sparkling white suspension bridge. 

​              We weren't sure exactly when the bus to Caen would leave—or, for that matter, exactly where the unmarked bus stop was, but we managed to be in the right place at the right time.  The driver and other passengers all reassured us and gave us advice for the rest of our journey, including how to transfer at Deauville.
              We shouldn't have been shocked each time we saw how badly this corner of France had been devastated during World War Two, but we were.  Caen wasn't flattened quite as badly as Le Havre, but only a few old buildings remained.  On our first trip to London, from time to time we'd seen in the middle of a block a burned out hole where a German rocket had hit.  In Caen, the situation was the reverse: from time to time, we'd see one or two medieval buildings standing amid blocks of much later buildings, like raisins in a cake.  The great castle had survived, but not much else notable.

​              The main reason we came to Caen was to take a train onward to Bayeux so that Sherrill could fulfill her dream of seeing the Bayeux tapestry.  Here, at least, there were plenty of trains going back and forth, so we were able have a satisfying day in Bayeux refreshing our knowledge of the conquest of England by the Normans in 1066.  Probably the most beautiful piece of propaganda in world history—and maybe the most accurate—it was an astonishing achievement.  It also was a miracle that it survived all these centuries.  

                                                                            Caen, surviving
                                                                                 Medieval houses             

​              The city of Bayeux had its charms, too, including its little cathedral, a picturesque mill with churning waterwheel, and buildings from various centuries, but we found it hard to focus on them, knowing that we had limited time to see the tapestry.  It certainly was magnificently displayed in its museum, although it was frustrating that we couldn't linger as much as we would've liked to study certain parts.

​              We finished the day back in Caen, then the next morning continued to Le Mans, where we got the TGI to Charles de Gaulle airport.  Sherrill and I loved traveling and discovering the world, but knew very well that there was no way to escape the boring, grungy parts of traveling—although there were plenty of times when we wanted to sit down on the filthy airport floor like a two year-old and cry.  Or at least swear. 
To be continued....
 
              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.    
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.