​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 years of marriage.  This is number 37 of a series about our lives and travels. If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017. Older posts you'll find below that are a previous series about later travels.  

​                The slides were stored away in a tin box under other tin boxes on the top shelf of a laundry room closet.  For a couple of decades, Sherrill and I mostly took slides when we traveled, made a few prints for an album of the ones we liked best, and stored the others.  Recently, I've been excavating these scenes from our past, studying them on a light box, taking some to be made into prints, rediscovering and reliving moments of exploring the world together.  Now, these new prints of old pictures are helping to tell the story of our trips and lives.
                Spies, refugees, secret agents crept through our room at the Avenida Palace hotel in Lisbon.  That's what we were told by the elderly mustachioed porter as he set down our bags.  The old hotel stood next to the nineteenth century Rossio train station.  Our room was on a narrow sixth floor extension that connected the hotel to the station's side wall.  The porter claimed that before and during World War Two it had been a secret passage through which desperate people had slipped from and to the railway station, hoping to begin a journey to safety.  Any door that existed between our room and the Rossio station was long gone, although Sherrill tried to find it. 

​                Lisbon's meandering beauty quickly seduced us, but was a challenge to explore.  The Old Town rose and descended with dramatic quirkiness on the slopes of several hills above the Tagus river.  Between it and the New Town opposite hunkered the Lower Town, built in a large hollow after the 1755 earthquake knocked down most of the city.  The sidewalks, we discovered, not only were cobblestone, but full of holes.  Remembering what happened to Sherrill in Warsaw, we tried to avoid gazing around while walking. 
                Gypsy women draped in black were the only beggars that we encountered, but they were relentless, pursuing us, pushing against us, hands everywhere.  They didn't get anything off us, but they certainly tried.  Several times, we climbed up to the Alfama, or Old Town, wandering along the narrow twisting streets between buildings that seemed ancient, but that must have been built after the earthquake.  From time to time, we stopped at half-hidden little squares and small restaurants, sometimes hearing the deep-throated, anguished strains of fado, the songs of Portugal.  I wanted to return at night for a full show, but Sherrill didn't enjoy fado—for much the same reason that she didn't care for the songs of Edith Piaf, the emotions they evoked were too raw, too tragic.  The Lisbon Botanical Gardens, especially the huge greenhouse with its enclosed jungle of giant ferns and oversized blossoms, were more to her taste.   

​            We knew nothing about Portuguese cuisine before this trip, but came to enjoy it.  Some dishes, however, were an acquired taste.    
            "Caldo verde," one woman told us, was her favorite typical dish: a thick soup of potato, shredded kale, and hunks of spicy sausage.  A man we talked with preferred the stews made from dried salt cod, a dish that evolved from seafaring days.  I rather liked some of these hearty dishes because of their rich flavors, but Sherrill preferred simple seafood meals, grilled sardines, octopus, and shrimp—always with a salad.  And Portuguese wine.
                Hiking along the Tagus river, we came to the area where the 16th century explorers set sail and the monument to those brave adventurers.  We even looked in at the chapel where Vasco de Gama is said to have spent the night before he left on his historic voyage.   It's easy to understand why the Portuguese became a people of explorers, with the restless sea lapping at their long coast, enticing them with promises of adventure and riches.
                After a few days exploring Lisbon, we took a cab to a rental car agency atop one of the hills.  An attendant brought out the car we'd reserved, left it on the concrete slope descending to the street, and walked away as Sherrill started to slide into the driver's seat.  Suddenly, the car began rolling.  He'd forgotten to put on the brake.  I managed to stop it with my shoulder, then Sherrill found the emergency brake and the man ran up, shouting apologies.  Now, all she had to do was navigate those twisting narrow streets until we got out of the city.  

​                The so-called freeways weren't much fun, either.  Portuguese drivers seemed to take traffic lights, stops signs, and speed limits as suggestions they could ignore.
                "The drivers here are insane!" Sherrill announced, as if she was afraid I hadn't figured that out, myself. 
                Not only did they speed, but were wildly erratic, changing lanes, crossing in any direction without signaling, suddenly slowing down, then speeding up again.  Each driver seemed to exist in a private universe, unaware of anyone else on the road. 
                "Don't talk while I'm driving," Sherrill warned me, "if you want to live." 
                The historic town of Sintra, dramatically poised above the Atlantic between two gorges, was only a short picturesque drive from Lisbon.  The first signs of the town were an 11th century Moorish castle and, nearby, a more eccentric palace, part Gothic and part Moorish, topped by a pair of enormous conical brick chimneys.  As we wandered through the country, we discovered many oversized, fantastic castles and palaces.  Because of its colonies, Portugal once was the richest country in Europe and for a while was busy spending that fortune, especially on gigantic building projects.  Near Sintra, we found an enormous palace-monastery, even bigger than Philip II's elephantine complex in Spain and almost as depressing.  

​                We decided that a good antidote for this gloomy gigantism was some time in a couple of fishing villages along the coast. 
                "This is more like it."
                As if we had all the time in the world, we strolled along, watching fishermen repair bright orange nets spread on the beach front, then stopped at small inexpensive cafe where a one-armed old man and a teenage girl brought us a meal of freshly caught octopus and sardines. 
                "I feel like Charles Laughton in The Beachcomber."
                "Darling, you're lucky I know what you're talking about.  Most people wouldn't."  

​                In the ancient walled town of Obidos, we wandered among the remains of a Roman settlement, a Moorish castle, a Cistercian abbey, and a medieval monastery.  Unfortunately, the place was not undiscovered.  While we were there, two busloads of Italian tourists invaded.  However, it was in Obidos that Sherrill fell in love with the blue and white Azulejo tiles that we saw all over Portugal.  Soon, we were challenging the weight limits our suitcases would face when flying home.  

​            Although we were heading into late October, the temperatures were soaring.  It was a pleasure to escape into the cool cavern of one of the most monumental religious structures in Europe, the great Abbey of Batalha.  We felt like ants as we walked through its huge doorways, but its gothic thrust pulled us skyward, instead of leaving us crushed as other gigantic religious buildings often did.  The filigree stonework lured us into huge spaces where carved saints eyed us disapprovingly.  

​            The heat continued, so the next day I changed into shorts and tee shirt, forgetting that we were on the way to the Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima, the shrine in honor of the Moorish princess who converted to Christianity and early in the twentieth century miraculously appeared to three Portuguese children.  Scolding me for being so dense, Sherrill left me in the parking lot while she went into the shrine.   
            "Too bad you missed it, you silly boy" she said, when she came out.  "It was quite a spectacle—even waxwork figures of the children and Saint Fatima...." 
            Although it was out of our way, Sherrill wanted to see Tomar, one of the oldest cities in Portugal, known for the beautiful convent and sixteen-sided church built inside the walls of a Templar castle and where Prince Henry the  Navigator launched the Age of Discovery.  The castle, the religious buildings, all were beautiful and fascinating in their way, but in my memory Tomar will always be the town with the museum of the world's largest collection of match boxes: room after colorful and crazy room of carefully arranged match boxes.  

​             I wasn't surprised that the next place we stopped became one of Sherrill's favorite places of the trip.  A day later, she drove us deep  into a large forest until we arrived at one of those eccentric buildings that the Portuguese seemed to love: the palace of Bucaco, a nineteenth century fantasy built for Portugal's last king in the overly decorated style of the sixteenth century,  surrounded by lush gardens that extended into the forest.  Towering trees, centuries old, rose among lakes and gardens, giant ferns and flowering plants.  We could have happily spent weeks wandering among the gardens.
            Portugal's second city, Porto, we decided, was as beautiful as Lisbon, as it climbed steep hills on both sides of the Tagus river. 
            "And this is where we learn about port," Sherrill reminded me. 
            "Is there that much to learn?"
            "You'll see."
            On the side of the river across from the main city, we found more than a dozen bodegas where different varieties and brands of port were created.  Most of them had been there for many generations.  During our days in Porto, we visited  and tasted at several, toured a few, and especially enjoyed two, Sandeman (with the cloaked man for their logo) and Ramos Pinto (with the logo of Cupid holding up a small glass so a 1920s couple can sip simultaneously.)  Sherrill was never a big drinker, but was surprisingly interested in the production and varieties of port.  Of course, we bought a bottle of each of our favorites to bring home.  

​                A two hour drive from Porto took us to the Douro Valley, where we drove along steep, terraced slopes of gold and orange vines, the wine estates far below along the curves of the Douro river.  It was like driving through the Napa wineries in the autumn, but more spectacular.
            "Look over there," I told Sherrill.  "And up there."
            "I'm busy admiring the road, my dear."  Eventually, she found some places where she could pull off the winding pavement, so she could really take in the full panorama.  "You're right!" she said, with feigned surprise. 

            Also on Sherrill's list of places we had to visit was the great pilgrimage church of Bom Jesus do Monte with its 381 foot baroque stairway known as the Way of the Cross.  Above the steep first section, more zigzagging stairways rose until finally they reached the church.  Every year, thousands of pilgrims climbed those steps on their knees to pray before a piece of the true cross.  The only other time we saw pilgrims on their knees was in Mexico, at the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, outside Mexico City.  We didn't do the climb on our knees, but couldn't miss seeing another bit of the true cross.   
            Often, we felt as if we were driving from one fairytale place to another, visiting castles and palaces, churches and cloisters, walled cities and Roman temples, gardens and forests.   Sometimes, centuries and eras were jumbled together to create astonishing results as we wound through hills and along rivers.  Finally, we were back in Lisbon and returned the car.  We agreed that Portugal was one of the most beautiful countries we'd visited, but Sherrill would've enjoyed it more if the drivers hadn't been so crazy.  After this, we always traveled by train, bus, or boat—no rental cars, except when we traveled with friends who shared the driving and a few times for only part of a trip.
            To be continued....
​

 If you enjoy these posts, 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 to several complete short stories and excerpts from my novels.  Please pass them on to anybody else you think might enjoy them. 

You also might enjoy reading the new bargain-priced e-book edition of my first novel, The Night Action.  "The novel careens around the night spots of San Francisco's North Beach and the words seem to fly off the page in the style of Tom Wolfe or the lyrics of Tom Waits."  The book is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 years of marriage.  This is number 36 of a series about our lives and travels. If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and adventures together look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017. Older posts you'll find below that are a previous series about later travels.   

​            "We're going to Hong Kong," Sherrill told me. 
            She liked to surprise me with these semi-impromptu trips. 
            The name called up images of the exotic and dangerous, and not just in old movies.  My Uncle Douglas, my father's older brother, had told me about traveling to Hong Kong many years ago, flying from San Francisco on one of the huge Pan American Airways' flying boats, stopping at Honolulu, Midway island, and other strategic points across the Pacific for refueling, splashing belly first in the water with each landing and taking off in great waves of white spray.  This was the old Hong Kong, before all the towers had started to rise, dramatically changing both the skyline and the nature of the city.  He never wanted to return, he said, because he knew that this wonderful, magical place had been spoiled by development.
            "I wandered through tiny alleys," he told me, "beggars following me, men offering me fantastic deals and sometimes their sisters, but it was beautiful, too, the green hills rising from the harbor, the blue water crowded with little wood boats and islands.  No skyscrapers."
            I was only a kid, so I asked him if—since he was there just after World War Two—spies were creeping around the city, too.  He smiled and shrugged.
            "Who knows?  Maybe." 

​            The Hong Kong that Sherrill and I visited in 1990 was a different city from the one that my uncle knew in 1945, but looking back from 2018 and going through the photographs we took then and at recent pictures on the internet, I can see how much it has continued to change.  Parts of the city then were still made up of old, low-rise buildings, some in poor repair.  Much of the harbor was still home to wooden junks lined up near each other.  Hong Kong didn't stop being part of the United Kingdom and transfer to the People's Republic of China—after 156 years as a British colony—until seven years after we were there.  Sherrill and I watched on television the official transition when Prince Charles flew to Hong Kong to represent the Queen and the U.K.  

​            Sherrill had collected some self-guided walking tours to help us explore different neighborhoods and areas.  As usual, she had done a lot of research before our trip.  This was a different kind of world than we'd experienced on most of our travels so far.  We loved wandering through the enormous Central Market with hundreds of different stalls and then along narrow streets and alleys, discovering little places for snacks, asking strangers for directions, and poking around in street markets, whether fruits and vegetables, fish, silver and gold, house wares, or old clothes were being sold.  We were in one of the most densely populated cities on earth, but didn't mind getting lost and then figuring out what do next. 

​            We bought bus passes so that we could get around  the city easily, becoming very familiar with the gaudy, advertisement-covered double-decker buses.  The 52 floor Jardine House probably was monarch of Hong Kong's skyscrapers, then.  Today, the city's tallest building reaches more than twice as high.  We visited several temples, watched street barbers clipping the hair of old men, and stopped at incense shops and a roasted meat shop displaying charcoal-cooked ducks and chickens.  

​            "You should get a suit made," Sherrill told me when we looked in the window of a tailor's tiny shop.  A young man who probably was the tailor's son or maybe apprentice peered out at us.  I still can remember the hopeful, almost hungry, look in the boy's eyes.  "Very cheap and ready before we leave," Sherrill added.  "Guaranteed to fit perfectly."
            "Then you have to get some clothes, too.  How about some dresses?"
            Neither of us wanted to take the time to do it, so we left the bustling area of shops and hotels and made a trip to "The Land Between" along the border with China, a very different part of Hong Kong than we'd seen up to then, a land of green hills, terraced fields, duck farms, and rural markets.  We might have been going back in time, back to the Hong Kong that my Uncle Douglas had remembered.  

​            One evening we splurged, going to a restaurant that Sherrill had discovered in her research.  We knew that it was going to be pricy when we saw both a Rolls Royce and a Bentley parked in front.  (At least, we'd made a reservation, unusual for us when traveling, and were wearing the best outfits that we'd brought with us.)  The place was elegant, but in a very understated way and the service, of course, was beyond perfect, if that's possible.  The meal, as we'd expected, was delicious, yet also understated.  Then, as we were eating, a hidden half-sized door in the wainscoting opened up near our table and a small woman, bent over, emerged, carrying what looked like a whisk broom and dust pan, closed the secret door, and got to work tidying up around some tables a little further away.  
            We tried to laugh in an understated way. 

​            Macau, a city famous—or notorious—in old books and film noir movies for sin and corruption:  "We have to go there," I remember telling Sherrill before the trip.
            "Okay, but it won't be like the movies, you know."
            A jetfoil carried us to Macau amid sprays of white water.  When we started looking around the old Portuguese colony, we were surprised at how rundown and sleazy a lot of it seemed to be—just like in the old movies.  Some of the buildings, in fact, appeared abandoned and in danger of collapsing.  We looked into a couple of the casinos and gambling dens, but the air in them was so thick with tobacco smoke that we quickly backed out.  And no sign of either Robert Mitchum or Jane Russell.  

​            I've read that Macau also has evolved in the years since we were there and has become modern and glamorous, but then it was far from being either one.  We didn't go to either the dog races or the "Parisian" strip show review.  Maybe that's where we would've spied the film noir characters.  However, we did explore the exotic Lou Lim Iok Gardens and admired the ornate stone facade that was all that remained of the 17th century Portuguese church of St. Paul. 
            The part of Macau that we liked best, though, was down in the heart of the old city where we asked one of the fortune tellers about our futures (he looked worried when he gazed at our palms, but for an extra tip promised that all would be good) and where we discovered a smelly concentration of tiny factories and workshops and watched people carving wood chests, putting together iron bedsteads, beating out aluminum bowls, stamping out toy soldiers, making noodles, painting wooden shoes, and pounding and blending medicines.  Sherrill bought a folded paper package of herbal medicine, but I don't remember what it was supposed to cure.  It looked pretty disgusting, though.  I don't know if she ever used any of it.   

​            Sherrill made sure that we took several side trips to some of the small islands dotting Hong Kong's blue waters, visiting temples and just walking to see what we might discover.  It hardly mattered where we went or what we saw, we both enjoyed the ferries that transported us back and forth.  I kept a sketch book in my pocket for quick portraits of people, especially old folks and children.  Some of them, I told myself, looked quite sinister.  From time to time on the islands, we encountered ancient banyan trees even larger than the ones we'd seen when we visited Sherrill's mother in Hawaii.  It's easy to understand why these trees often are called sacred.  A magical aura does seem to float among their many branches and reaching tendrils. 
            We were aware that in the time we had we could see very little of the dense, complex reality that was Hong Kong, but hoped, unlike my uncle, to go back one day—however, as it turned out, we never made it.
            Back home in Berkeley, someone asked Sherrill if she wasn't afraid when we were lost among the crowds of Hong Kong.
            "Are you kidding?" she replied.  "I work in downtown Oakland.  A man was shot to death on the library's front steps.  A few weeks later, there was a gang killing in the McDonald's two blocks away.  Hong Kong felt completely safe."
To be continued....   

​            If you enjoy these posts, 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 to several complete short stories and excerpts from my novels.  Please pass them 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 years of marriage.  This is number 35 of a series about our lives and travels. If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017. Older posts you'll find below that are a previous series about later travels.  

​               When Sherrill and I crossed the border from the gray and gloomy Soviet bloc into Scandinavia in 1989, the contrasting prosperity we found dazzled us.  Helsinki may have been small for a capital city, but was clean and cheerful after the drab, crumbling cities we'd just visited.  The bright colors along its waterfront, the luscious fruits and vegetables at the farmers' markets, and the well-stocked department stores were so different that we might have wandered into an MGM musical comedy and wouldn't have been too surprised if Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse had started dancing among the vegetables.   
               Today, Helsinki is considered one of the world's most livable cities, but even in 1989 its beauty, stretching from the tip of a forested green peninsula across several green islands, was seductive and when we tried the seafood that it was known for we almost were ready to stay—not that we would've wanted to cope with its winters.  We heard part of a rehearsal for a Sibelius concert in the dramatically modern Finlandia Hall, peered in at a couple of domed Russian Orthodox churches, and looked into several pricy shops, pretending that we might buy a suede coat, some fancy crystal, or Marimekko fabrics.  The dramatic monument built to honor Sibelius impressed us: the 600 steel pipes welded together in a wave-like pattern were supposed to capture the essence of his music.  Whether or not they did might be a matter of opinion, but we liked it.  His shining metallic face posed next to it seemed to approve.  

​               "This place is wonderful, it's clean and beautiful," Sherrill told me at the end of our third day in Helsinki, before we boarded an overnight Silja Line ferry to Stockholm, "but something's missing."
               "Maybe it's too perfect."
               "Maybe that's it."
               We weren't being perverse—I don't think we were—but just as I preferred Dostoyevsky to Tolstoy and Dickens to Austen, the impoverished grunginess of Warsaw and Prague were more my style than this squeaky clean perfection.  Of course, we weren't in Helsinki long enough to discover its underside, if it had one, but part of the appeal for me of London, New York, and even San Francisco was that it was all there in the open, like it or not: splat!  Sherrill wouldn't go that far, but agreed that endless perfection could be pretty dull.  

​               The trip across the Gulf of Finland to Stockholm turned out to be a grander experience than we'd expected.  The ferry was surprisingly large and our room for the overnight trip was attractive and comfortable, but it was the vast breakfast buffet featuring platters of herring and smoked salmon that overwhelmed us.  Scandinavia might prove to be boringly perfect, but we'd put up with it for meals like this.
            Larger and more spectacular than Helsinki, Stockholm was scattered across what seemed to be countless islands, large and small.
            "Water everywhere!" I pointed out to Sherrill, as we docked.
            "I noticed," she countered.  

​            Stockholm wasn't easy to explore, but it was fun watching Sherrill's pleasure as we took a boat tour among the islands, under bridges, through narrow channels and canals, passing dockyards, quayside boulevards, castles, and parks—getting a sense of the city that we couldn't have any other way.  We discovered more museums in the city than we possibly had time for, but did give serious attention, at least, to the huge National Museum.  As always, whenever we found a Rembrandt in a museum, we sent a postcard with a photograph of the painting we'd seen to our friend, the president of the Berkeley Rembrandt Society.  We'd hoped to visit the new museum where the Vasa, a recently found and restored 17th century Swedish sailing ship, was to be displayed, but that museum wouldn't open for several months, yet. 

​            Sherrill's fascination with architecture had continued since the days when she dreamed of designing buildings herself, so we couldn't miss Stockholm's famous City Hall, a stylishly modern red brick building on the shore of one of the islands, with an elegant brick tower rising above it.  We walked through many of its spacious rooms, including the golden hall where the Nobel Prize banquet was held.  However, I enjoyed even more wandering through the narrow streets and oddly shaped squares of Stockholm's old town.  Each building reflected the taste of the era when it was built, an architectural smorgasbord.  And, of course, we indulged in real smorgasbord whenever we had a chance.  

​            Often, when we traveled in Europe, we were reminded of how short the distances were between cities and even countries.  Somehow, this seemed more civilized than the vast spaces we had to cope with here.  When we left Stockholm, a leisurely ferry ride took us to Copenhagen, another smallish, civilized capital city.  Or was it so civilized?  At least, it wasn't boring.   

​            After all this traveling, I looked forward to an evening sauna at our hotel, however I was informed that the sauna was only for cold weather.  Instead, I went for a walk, past the famous 19th century amusement park, the Tivoli Gardens.  Much of the city, Sherrill and I discovered during the next days, was quite beautiful, but that evening I was surprised to find that the area near the Tivoli Gardens was both grungy and raunchy, with cheap hotels and porn shops advertising their wares with graphic posters and even neon signs in their windows.  Well-dressed men, as well as disreputable-looking people, wandered in and out of the shops and hotels.  Who would've thought that Copenhagen had the seamy, scuzzy side that we didn't see in Helsinki?  The area reminded me of San Francisco's Tenderloin, which also is near high-priced respectable neighborhoods.   
            The next evening, after a day exploring Copenhagen, Sherrill and I wandered through Tivoli Gardens, which still had a turn-of-the-twentieth-century feel to it.  We might have stepped into a old movie as we strolled past the old-fashioned carousel, the 1914 roller coaster, a lake with rowboats to rent, and a fun house, among other attractions, all of it illuminated by thousands of light bulbs.  Teenagers, families with young children, and old folks all seemed to be enjoying themselves in this delightfully quaint place.  

​            Denmark may be a small country, more water than land, but it seemed to have more than its share of palaces and castles.  We were losing our enthusiasm for palaces, but did locate the statue of Hans Christian Anderson's Little Mermaid, poised on her rock at the edge of the harbor—we knew that somebody back home would be sure to ask if we'd seen her.  More exciting, however, was the Viking Museum in Roskilde, a short train ride from Copenhagen, where we saw the surprisingly intact remains of an original Viking boat that had been buried for centuries.  Nearby, reconstructions sailed in the bay.  

            Leaving Copenhagen the next morning, we drove past green Jutland farms to Esbjerg, where we boarded another ferry to cross the North Sea to England for our Pan Am flight back to San Francisco.  To our surprise, somebody called out that we were passing Elsinore castle, where that famous Dane Hamlet bemoaned his fate so eloquently. 
            "We could've gone there, had a tour, explored it!" I moaned.
            "You can't do everything, sweetie."  She patted my cheek.  "Next time...."
            Wherever we were, sooner or later, one of us talked about "next time."
To be continued....
​

​            If you enjoy these posts, 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 to several complete short stories and excerpts from my novels.  Please pass them 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 years of marriage.  This is number 34 of a series about our lives and travels. If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017. Older posts you'll find below that are a previous series about later travels.  

​            Sherrill and I often were asked why we traveled so much.  Why did we spend so much time wandering around the world, especially in places that were so different from those we were used to and comfortable in?  Sometimes, we just replied, "Why not?"  A good answer was more complicated.  We knew people who thought that traveling to the places we did risked being contaminated by wrong beliefs.  We soon learned that they would never understand or consider our point of view as anything but foolish and dangerous.
            "What's the point?" they wanted to know.
            So what could we say?  That there were few pleasures to compete with the thrill of wandering unfamiliar streets, of discovering villages and towns unlike any back home, of meeting people who looked, dressed, spoke, and believed differently than we did?  Or was it that traveling gave us a better perspective, that as we engaged with the world we came to understand that our way wasn't the only way or even the best way?  Or, as Hercule Poirot might have said, maybe it was that traveling stretched the little gray cells in our brains? 

​            Sherrill and I both grew up moving around as children, so we didn't mind change and were used to surprises in our lives.  Maybe that was why we weren't satisfied to burrow down in one place. 
            About the time I turned twelve, a package came for me in the mail.  My Uncle Douglas, who'd spent his adult life traveling around the world, had sent me his collection of matchbooks he'd picked up along the way.  They were different from the free ones my father got in bars and markets.  Often oversized and brightly colored, they advertised restaurants and hotels in Europe, South America, and the Far East.  Sometimes, the matches themselves were colored to make pictures: a peacock flaunting an open tail, a palm-bordered Spanish hotel, a curving bay framed by the sands of a golden beach.  Worlds still beyond my grasp, but not my imagination.  I covered the walls of my bedroom with huge maps of the world that I drew and colored on great sheets of butcher paper and then penned in the magical name of each foreign place. 
            My uncle's matchbooks disappeared years ago, but long after, as Sherrill and I traveled, I saved some that I picked up, usually not as nice as his, but colorful and full of memories for us.
            Although we didn't know each other yet, Sherrill and I both were aware as kids that some people were lucky enough to fly around the world on airplanes and travel the seas on ships.  We both grew up curious, wondering about this planet on which we lived.  Our parents taught us, unintentionally no doubt, that although each of us was the hero of his or her own story, we were supporting players in everyone else's.  Somehow, we each figured out that most people, including our parents, were just muddling along, trying to survive and be comfortable.
            "Is this all there is?" we asked.  We both craved something more than that.  

​            As soon as Sherrill graduated from college, her mother moved from California to Hawaii, leaving Sherrill alone in the apartment they'd shared.  After two years in her first job as a librarian in San Jose, Sherrill sailed by herself on the President Cleveland from San Francisco to Honolulu—a modest start into a life of adventure, perhaps, but even then she was not afraid to go places and have new experiences.  It still was more than a year before she and I would drive in her little secondhand Corvair from Berkeley to Mexico City and back, getting married at the Cupid Drive-In Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas on the way down.  
            Maybe some people in the world used funny toilets, ate with their fingers, dressed in their own way, had different ideas about where humanity came from and where it was going, but was that reason to fear or hate them?  Or for them to fear or hate us?  Sherrill and I soon realized that we shared this urge to get out there and meet these people and see where and how they lived.  We traveled because every new experience raised questions, because every answer also was a question in disguise.  It was harder, we learned, to be closed-minded if we'd met, eaten with, and talked with people who had grown up with different traditions and viewpoints than our own.  We liked that. 

​            Let me tell you a story.  The year was 1988.  The Communists were still in power.  Sherrill and I were in the city and territory of Kaliningrad, named for one of Stalin's pals.  Kaliningrad was separated geographically from the rest of the USSR by parts of Poland and Lithuania, but was important as Russia's Baltic sea port.  Much of the old city was destroyed during World War II and replaced with typical Soviet architecture—notably the House of Soviets, a structure of remarkable size and hideousness that had to be abandoned because it began sinking even before it was used.  It still stood, precariously, a monstrous shell.
            The middle-aged woman showing us around Kaliningrad shuffled gloomily from site to site, giving us the official explanations.  Whenever we showed interest or asked questions, she perked up a little.  I had just finished reading a paperback edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's epic about the Siberian prison camps of the USSR, The Gulag Archipelago.
            "Give the book to her," Sherrill whispered to me.  I looked at Sherrill and she nodded.  "Do it."
            As Sherrill and I were saying goodbye, I put the dog-eared book into the guide's hand.
            "For you," I said.
            "For me?" she cried, clutching the volume, then lowering it discreetly.  "Oh my!  Solzhenitsyn!  For me!"
            All works by Solzhenitsyn were forbidden in the Soviet Union, but I hadn't expected such an emotional response—and for an English translation, at that.  Almost in tears, the woman hugged us as we boarded the boat that would carry us away.  I can still see her, in that shapeless patterned dress, long gray sweater, and down-at-the-heel shoes, holding that hefty paperback as if it were a gilded box filled with rare treasure.

​            Today, it's hard to imagine a physical book creating that kind of excitement, but words still have power.  Sherrill and I grew up with books and have always valued them.  When we were still single, working together at the San Jose Public Library, I finished my first novel, a typical novel for a 21 year old, about college life.  I needed a clean copy to send to a contest.
            "I'll do it," Sherrill told me.
            I gave her my manuscript and she did retype the entire book.  That was when I realized that she really was interested in me.  (Fortunately, that novel was never published, but writing it was a turning point for us in several ways.)

​            A few years later, married, we were living in a small apartment in Oakland.  It was in that one-bedroom apartment that she encouraged me to take a very important journey: she was willing to support both of us while I wrote short stories and then the book that became my first published novel.  That journey has continued all these years with its ups and downs, with great successes and some failures, but always moving ahead, one way or another.  For 52 years, we were co-pilots, she encouraging me and supporting me in countless ways.  And we kept on traveling, exploring the world all this time, as well.  

            Yes, some places felt more congenial to us than others, but we never took a trip that we regretted, never wished that we'd stayed home.  Comfort was never the issue for us.  It was always the experience.  In fact, some of the most difficult places to explore were among our favorites.  It was good that we traveled to them when we did, because some of them became battlefields afterwards.  Often, we weren't sure what had happened to friends we'd made in those countries torn by conflict and war. 
            "Aren't you afraid to go to those places?" friends asked us. 
            The truth was that we never were, not while we were there, only afterwards, for our friends and for the treasures being so thoughtlessly destroyed.  In fact, our list of places that we wanted to visit kept growing, an ever-changing kaleidoscope of opportunities.  Although we didn't get to all of them, we didn't do too badly during those five decades.
            To be continued....   
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​            If you enjoy these posts, 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 to several complete short stories and excerpts from my novels.  Please pass them on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.