​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 67 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. 

​              Almost as soon as Sherrill and I reached Hanoi, we had the feeling that this trip would be different from any other we'd taken.  Already, we'd spent more than 30 hours traveling to Bangkok, including a rough spell flying through the edge of a typhoon.  We reached our hotel there at 1:00 AM.  Our continuing flight with Vietnam Air later that morning got us to Hanoi in only one and a half hours, but the ride into the city was just as long—passing countless motorbikes, including one weighted down with six fat pigs in cages.   
              Sherrill and I were surprised to see so many buildings that obviously dated back to the French and Chinese colonial periods.  The ornate old architecture, with its frills and gestures to a long-vanished past, gave Hanoi a distinct charm, even when it was decaying.  The government in the unified Vietnam was Communist, but the economy was capitalist, our guide told us.  People often worked at several jobs, even working at the sides of streets, selling food, cutting hair, giving massages, whatever they could do. 

​              We learned more about life for ordinary citizens one evening, when we joined a local family for dinner in their apartment: a middle-aged woman, her two adult daughters, and the oldest girl's husband, who was Dutch.  When we arrived, they served us rice wine and we settled into their main room, a combination living and dining room.  They all were educated and, except for the mother, spoke English.  The main problem in their lives, it seemed, was economic. It wasn't easy to find a job that paid enough to live comfortably. 
              "But it's a beautiful country," the young husband told us.  "And the people are the most gentle and kind-hearted you would find anywhere."

​              When we set out the next morning, we had no doubt that most of the 4 1/2 million citizens of Hanoi had leaped onto their motorbikes moments before.  Later in the day, we passed more than a hundred parents sitting on motorbikes, waiting for their kids to emerge from a grammar school.  A ride on cyclo-bikes took us careening through traffic to see some of Hanoi's old town and French quarter.  Interesting and colorful as the ride was beneath its veil of pollution, it was a relief to put our feet on the ground again when we stopped.  

​              As we drove to Ha Long Bay a day later the world gradually seemed cleaner, especially after we crossed the Red River.  Farmers were irrigating their fields the ancient way, using baskets on poles, even plowing with wood plows pulled by water buffalo.  A water buffalo trussed on the back of a motorbike sped past us—not very comfortable for either the animal or the man.  Rugged green mountains rose up dramatically as we neared Halong Bay.

​              When we reached the dock area we discovered a bubbling bouillabaisse of wooden junks and smaller vessels, many of them fishing boats of different sizes and types.  The traditional style junks, it seemed, now were strictly for tourists.  Sherrill and I shared a small cabin and tiny bathroom in one.  Meals were up on the deck.  Years later, we read about some of those Halong Bay junks sinking, drowning both crew and passengers.  Once again, we were lucky, but there was always the possibility that one day our luck would run out.  That didn't stop us from traveling, though. 

​              At lunch, we met several interesting people, including a woman in her seventies who during the war spent five years entertaining troops in Vietnam.  This was her first trip back.  As we ate, the junk moved out, sailing between tall, jagged islands draped with cloaks of greenery except where the streaked limestone cliffs plunged naked into the sea.  Nearly 3,000 jagged little islands had been counted in the bay, some little more than green-covered pillars, others much larger, eroded into strange shapes, sometimes with natural arches, caves, and grottoes.  

​              Back in Hanoi the next day, we visited the one remaining building of the Hoa Lo Prison, famous once for its nickname, "the Hanoi Hilton"  because many U.S. prisoners of war were held there during the Vietnam war.  Built by the French in the nineteenth century, the prison was crammed in the days of French Indochina with as many as 2,000 Vietnamese political prisoners.  Most of the displays, however, focused on the time when the North Vietnamese kept U.S. soldiers there.
              On our way south to Hoi An, we stopped at a fish farm, where large cages were immersed in the water between plank catwalks and houseboats.  Climbing down onto a wood walkway, we watched sea creatures hauled up in nets: monster shrimp, huge striped sea snails, crabs, a shark-looking fish, and some sea beasts that we didn't recognize. With the help of a translator, Sherrill talked with a woman in her nineties sitting on her haunches on the planks chewing betel nut. 
              "How long have you been chewing betel?" Sherrill asked.
              "Since she was seven," the translator replied for the old woman.
         "No wonder her teeth are black."  I stepped closer, asking in pantomime if I could take her photograph.  She nodded, then spat red betel nut juice on the planks.  

​              Travel in Vietnam was a constant ricocheting between distant and recent history—from the 16th and 17th centuries when Hoi An was a port used by both Chinese and Japanese traders to when Vietnam was a French colony to the war of the 1970s.  At My Son, nearby, the Cham peoples built temples and towers in the seventh century similar to those that Sherrill and I saw when we visited Cambodia.  However, in the nineteen-seventies, the U.S. dropped bombs on some of My Son's magnificent temples because they were near the Ho Chi Min trail.
              The subject of the war was never far away during this trip.  We stopped at China Beach, the once famous R & R location for thousands of American soldiers.  It was quite an emotional experience for the woman who had entertained troops there.  She walked barefoot into the surf, a tiny figure on the long beach, lost in private thoughts.  Afterwards, she talked with Sherrill and me about her memories. 
              "The soldiers loved it when our troop was here.  They took us out into the water in little boats and things.  One of our girls drowned, though.  I can remember it so clearly."
              Turning away, she stopped talking for a while.  
              We passed Da Nang, which she also remembered. The entire city was a vast military base during the war, she told us.  Now, it seemed to be turning into a city of high rises. 

​              Unexploded mines and bombs still killed people, as late as 2007.  At least six percent of the population was disabled.  This was a serious problem in many parts of the world, we'd learned in our travels.  We'd encountered it in Cambodia and Laos and in Croatia.  Even if many years had passed since the conflict, the land mines often remained buried, ready to maim the unaware.  Dioxin, a chemical related to the notorious Agent Orange still affected the soil and water in Vietnam, even the fish.  When we were there, early in the new century, most of the population had been born after the war, but we saw school groups visiting museums about the war.  After all, it still was part of their lives.  

​              Returning to Hoi An, Sherrill and I explored the Old City, walking along the river, through crowded, fragrant, indoor and outdoor markets, then wandering among different neighborhoods until we reached the white sand beach on the South China Sea.  We passed dozens of tiny shops: in one a man was repairing old TVs, in another someone was fixing motorbikes, and I saw a youth working an aged sewing machine.  That evening, we had dinner alone on a roof terrace overlooking Hoi An, electric lights blinking below and fireflies darting through the air near us. 

​              On the way to the city of Nha Trang, we stopped at a fishing village where families lived on their boats, venturing between floods into the bay to catch whatever they could.  Shanty houses on stilts were connected to land by precarious catwalks.  As many as seven or eight typhoons hit that area every year, we learned.  A hike across town brought us to a giant statue of Buddha.  Along the way, we passed several dark little shops in which we could see through open doors kids playing primitive computer games.  The Buddha, handsome and stoic on his great lotus blossom, looked as if he had been carved out of a monster bar of white soap.  After paying our respects to the Buddha, we indulged in a cab back to our hotel—we had underestimated the impact of the heat and humidity.  

​              We were glad to get to the cooler air of the mountain city of Dalat, once a vacation retreat for French colonial officials, among gently sloping hills, rice paddies, and vegetable patches.  A visit to the Dalat university gave us an opportunity to meet and talk with students—much like young people everywhere, they were smart, ambitious, and eager to leap into the modern world.  

​              Driving through the highland area, we followed the narrow roads among rice terraces and paddy fields, occasionally passing bamboo thickets and fast-flowing streams.  We were surprised to discover that the area still was a center for ethnic hill tribes, each with its own language and traditions.  The women were very handsome in their hand-woven, elaborately embroidered clothing, sometimes with headbands and tassels.  Physically, they reminded us the most of the Hmong people we saw in Laos, although sometimes also of the regally handsome native Peruvians we'd met three years before. 



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              Several thousand people lived in small clusters on the slopes below the mountain of Lang Bin, many of them of the Lat tribe.  Although the area generally was poor, they filled their lives with color.  In one of the long houses, we saw some beautiful fabrics being woven on fairly primitive looms.  The hands of the young weavers moved like hummingbird wings as they pulled the threads into place, their naked feet working below at the same time.  At another place, we watched with fascination the complicated process of constructing  beautiful lanterns from wood and silk.  In the evening, we sipped rice wine while listening to folk songs and watching traditional dances around open fires—a very different experience than anything in the cities.  

​              Arriving in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) after our time in the highlands was like jumping into a wind-whipped sea.  Its eight million people and many thousands of motorbikes and bicycles, all in constant motion, stirred up whirlpools of chaos that left us staring with amazement. There was a lot to see in the city, but getting to it was the challenge.  (Now, eleven years later, the city expects to reach a population of more than 20 million by 2020.)  Past and future were colliding, sometimes violently, in front of our eyes.  

​              Maneuvering between the clouds of exhaust on the streets and the clouds of incense and food smells in the markets, when we could we dove into the somewhat cleaner, definitely cooler, air in the nineteenth century Notre Dame Cathedral, Opera House, and other Beaux Art buildings dating from when the French were trying to recreate Paris in Indochina.  Gigantic wall maps in the 1891 Post Office gave us a glimpse of a long-ago Vietnam.  Crossing a street was terrifying because of the rivers of mopeds in constant motion, but also because the drivers were unpredictable, often suddenly making U-turns into oncoming traffic or swerving wildly as if aiming right at us.  Somehow, Sherrill and I reached the 1880 Hotel Continental, where we lunched amid the Belle Epoch splendor of a long-gone colonial world.  We enjoyed it, but at the same time felt out-of-place and somewhat foolish.  At one point, Sherrill gave me one of her looks, wry may the word to describe it, making it clear that we were in on the joke together, one of the many jokes that we shared during our travels.  

​              Walking through the War Remnants Museum in Saigon was as upsetting as it was fascinating, starting with the military helicopter, fighter plane, tank, and bombers in the walled yard.  Some of what we saw inside the museum was even more upsetting: the "tiger cages" in which the South Vietnamese kept political prisoners, photographs of effects of napalm and Agent Orange and of the My Lai massacre, and even a French guillotine used to execute prisoners in the days of French Indochina.  Sherrill and I agreed that it was undoubtedly good to bring all of this out in the open and probably also good that it was so upsetting, but we questioned the notion that if people saw it all it would stop them from repeating history.  

​              Our last full day in Vietnam we descended so far into the past that we became part of a prehistoric world of huge palm fronds thrusting up from muddy water mottled with chartreuse algae.  A sampan took Sherrill and me into the maze of rivers, swamps, islands, villages and rice paddies and floating markets known as the Mekong Delta—where the Mekong River empties through countless channels into the sea.  Along the way, we sampled several different tropical fruits, some of which we'd never tasted or seen before.  From time to time, we heard and glimpsed brightly hued tropical birds as they darted among the palms and trees.  These watery villages were different than the ones we'd seen before: some floated on the water, others were surrounded by rice paddies or bordered by swampland and coconut palms.  It would fun, I told Sherrill, to come back and spend more time in the Delta area, but we both knew that it wasn't likely to happen. 

​              Returning to Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, we became aware of a couple of campaigns being publicized on billboards and posters around the city.  One was telling people that they must start wearing helmets on motorbikes on December 15, just a week away.  Sherrill and I wondered how successful the campaign would be.  We had noticed on several trips in this part of the world that people to seemed to have an aversion to both seat belts in cars and helmets when riding bicycles and motorbikes.  Maybe they didn't like being told what to do and maybe it was just a kind of fatalism: whatever will happen will happen.  The other campaign was to encourage the use of condoms.  Posters showing condoms with happy, smiley faces were plastered on walls around the city.  Did that effort have a chance of success in the Vietnamese culture?  We had no idea.  Sherrill did have a chance, though, to dart into a book store and buy a copy of a Vietnamese edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.  
               The next day, we rose before dawn to begin our long journey--once again staying overnight in Bangkok en route--back to San Francisco and Berkeley.

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 66 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. 

              The summer of 2007 broke records for heat and wild fires along the Adriatic Sea from Slovenia in the north to southern Greece. That also was the year that Sherrill and I set out with our friend Tom to explore the five countries along that coast. The temperature didn't start out unusually hot, but it steadily, relentlessly, rose.  When our little Slovenian plane from Frankfurt to Ljubljana dropped through the clouds enough to give us a view of Lake Bled circled by forested mountains, it didn't occur to us that an historic heat wave was starting down there.  

             From Ljubljana, we drove back to the lake through gold farmland, green forests, and villages of red tile roofs.  Jet lag had me walking around the lake early the next morning, where a female mallard and four ducklings waddled down the bank, and into the water to join the male waiting like a monarch atop a post jutting up from the rippling water. A striped hot air balloon with a few people in its basket drifted over the lake.
             Our young guide, from neighboring Croatia, took our little group to dinner in a small town hidden in one of the forests, the front walls of many of its seventeenth and eighteenth century buildings decorated with frescoes.  A drive into the mountains one day brought us close to the Italian and Austrian borders, where we visited the largest cave complex in Europe.  A tram took us through a long tunnel and several large chambers until we reached a cathedral-sized space where we continued on foot.  During World War II, the Russians forced prisoners to build new walkways and bridges to expand access to additional chambers.

​              We visited one castle on top of a mountain and another spilling out of a giant cave,  but Sherrill, Tom, and I were more interested in the palace at Lake Bled that once was an official residence of Marshal Tito, the iron-willed Yugoslav ruler after World War II, and now a  hotel.  We walked over late one afternoon, sipped drinks on a terrace facing the lake, and talked to some of the hotel employees about the building, its history, and Tito.  We even found Tito's bunker on the side of a cliff above the palace. 
              After the serenity of Lake Bled, we expected the capital city of Ljubljana to be jarring, but we enjoyed walking along the city's narrow streets, past parks and handsome old buildings.  Several streets were pedestrian only and many were lined with open-air cafes and markets.  With a population of only 200,000, it hardly felt like a major city.  

​              Zagreb, Croatia's capital, was much larger and livelier.  The evening after we arrived, we poked around the lower town and part of the older upper town.  Some streets were closed off for sidewalk cafes and stages.  The public spaces were like a big living room for everyone, the  crowds happily enjoying the singers and bands—as well as, we noticed, quantities of beer, wine, and grappa.  At the same time, I also was impressed by the number of bookstores—more than a dozen within a ten minute walk of our hotel.  Sherrill found a Croatian edition of Alice in Wonderland in one of them to add to her collection.
              The next day, we saw people lighting candles and praying at shrines inside the shadowy gate to the upper town, remembering victims of the Croatian war for independence.  From 1991 to 1995, the Serbs often attacked the city, but never occupied more than its outskirts.  One woman we met said that as a child during one siege period she spent six months in a basement.  

​              As we entered the national museum of art an elderly guard told me to check my water bottle in the cloak room.  When I went over there, I found a bare-chested young man behind the counter pulling up his trousers.  I held out the water bottle, but he waved me away.  The art, as was usually true in small countries, was mostly Croatian, with little from the rest of Europe.  After the museum, Sherrill and I walked over to the botanical gardens, a welcome change from the hot concrete streets.  While we were there, a wedding party, the bride in a strapless white dress, started taking photographs.
              "It always happens," Sherrill whispered, "every trip—weddings."
              "It must be symbolic."
              She smiled.  "If you want symbolic, look over there."
              Down the path, we saw two young men in dark suits with clip-on ties and little badges on their breast pockets—a pair of Mormon missionaries.  We seemed to run into them almost as often as wedding parties.  

​              Our destination the next day was a national park to see dozens of small lakes connected by waterfalls and cascades, but on the way we drove through a large area that still showed major damage from the war with Serbia and Bosnia, many buildings empty shells surrounded by wreckage.  One historic village and the old bridge in its center, our guide told us  had been quickly restored to show Croatian pride and identity after independence.
              "Croatia is shaped like a crescent, Bosnia-Herzegovina pushing at its center.  The border here once was the line of defense against the Ottoman Turks."
              "More symbolism," I whispered to Sherrill.
              We continued south, passing through more ruined towns and villages, toward the ancient city of Split, where the Athena, our 50-passenger ship waited.  Our guide gave us a short history of the area—leading up to the birth and then the death of Yugoslavia, a bloody tale of ethnic conflict from the seventh century into the twenty-first.  Landmines still lurked around there, she told us.
              "For your own safety, I can't stop the bus, not even for photos."
              "Just like in Cambodia," I whispered to Sherrill.

​              At last, we saw the great aqueduct built to bring water to Emperor Diocletian's palace at Split and then our ship. 
              The legend was that Diocletian's palace was so huge that eventually an entire city fit within it.  Soon, we saw that this was not just a legend.  With a footprint of more than 260,000 square feet, it easily had held the shifting populations of ancient, medieval, and renaissance towns.  Even now, at least 3,000 people of the modern city lived inside the palace, many behind walls constructed 1,200 years ago.  In the center, we found what once was the palace's great hall, now an open-air square.  Nearby, we heard singing: five men in black, we discovered, their voices rising powerfully in a gigantic domed room.  One of the sixteen granite sphinxes that Diocletian brought from Egypt pointed the way to the main "street" just beyond.  Only three of the sphinxes survived; the others were smashed by early Christians. 
              Hopscotching from one era to another during the next days, we drove across a small bridge to the medieval island town of Trogir and hiked along its narrow streets to a little square, complete with a miniature Romanesque church, where we found in a small chapel a bearded figure hanging upside down from a hole in the ceiling.
              "What is that supposed to be?" I wondered aloud.
              "It's God," Sherrill said, pointing.  "Look." 
              The clue was that he was holding the world in his hand. 

​              As we ate that evening, the Athena sailed to the Croatian island of Hvar and dropped anchor, our ship like a toy among the private yachts crowding the harbor in front of us.  Several of us took a tender over to the dock to explore for a while, peering in at some of the busy bars, cafes, and dives around the harbor.  Later, while we were waiting for a crewman to let us onto the tender, a young man stumbled up to me.
              "What is that?" he asked, pointing to the streamlined plastic shell of the orange tender bobbing in the water.  "A submarine, or what?"
              Hvar, long ago a haven for pirates and now known more as a summer resort than for its thirteenth century walls, was pretty, but the next, larger, island that we reached two days later appealed to us more: Korcula, birth place of both Marco Polo and our guide. 
              "That's where I went to kindergarten." She pointed to a limestone building shimmering in the sunlight above a great stone wall.  "My father was a sea captain—so was the father of a boy in my class.  We'd stand at that big window and look out to sea for our fathers."
              As we began hiking past the city walls and towers, the day already was getting hot.
              "That's the way it is, now," she told us, "extreme.  Very hot or very cold."
              I noticed a sign that someone had painted on the seawall and asked her to translate.
              "Look at us," she read, "we're still here."
              The street pattern was designed to prevent winter winds from howling through the city.  However, that also meant that we didn't get any breezes to help with the heat.  We went into the Romanesque cathedral primarily to cool off, but were rewarded with a recently restored Tintoretto painting of St. Mark flanked by St. Bartholomew and St. Jerome, its rich colors of burgundy, gold, black, and white freed from centuries of dirt and varnish. 

​              Visitors often say that the highlight of the Dalmatian coast is the city of Dubrovnik, its massive walls clinging to the cliffs above the sea.  It still stood there, a monument to survival, despite the terrible sieges of the recent war.  Starting with Dubrovnik, we had to follow new security procedures, carrying badges with our photographs and passport numbers.  Early that evening, which happened to be the longest day of the year, we went ashore to begin our exploration of the pedestrian-only walled city.  With the slowly fading sky like a curved ceiling above the great walls and historic buildings, the city almost became an artificial Las Vegas panorama. 
              Why?  What compelled them to do it?  That was our question when, early the next day, we drove along the road winding above this unique city and looked down from where the Serbs had shelled it.  And why, although Dubrovnik had been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, did no one from the West try to stop the attack?  With mixed feelings, we walked across the historic bridge and through the old gate into the city.  The streets were narrow enough to shade us from the heat of the day—except when I went up to walk on the old walls while Sherrill wandered among the crowds on the streets and shops below.  From above, the rich colors—scorching blue sky, dark sea, orange and red tile roofs, and gray stone walls—might have been painted by an old master.  

​              About 80 percent of the tile roofs had been replaced since the war.  Forty thousand roof tiles were donated by the city of Toulouse.  From time to time, I came across buildings destroyed by the Serbs, still in ruins.  By mid-afternoon, the main streets were crowded with day trippers from the big cruise liners parked in the bay—they weren't allowed to dock, even at the new port.  Their passengers were given four hours to experience the city. 
              One evening, our guide took several of us to visit and have dinner with some local people at their farm close to the Montenegro border.  "During the war," she told us, "the Montenegrins invaded and occupied this area.  They burned many of the farms, including the one we're visiting."  Until the Serbs under Milosevic stirred up ancient hatreds, the people on both sides of the border had got along together. 
              Luko and Mira, a middle-aged couple married thirty years, welcomed us at a stone farmhouse with an orange tile roof, blue wisteria draped over the entrance.  Opposite, behind a fence, a lazy-eyed donkey and some sheep grazed.
              I asked, with our guide's help as translator, if they were surprised when the Montenegrins invaded.  Of course, they said, they had never imagined that such a thing could happen.  They showed us snapshots taken by neighbors of their burned and gutted farmhouse.  Luko had stayed to fight, but Mina and the children went to Dubrovnik where they lived in a hotel for eight years—even though the city was under siege. 

​              At dawn the next morning, we sailed out past Dubrovnik's gray city walls and rocky cliffs, heading south toward Montenegro. A few hours later, we reached the medieval city of Kotor, wedged between dizzying, craggy peaks and the meandering bay, long ago carved by glaciers.  Tom and I walked with Sherrill through Kotor's sun-baked old town, then joined a small group hiking up the 300 year-old fortified wall that climbed the mountain behind the city.  
              We'd waited until 5 PM to start, but the heat still was fierce.  We gulped from our water bottles and mopped our faces with handkerchiefs, sleeves, whatever we had, stopping now and then to gaze over the tile-roofed town to the bay and along the gray rocky face of the mountains, continually changing shape as the light moved.  Finally, more than an hour later, drenched with sweat, we congratulated each other on reaching the top.  Then, after a brief rest, the seven of us began to trudge down over the slippery broken stones and loose gravel.  The first to reach the harbor stripped to his underwear and jumped into the water. 

​              Most of us were on deck the next day when the Athena pulled up anchor to begin its long voyage to southern Albania.  After lunch, the two tour guides explained more about the violent history of the Balkan peninsula, then opened up a question and answer session with the Hotel Manager, Second Officer, and themselves.  Many of the questions dealt with recent history and the war of the nineties.
              "What were you four Croatians doing when the war started in 1991?"
              Our guide explained that she'd left her home on Korcula for the first time and was starting university in Zagreb, so on top of adjusting to university life she also was coping with daily air raids and curfew.  The Hotel Manager was at his home in central Croatia, where they were bombed daily.  The Second Officer was from Dubrovnik and was there during the war.
              "I can't talk about it," he added, "because I can't be objective."
              The other tour leader was working outside the country at the time, he said, so he was safe, but worried about family and friends back in Croatia.  

​              The Athena sailed all evening and night, reaching Saranda, Albania early in the morning.  Coming into port, we were surprised to see so many unfinished buildings not only near the harbor, but throughout the city and climbing the hills.  The heat was expected to continue during the day, so we left for our shore excursion immediately after breakfast.  Our Albanian guide introduced herself and promised to give us an honest account of her country during the forty minute rides to and from the archeological site.
              The unfinished buildings we saw everywhere, she explained, were an investment in the future.  Privatization allowed people to claim parcels of land, but they had to be working on it to retain ownership.  The country was still poor, despite a decade of progress.
              "After forty years under Enver Hoxha's dictatorship," she admitted, "we're still  on the way from the Middle Ages to the present—not an easy or quick trip."
              Thanks to Hoxha, she said, Albania became completely isolated.  We drove past some of the 750,000 bunkers built around the country and coastline to "protect" Albania and its people from outsiders.  Many of the bunkers had been broken and damaged and "decorated" since the dictator's death.  Now, they hunkered along the rocky shore like giant multi-colored tortoises.  Vast sums of money had been spent on those miles of fortifications.  Why?  According to Hoxha, to keep out the rest of the world, which was insanely jealous of what the Albanian people had.  Since no Albanian could leave the country or have contact with anyone beyond the fortified borders, nobody could contradict him.

              At last, after several close calls on the narrow road, we reached the UNESCO site of Butrint, Albania, with its Greek and Roman ruins.  We stopped at a little cafe/bar rest stop at the entrance.  Because they seldom had foreign visitors, there was no souvenir shop, so they'd brought bags of postcards, booklets, and crafts to set up on tables.  They would accept any currency, they said, dollars, Euros, whatever—but preferably not their own. 
              There wasn't much that we could see in Albania then and few roads to get us anywhere, so we sailed early the next day, stopping at the Greek island of Corfu on our way to Delphi and then Athens, the end of the trip.  The heat had continued to escalate, climbing as high as 111 degrees.  All over Greece people had to be hospitalized and the Acropolis in Athens was closed.  By the time we reached Piraeus, the port for Athens, the sky was darkened with clouds of smoke as forest fires spread across the country.
              The temperatures began to drop a little the next day so the three of us could explore Athens a bit.  Sherrill and I hadn't been there since 1984.  The Acropolis reopened, so Tom and I climbed up to the Parthenon while Sherrill tried to stay cool below.  Two days later, after watching an orange sun struggle into the grimy sky, we left for the airport.  
To be continued....   
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​              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 65 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. 

​              "Hi from Delhi.  We're seeing a lot, despite our 35 hour trip here and jet lag.  Aside from walking into the bathroom door in the middle of the night, no mishaps, so far.  India is astonishing.  Thousands of gods, more than a billion people, the best vegetarian food in the world.  Fabulous forts and palaces, temples and sacred cows everywhere.  We have a great country guide, an Indian gentleman who sounds like Ronald Colman."
              ...From an email to our daughter, October 2006.
​
              When Sherrill and I returned from India, people wanted to know our impressions.  It was hard to sort them out, but the strongest was the kaleidoscope of color.  Navigating the crowded streets of Old Delhi, we were swept up in the preparations for the annual Festival of Lights, people buying candles, fireworks, and gifts to honor Lakshmi, goddess of beauty, wealth, and good fortune.  The streets were lined with sellers of marigolds and buildings draped with lights.  We were dazzled everywhere by the colorful saris women wore, even sweeping out their houses, tending children, or working in the fields.  The sculptures on temples often were painted rainbow colors.  On special occasions people threw powdered colors on each other.

​              A pedal rickshaw ride through Old Delhi took us careening along narrow streets overflowing with merchandise and people under a terrifying chaos of electric wires.  The population of two million all seemed to be out at the same time, even when we visited the largest mosque in India and a magnificent tomb that was model for the Taj Mahal. 
              A couple of days later, our little group was back in bicycle rickshaws, this time weaving through the hectic streets of Varansi on the way to the Ganges River, making our way through motor scooters, small trucks, taxis, bikes, and other rickshaws streaming in all directions, each intersection such a whirlpool that we never knew where we'd come out.  Finally, leaving the rickshaws, we followed our guide on foot through a maze of alleys and tiny streets. 

           We reached the river at the top of the most sacred of the many ghats along the Ganges, then descended several dozen wide steps, passing at least ten bodies being cremated on tall pyres until we got to the water, where we climbed into a large rowboat and went out into the river to watch priests performing ancient rituals, hundreds of people participating and watching.  More bodies, we could see, were brought to be cremated, mourners gathered around, the chief mourner in white, with a shaved head.
              The next morning, we were up at 4:15 to go out on the river to watch the sun rise as people went through their daily ablutions, after which we hiked with our friend Hala and our guide through winding streets and hidden neighborhoods. The local people mostly ignored us.  Back then, few tourists went there, but Sherrill and I always felt that Varanasi was a high point in our years of traveling.  

​              We arrived in the city of Agra on the holiday that everyone had been preparing for, Dawali, celebrating when Lord Vishnu defeated his enemy and rescued his consort, the goddess Parvati.  It seemed like a cross between Christmas and the Fourth of July: families getting together, exchanging gifts, fixing up their homes inside and out, decorating with marigolds and lights, in some areas spreading fresh cow dung on the ground outside them, and setting off firecrackers and fireworks.  

              We'd been looking forward to seeing the famous Red Fort, a fortified red sandstone and marble palace built by several Mugal emperors over a couple of hundred years.  Dominating its hill, it overlooked the Taj Mahal, which we visited later in the afternoon, when the light gradually transformed the colors of the marble and the precious stones set in it.  The great monument to love was larger and more beautiful than we'd expected.  No photograph could capture it any more than photographs can capture the true spectacle of the Grand Canyon. 
            Our guide invited Hala and our group of ten to his home in Agra for Dawali so that we could experience the beauty and warmth of the holiday.  Outside, it was exquisitely decorated with burning oil lamps, marigolds, and other flowers.  Inside, his wife had created a shrine with flowers, images of the deities, and small oil lamps.  Their son, who was in graduate school in Delhi, had come home for the occasion.  The family welcomed us as if we were old friends, serving us traditional homemade treats.  This intimate celebration was another highlight of the trip and of our travels. 

​              The walled city of Jaipur, rose-colored capital of Rajasthan, lived up to its legendary beauty.  One of the most beautiful—as well as practical—buildings was the Hawa Maha, or Wind Palace, its red and pink sandstone facade designed like a honeycomb to allow cooling air to circulate.  Jaipur also was where we bounced and swayed atop an elephant up a mountain road to the Amber Fort.  Once the palace of a powerful raja, with its massive gates, pillared pavilions, grand stairways, and magnificent views, the fort gave us a good idea of the splendor once enjoyed by Mogul nobility, although Sherrill didn't care much for its austere gardens.  Monkeys skittered on rooftops as we walked through jeweled, mirrored arcades

​              A trip through desert country—passing camel carts, overloaded trucks, crowded buses, and wind-whipped acacia trees—took us to Birkaner, another ancient city. 
           When Sherrill woke up the next morning, I handed her a small package.
            "Happy Birthday!"
             When she unwrapped it, she discovered a chain with a 100 year-old rupee coin with King George V's portrait on it that I'd bought in an antique store the day before.  After breakfast, Hala draped three huge necklaces of roses and marigolds around her neck, wishing her a happy birthday.  Then we all toured Birkaner in three-wheel auto-scooter taxis, including a visit to a camel breeding farm where we ate camel milk ice cream—very rich, not great, but not too bad.  That evening at dinner, Hala had arranged for a beautiful birthday cake to be brought out for Sherrill.  

​              The next day, driving deeper into the Rajasthan desert, we passed many villages, camel carts, over-loaded (although richly decorated) trucks, including two trucks by the side of the road that had collided head-on as they approached a railroad crossing.  The gates were down at the crossing, although no train was coming, so traffic had piled up on both sides.  Then a railroad employee appeared from somewhere, waved a green flag, and the gates went up, but that caused a huge traffic jam on the tracks as everyone tried to cross first, trapping us on the tracks along with everyone else.
              "Why doesn't someone do something?" Sherrill wanted to know.
              As if he'd heard her, a man got out of a car and began directing the traffic, himself, breaking up the logjam.  

​              During the next days, we explored one fortress or palace after another, all of them gigantic and ornate, especially the 15th century Meherangarh Fort atop a mesa overlooking the blue-tinted city of Jodhpur: beautifully carved sandstone walls, rooms of gold and silver mirrors.  We even had lunch in a small palace in the center of a lake, monkeys, squirrels, and gigantic bats called flying foxes around us.  Then we continued through farmlands seldom visited by foreigners, people staring curiously and sometimes waving.  As always, the women were working dressed in colorful saris, even when picking crops or carrying bundles of sticks or water jugs on their heads, their clothes bright against the brown earth. 

​              "It's a sea of camels," Sherrill said, as we drove very slowly past several dozen camels loaded with household goods, babies, and toddlers led by women and old folks.  Ahead, we discovered the men with their goat herds, leading the way to new pastures.  It took us at least an hour to maneuver past the caravan and herds. 

​              On our way to a camp where we'd spend several nights in tents, our guide spotted men in white turbans, shirts, and dohtys all splotched with pink.  We learned, when we stopped to talk with them, that they'd been to a wedding where colored powder had been thrown—a traditional ritual.  While we were talking, a crowd gathered around us. 
              "Namaste," we greeted each other, putting our hands together—which means, "I greet the light within you." 
              Some of the villagers wanted their pictures taken with us.  A brightly dressed woman with an ornate nose ring connected with a chain to her ear was waiting with her grandson for a bus.  Several buses picked up villagers and dropped off others.  Our guide brought us tea from the man who ran a little shop, but when he tried to pay the man refused his money.  

​              Our tents stood in a row atop a 100 year old dam, next to a lake and farmland.  The camp owners, three young brothers, welcomed us.  The whole area once was their family's private hunting preserve, but it was broken up after India became independent.  We ate in a large open-sided tent from which we could see long-tailed green parakeets, spotted owlets, and other birds.  The next morning, we drove in two jeeps to visit local farms, a village, and a school.
              At the village, we were invited to join a pre-wedding celebration.  The groom's family had come to meet the bride's family, but the groom wasn't allowed to see the young bride—she looked about fifteen—until the wedding day. The grandfather blessed us, putting the spot representing the third eye on each of our foreheads. 

​              After two idyllic days and nights at the tent camp, we took a back road south, deep into territory that seldom saw tourists.  Women in orange and yellow saris were sorting red chili peppers and threshing millet in the middle of the road.  We passed a family of pigs devouring piles of garbage and spied countless small shrines along the pavement and bats hanging from electric wires.  Finally, we reached the largest Jain temple in the world, an incredible mountain of marble carved with delicate lacy patterns, as astonishing inside as outside.  We never knew what was around a corner—it could be horrible or wonderful.

​              We were nearing the end of our trip, but our friend Hala had arranged a conclusion to remember: invitations to a party given by the Maharaja of Udaipur on his private island.  Dressed in whatever finery we'd brought, we went down to the royal dock on the lake, showed our invitations, and walked down a red carpet while a band played.  After nonalcoholic cocktails, we got on a boat to go to a palace on the island.
              From the boats, we walked through gardens and courtyards, past shrubs covered with small lights and ponds with shimmering flowers.  Then we joined the other guests for the evening's event honoring Lord Brahma, creator of the universe.  Speeches, music, and dances followed, then fireworks, cocktails (alcoholic, this time) and buffet dinner.  During drinks, the Maharaja wandered around shaking hands.  With his portly physique, white beard, and moustache, he looked like an Indian Santa Claus.  He was the 76th head of the Mewar dynasty, although, of course, he no longer ruled anything, except his businesses. 

​             Although we didn't get much sleep. the next morning we left early to get our flight to Aurangabad for our visit to Ajanta: a huge horseshoe around a canyon of manmade caves, temples and monasteries, going back hundreds of years BC. We had a different, younger guide there who had his own perspective on India. 
        "Yes, the economy is growing," he told us, "but corruption has become a way of life."
              We spent most of the day exploring the caves (lots of carved stairs).  All of the art, from giant statues to small exquisite paintings, was about Buddha.  For over a thousand years, the caves were safe because they were abandoned and forgotten.  Now, they may need to be closed again to preserve them.
              Sherrill stopped to talk with an elderly caretaker while I climbed higher.  When he asked her age and she told him, he was astonished.
              "And she still has her own teeth!" he shouted to his friends. 

              The next day, we continued to the great cave temples at Ellora, all carved out of a single mountainside.  The biggest Hindu temple there is the largest cut-out monolithic structure in the world.  Then, the day after that, we flew to Mumbai (Bombay) and bounced to Singapore, Korea, and San Francisco: exhausting just to remember, these years later.                                           
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.  You also might enjoy reading the new e-book of my early novel, The Night Action, set in San Francisco's North Beach in the 1960s.  The book is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and other online retailers.  Click on the title or Here for the link. 
              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 64 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. 

​              No doubt about it, it's work planning and organizing a trip on your own, but it also can be part of the fun.  Sherrill and I discovered that we could take a train straight from Fiumicino Airport to Rome's central Termini—no need for a bus.  Although we'd been to Rome twice before, we wanted to visit some new places, including the just-restored Ara Pacis (altar of peace) and Mausoleum of Augustus by the Tiber.
              The train to Naples when we left Rome after a couple of days was much faster than the local trains we endured in 1978 because of the Italian passion for strikes that start and stop without warning.  This time, we were able to really explore the city, starting with the archaeology museum, including the adults-only room of frescoes from Pompeii.  A self-guided walking tour of old Naples, up and down hills and through a kaleidoscope of neighborhoods took us from the castle on the bay to the Galleria shopping arcade that rivals Milan's venerable one, then on to a tour of the San Carlo Opera House, where we learned about its long history.  Along the way, we stopped for lunch in a little trattoria that we discovered and would have returned to if we'd remembered how to find it.  

​              A 40-minute train ride a few days later to Caserta to see Europe's largest palace and its gardens proved once again that schedules and time tables didn't necessarily mean much in Italy.  All the guidebooks said the palace was open but we found it tightly locked and a crowd in front proclaiming its anger in a dozen languages and accents.  Since nobody was getting in, we returned to Naples, where we took a train across town and then a funicular up the side of a mountain to a Renaissance castle and Baroque monastery—and a spectacular view of the city, bay, and Vesuvius.
              "Nobody can say we're not flexible," I told Sherrill.
              "Yes, dear," she replied. "Nobody can say that."  

​            Later,  we rode the funicular back down the mountain and took a bus up a different hill to the Naples museum of art where we happily wallowed in a special exhibition of Titian paintings before riding still another bus back down.  An old man at the bus stop by the museum pantomimed a warning about pickpockets as we got on the bus.  It turned out that he was right.  When we got off, I discovered that my front left pants pocket had been emptied—of used bus and train tickets.  Everything else, as always, was under my clothes.  
              Another day, another series of train rides: first to the remains of the buried city of Heculaneum, which turned out to be closed (of course) because of a "staff meeting"—that is, somebody explained, a temporary strike.  So we took another train to Pompeii, which we discovered was closed for its morning strike.  Eventually, we got into Pompeii and discovered that a great deal more of the ancient city had been uncovered and restored since 1978.  We tried to see it all, despite the terrible heat and lack of shade.  Although we drank water constantly and rested from time to time, Sherrill turned quite pink.  

              Herculaneum, open at last, was better preserved we discovered than its larger neighbor, primarily because Vesuvius had covered it with mud, not ash.  In its prime, it must have been a very elegant little town.  Even now, its mosaics and frescoes were in remarkable condition.  However, despite all the water, we felt miserably dehydrated.  Maybe we shouldn't have drunk that whole bottle of wine at lunch back in Pompeii. 
                 *             *             *   
              "At least, I'm not driving!" Sherrill told me the next day, as she stared out the bus window at the blue sea and sky meeting on the horizon.  

​              We'd taken a train from Naples to Sorrento (which we discovered was full of British tourists lazily savoring both sunshine and wine) and now were on a bus speeding along the spectacular curves of the Amalfi Drive.  After briefly stopping at Positano, a startlingly vertical town that plummeted down a series of cliffs to the bay, eventually we reached the excessively picturesque town of Amalfi.  We found a small hotel just off the Piazza del Duomo, which turned out to be a perfect spot from which to watch a political rally in the piazza while we relaxed with cheese and wine.  From time to time, Sherrill fed some local dogs bits of garlic bread.  

​              Early the next morning, I strolled around Amalfi, which felt like small towns everywhere, no tourists, just local folks gossiping, cleaning the narrow cobblestone streets, setting up their shops, shouting affectionately at each other.  I walked out to a point high above the bay where an old hotel faced the sea—one where Wagner had stayed.  I could picture him there, furiously working, inspired by storms churning up the dark water. 

​              Sherrill and I hated to abandon Amalfi's many charms, but the next day we took a ferry across the bay to Salerno, which, we agreed, had little charm.  Most of its old town had been destroyed during World War II, but we located a small hotel near the train station then rode a local train to the village of Paestum, where we hiked up to a group of the best preserved Greek temples in the world, even better than those we'd seen in Sicily and far better than any in Greece. The weather was warm, but not as brutal as at Pompeii. The huge Doric temples of golden stone stood magnificently amid the ruins of the ancient city, as if we could walk right into them and pay tribute to Hera or Neptune.  

​              On the train back to Salerno, we talked with an Australian woman who was traveling around Europe by herself for six months. 
              "We all do this," she said, "because bleeding Australia is so far from everything else."
              Her partner, she told us, was married to another woman, the three of them living together—still, there she was wandering alone for six months, making her plans as she went.
              Salerno, that evening, was bouncing.  We strolled out a pedestrian street filled with people of all ages doing the traditional passeggiata, but some also were campaigning, because the Saturday and Sunday coming up were election days.  Several piazzas were taken over by the political parties.  Finally, we reached what was left of the old town after the wartime bombing, where we ate a typical meal of the area: melanzana (eggplant) and frutta de mare (seafood).  Simple fare, but well prepared.
                                                            *          *          *

​              A train across the foot of the Italian peninsula brought us to the town of Taranto on the arch of the boot, named after the tarantula.  (The dance of the Tarantella was born there, it was said that if you were bitten by a tarantula you had to dance nonstop or you died.)  In fact, Sherrill had a big bite on her arm, red and quite swollen, but we decided that it probably was not from a tarantula.  Eventually, it faded away.  

​              From the train, we gazed out at fields and hills covered with yellow Scotch broom.  The houses there had flat roofs, more like Greece than the rest of Italy.  Soon, we were passing orchards of gnarled old olive trees.  For a while, as the train continued south, we chatted with a red-haired woman from Bulgaria.  We were lucky that we spoke today's universal language, but we didn't know that in just two years we'd be exploring her country.  In Taranto, we changed trains for Brindisi, then changed for Lecce facing the Adriatic on the heel of the boot.
              The cab driver who picked us up at Lecce's station told us that the hotel we wanted didn't exist anymore and took us instead to a B and B also near the historic Baroque section of the city.  The couple running it seemed awfully buddy-buddy with the driver, I thought, and it was hard for me to get a straight answer from them about the price for the room.  I should have walked out then, but after our long train journey Sherrill and I just wanted to rest. The room was okay, but the next morning for breakfast we were given a note to take to a cafe around the corner, where we each got a hard roll and cup of coffee. 
              "That's all?" I asked the counter man.
              "Si.  E tutto."  

​              Nevertheless, we were glad to be in Lecce, a beautiful city almost at the bottom of the Italian boot.  We had a splendid time strolling along its streets, admiring its magnificent architecture, from the Baroque Piazza del Duomo and its astonishing cathedral to the equally amazing Basilica di Santa Croce.  The whole city was full of elaborately carved facades exploding into clouds of joyous angels, triumphant saints, dragons and birds, heralds and lions—except for a second century AD Roman amphitheatre in the middle of the whole drunken place.  When we worked up an appetite, easy to do hiking over the cobblestones after our prison-fare breakfast, we found a restaurant where we sampled the hearty rustico-style cooking and robust red wines of the region. 
              From Lecce we took a train north from the pointed heel of the boot along the Adriatic coast to the busy port city of Bari.  (The morning we left Lecce, the hotel proprietor and I argued about the amount due and two days later Sherrill realized that one of her blouses was missing—for whatever reason.  However, we didn't let any of that spoil our memories of Lecce.)  Bari's new city wasn't very interesting, but we enjoyed exploring the old part of town.

​              If we ever had any doubts, we had proof that Santa Claus was dead when we saw St. Nicholas's tomb in the Basilica of San Nicola in Bari.  One evening, after exploring the old waterfront and sprawling Romanesque castle, we indulged in some splendid red wine, delicious mussels, pasta, and artichoke flan.  A British couple sat at the table next to us with a beautiful baby girl and a young boy who looked like Christopher Robin.  We met them again at our next stop, the ancient cave town of Matera.
              An hour and a half by train through olive groves brought us back in time to one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, the hillside town of Matera.  We hiked In the broiling sun along its steep twisting streets, exploring the homes dug into the hills and cliffs.  The ancient town had been carved along a rocky ravine, facades and other rooms added much later.  Even churches were cut into the cliff.  Only in the 1950s did the Italian government force most of the population to move out.  Recently, a number of movies had been filmed there, including Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ.  Maybe it didn't look exactly like Bethlehem, but it definitely looked ancient.  

​              A couple of days later, we returned to Bari to head north again, then began the seven hour trip on the Eurostar from the hot south to Bologna.  When we turned inland, the weather grew cloudy and we arrived with a cloudburst, but the next day was beautiful.  The rule when traveling is: be prepared for anything.  Sherrill always was, with a folding umbrella and rain hat in her purse. 

             Neither of us expected that Bologna would become one of our favorite Italian cities, but it did.  Part of its charm was the old arched porticoes lining its streets.  Even new buildings were built with arcades, so the weather hardly mattered.  The center of the old town still was surprisingly medieval with its square towers (one leaning dramatically), and the massive unfinished Basilica of San Petronio that looked as if a giant had come along and started to skin it.  We enjoyed wandering among the university buildings scattered around the old city—it's said to be the oldest university in Europe—and were especially fascinated by the ancient anatomical theatre and accompanying exhibits, including skeletons and models showing the networks of muscles and veins beneath the skin. 

​              One of Bologna's pleasures was that it wasn't touristy.  It lacked the famous attractions of Venice, Florence, and the Cinque Terre.  We saw no other Americans, just a few Germans and British.  It also had its own wonderful version of Italian cuisine.  Our favorite example was the dinner we had one night at Cesari's restaurant on a side street near the Duomo.  Cesari, himself, guided our choices: asparagus flan and tomato aspic, a bottle of Sangiovese di Romagna Riserva, ravioli stuffed with pumpkin and goat cheese, then veal with asparagus sauce and sweet and sour rabbit with olives and onions and polenta.  No room for dolci, alas. 
              Mostly, we enjoyed wandering around Bologna's old city.  When we stopped to look at the 18th century theatre, we chanced onto a dress rehearsal of a dance show and were taken to watch from our own box.  Some of the dancers were in 18th century costumes, others almost naked.  A Don Juan figure in blue pantaloons danced barefooted—until he descended into Hell.
           In one small church, we found a gorgeous Cimabue Madonna and child in remarkable condition.  We wanted a postcard of it, but the place seemed deserted.  Finally, we located a caretaker who took us through a series of back rooms where he presented us to an old man who took us to another room (that he had to unlock).  The walls were covered with tall wooden cabinets that he opened and closed until he found the drawer with the postcards.  He'd worked so hard that we bought several—then he didn't know how much to charge us.

​              As much as we liked Bologna, we dragged ourselves away for the hour train ride to Parma, the "city of art."  Parma's cathedral was an impressive Romanesque monster, but the real treasure was the 13th century baptistery next to it: an 8-sided silo with fine carvings on the outside, then inside a fantasy of colors and shapes rising in a great inverted cone.  We discovered other splendid churches and streets on which buildings of ocher, rust, and orange alternated, many of them displaying humorous and grotesque knockers and carvings on their doors and under their windows: weird figures with open mouths, lolling tongues, and bugging eyes.  

              The city's infatuation with the grotesque reached its peak in the Puppet Castle, a museum dedicated to three centuries of hand puppets, marionettes, carved puppet heads, props, and scenery.  Ah, what we could have done with those, Sherrill and I agreed, back when we were putting on puppet shows at the San Jose library children's room.  At the Farnese Palace, we had a chance to explore probably the most beautiful theater we'd ever seen.  As magnificent as it was, inspired by Palladio's theater designs, built in 1618 for Cosimo de Medici's visit to Parma, this great half circle of columned and arched tiers facing a handsome stage sat there almost unused during its long life, although it was damaged in a 1944 bombing raid and then restored.  
              From Parma, we trained to Milan, where eventually we got a plane to San Francisco.  People often asked us what our favorite country was.  Increasingly, we answered, "Italy, of course!" 
​
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.  You also might enjoy reading the new e-book of my early novel The Night Action, a tale of San Francisco's North Beach in the 1960s -- available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and other online retailers.  Click on the title or Here for the link. 

              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.