We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Bordeaux is a small city (pop 260,000) but including its suburbs around 1.5 milion, near the mouth of the Garonne River.
Is it a tourist city? Kinda sorta. The Nouvelle Aquitaine is especially popular with Brits. It's a short ride for them to decent food. The downtown is a walking place, with a long promenade along the river. Cafes packed at 6 pm.
Two comments: their Vins Ordinaire are many notches above American and, second, the buckets of mussels are wonderful.
Our house was on this alley in Sarlat (Sarlat-le-Caneda). Church to the right, Lantern of the Dead behind commemorating the dead from the plagues. More below the fold -
Lokrum Island is about a 20-minute ferry ride from Dubrovnik's Old Town Port. It's a park, really, with a cafe, trails, an abandoned Benedictione monastery, and swim ladders along the shores. Sorta like Central Park for Manhattan but with swimming and sunbathing.
In June, the Adriatic is not warm but refreshing and comfortable. We met Aussies and Californians in that pictured beach.
The Croatian coast is almost entirely rocky which is why they put swim ladders on the rocks. The rungs are slippery and hurt your feet so if we ever go back we'll bring water shoes. Yes, the boat swim ladders are the same.
Back from a merry Christmastime in olde England with family including our 15 month-old rambunctious grandlad and his grandma -with a couple of days in London too.
A child-friendly Christmas Day service in our village chapel, lots of chilly rural hikes, day and nighttime urban hikes in a crowded London to see all the sights. Evensong in St. Paul's, and a tour of Westminster Cathedral.
Night comes early up there - by 4 -4:30 it's dark.
Yes, London is full of immigrants. More than NYC where we are venturing today for the opera. Carpe diem.
The Queen Mary 2 still does them. It's a 7-day crossing, not a cruise. NYC to Southampton in the UK.
I've done quite a few crossings back in the day, and enjoyed them enormously. Some Cunard, some Holland-American. They used to be sort-of formal (ties for boys at dinner, for example) but more relaxed now. Same for Med cruises which are wonderful.
Not be be compared with the mass market Caribbean cruises.
I've never done a winter crossing, but I'd do it happily:
Several of the towns (mostly villages) in southwestern France were charming as hell. We did not spend any time in Bordeaux, which is a city. Our only time in Bordeaux was changing from the bullet train from Paris to the slow local train to Seurlat.
These village people view the EU inspectors as "Gestapo." They want to be left alone, but the ruling institutions will not. They warn eachother about EU officers coming to their farms, their cheeses, their meat, their jams, their weekly village markets, etc.
Our delightful and adaptable guide and driver brought us there for our picnic lunch on the banks of the Vezere river. Tomatoes from his garden, a little rosemary-flavored pasta, a liqueur his father makes, a local sausage, a farmer's cheese (certainly illegal), and a hunk of chocolate.
The Verzere River joins the Dordogne near Bordeaux. Yeah, of course the Vikings (mostly Normans from Normandy, I think) went up there causing havoc - rape, theft, murder and other fun things - in the 900s or whenever.
I think we drove over 1000 miles in our rented Nissan (nice car) from Lisbon airport, east into central Portugal, then north to the Douro Valley, then west to Porto, then down to Lisbon again. 12 days. The central plains are all agricultural (cork groves, olive groves, hayfields, huge pastures for sheep and cattle) then north (apples, chestnuts, peaches, cherries) until the endless hillside vineyards begin.
- The highways are excellent and well-marked. A pleasure. No traffic. Zero litter. Good truck lanes on hills.
- The rest stops are unprepossessing until you get inside. Really nice.
- Never saw anything but spotless bathrooms anywhere.
- Storks nesting all over, especially on powerline structures. Lots of swallows too. Harriers and Golden Eagles on hillsides.
- Off-highway, country roads. Good condition but curvy.
- You get tired of seeing hillside castles and fortifications. Wars since Roman times. We stayed in a few old fortified places.
- Everybody speaks at least some English, from grade school.
- Things generally are much less expensive than I expected.
- Meals are too large. Best thing I had there was a pile of sliced foie gras with a good drizzle of port wine reduction. Mrs. BD's favorite was a venison stew full of whole chestnuts. Yes, their pork and bacalao and oysters and fried cuttlefish too. Octopus always on menus too.
- The standard beer is SuperBock.
- Mapquest works perfectly. So does Alltrails for hiking. Interestingly, Merlin works for bird song. Those apps are life-changing for travelers.
- May is perfect. Maybe up to 70 day, 50s at night. Summer too hot.
- Plenty of Asian tourists. Few Moslems to be seen. We met a few people to connect with - an older Aussie guy smoking while his wife was in some shop, a couple from Newfoundland (really) but he grew up in Yonkers, and a serious boating couple from Connecticut who had done the Great Loop three times. Sheesh.
- If you ever imagined that Porto was a cute fishing village, think again. Streets crowded with tourists - Brits, Asians, Scandinavians, Germans, Canadians - all sorts. Not lots of Americans.
On our drive south from Porto to Obidos, we stopped in a seaside joint for grilled sardines. Nice. I do not know why they gave me a dark beer, but it was hydrating.
Mrs. BD is a world-class trip-planner and an adventurous one too:
As I mentioned earlier, trips down (up) the Nile have been popular since the 1850s. They used to go to the first cataract, but the Aswan High Dam now prevents that. Thus you do not get to see hippos or crocodiles.
Most trips go from Luxor upstream south to Aswan, with stops at places of interest. There might be as many as 50 riverboats on these routes. Naturally, we took the most expensive one which was quite comfortable with attentive, cheerful service. The windows open, which I like.
They have a/c, but no need for that in January. They have no heat.
In this pic from the Sun Deck, the Nile flood plain is very narrow before the desert begins. In other areas it can be a couple of miles:
We flew from Cairo to Luxor. Luxor, besides being a lovely town, has Karnak, the Luxor Temple, and lots more. Yeah, if you are of a certain age it can be hard not to think of Johnny Carson.
Interesting that Luxor has been a riverboat tourist spot since the 1850s. Mostly Brits, Americans, and French at that time. Good for a "rest cure," "good air for the lungs," - and work for the mostly-amateur archeologists.
We met our elegant riverboat (with a gym and pool on board) in Luxor. The Sonesta St. George. The boat's lobby all set up for January Coptic Christmas (our Captain and many of the crew were Coptic and, as I mentioned earlier, few of the passengers were American or Brit) :
That nice lady was our Cairo guide for 3 days. Hassam was our driver - excellent too but he had no English. Yes, we liked to stop for coffee.
From our trip:
- They like US dollars - not their own currency.
- Everybody expects baksheesh (in US dollars), even if you are an Asian tourist. No Euros either. For everything including using a bathroom.
- Everyone has a cell phone
- Nothing seems dangerous, but you are out of place in non-tourist sites without an Arabic-speaking guide. It's a bargaining culture too, so everything feels like they want to rip you off. Cairo is dirty, kinda random. Has some top-knotch hotels.
- Feral cats and dogs are everywhere. No pets.
- Zero recreational boats on the Nile. All work boats.
- The Coptic Christian religion is alive and well, thus all the Christmas decorations. There are no Jews in Egypt now, but there used to be.
- Every male smokes cigarettes, except a few who smoke hookahs.
- English is their second language. Not widely spoken, though.
- All those camels are just for tourist photos. I refused that.
- Even in Cairo, lots (not most) of guys wear thobes with turbans.
Mrs. BD found, in a box of stuff in the basement, my great grandmother's journal of her trip to Egypt in 1908. 1908 handwriting is a little difficult to decipher. Elegant, but faded.
In the good old days, people journaled their travels. As I read it, they were in Paris, Munich, Italy (Stresa and Rome), Athens, Jerusalem, and Egypt. The Grand Tour with their kids.
Amused me that they stayed in the same hotel in Stresa (Grand Hotel Borromeo) that we did a few years ago. Our lad met us there from the train up from Rome. I recall we brought him one or two big jars of peanut butter, which he could not find in stores during his job in Italy. Then we all had some fun on hikes and trains. It did not all go well, but that's adventure.
Another cool thing with this find is that we are headed to Egypt in January, so it's timely.
Advice: one kipper is plenty for breakfast. They are huge.
Oh - I notice on their site that they have shortened the hikes. That might be better for some people. Remember, European hiking has different difficulty standards.
Pic is a crowded Cape Cod beach - the bay, at Wellfleet. Duck Harbor. You can walk it for hours, if you bring enough water. Can take dogs there, off leash of course. Do dogs love that? Guess. At low tide, it is dog heaven.
Mitcham's Provincetown Seafood Cookbook. His Kale Soup and Haddock Almondine, along with all the rest of his Portuguese-influenced recipes - are immortal, but his Baked Stuffed Cod is the best. The whole Cape area has lots of Portuguese descended from the visiting Cod fishermen (Emeril, from Fall River, is one.) Interesting fellow, Mitcham. Highly productive in his life; rarely, if ever, sober from what I heard. Dead now, at 77.
I have a few other out of print Cape Cod area history books that I won't link because even Abe's doesn't have them.
Pic is JFK in a snowstorm last week. Managed to get out after an extensive de-icing of the airplane.Got lucky - the plane had managed to arrive the night before in a sleet storm.
I always forget something, so I have a travel checklist to run through.
Obviously one does not need everything for every trip - it depends on what your plans are - but I print it out, circle what I'll need for a given trip, then check them off when they're thrown in the bag. Perhaps it seems obsessive, but it is annoying to arrive somewhere and to find that you forgot to pack any socks. On my last trip, forgot to pack a t-shirt for snorkeling, had to buy one for $25. Mrs. BD does her packing her own way, and always brings too much stuff. That's what females do.
I travel too light, she travels too heavy.
My travel checklist below the fold. Obviously you just bring what you need for a given trip. Let me know what I have left out, and I will add items.
What has occurred in the last week, for me, has been significantly bad. Nothing measured or caught for medical worseness - just that radiation on your brain for 6 weeks slowly causes growth in skull brain reduction in the region after about 4-5 weeks as language and memory slows due to expansions of brain from this. Over time, this will reduce. It ended all yesterday and I headed down to FL to live with my in-laws who were very grateful to offer themselves to me. They are in their late 87s and in wonderful shape than my own parents - and they have been AMAZINGLY HELPFUL helping me with my word members and working through when I hit memory or language slowdowns. As an FYI, over 32 years of married to their daughter, I have gained a great deal of love and support for these people, even as both my parents and one stepmother remain alive, they are simply not capable of keeping up with me at all the way my in-laws have. I owe them great love and support for their effort and support.
Mrs. BD found, in a box of stuff in the basement, my great grandmother's journal of her trip to Egypt in 1908. 1908 handwriting is a little difficult to decipher. Elegant, but faded.
