As if I'd need an excuse!

Well, 3/25 is Tolkien Reading Day, which should be pretty self-explanatory. A little J.R.R.T. can brighten up most any day, and honoring the man/author by reading his works seems highly appropriate.

Totally inappropriate is the design of the Dodge Caliber, which I had reason to drive as a rental car recently. I don't know if I've driven a car with worse visibility all around as that unfortunate vehicle. Not only was the rear obstructed by thick, opaque structures, but the front pillars also seemed to be perfectly placed to obscure important swaths of view. It also handled awkwardly, and the automatic transmission wasn't smooth at all at low speeds. Anyhow, I survived my brush with lackluster design, and will certainly never subject myself to such a vehicle again if I can at all help it.

I may have encountered another one of those places that I'm going to have to visit sometime in my life. I was reading back issues of a certain magazine (Backpacker), and I read an article about hiking the length of Offa's Dyke that essentially runs the length of the Wales-England border. It was built way back when during more hostile times than these. It looks like a lot of fun, like something that could likely be found in Middle Earth, and has certainly caught in my mind. When I have these sorts of ideas take up residence between my ears I end up doing things like going to Antarctica, sailing to Easter Island, endeavoring to become and astronaut, etc. Life is fun, and I'm thankful for the opportunities I've had.

I'm also thankful I'm not a resident of northern Honshu, or Japan in general right now. Talk about a trio of nastiness to deal with...

Anyhow, this is getting long. I'm still in limbo on the employment front, blah-blah-blah.

“You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.”
~Aristotle

Carry on then, carry on.

Well, there has not been much in the way of excitement since my last post. I’m still trying to figure out where life will take me next. Nothing is happening very quickly, but that’s nothing new. In the meantime I’ve been doing the usual errands and helping out around the homestead. Today I raked a bunch of gravel on our lane road, which was quite enjoyable. No kidding! It was a beautiful day today, though our temperatures have really been on a roller coaster in the last week or two. But, there is some green out there now, with grass and wheat just beginning to grow. Spring will get here eventually, but we continental dwellers-far from the ocean’s moderation-know there could be plenty of snow and winter yet to come. In the meantime, I’ll carry on as required.

“Step by step walk the thousand-mile road.”
~Miyamoto Musashi

Waiting Game…The Sequel

The usual process of job search, application, and rejection is in full effect here once again. Granted, that has been interrupted quite a bit in the last few days with lots of snow shoveling, since we here in central Kansas have gotten a thick blanket of the white stuff from the last big winter storm. I think this last one deposited 15-17” here, and did it quickly enough at times that the driveway and patio areas we’d started shoveling were already covered again by the time we finished the whole thing.

Anyhow, what comes next is still very much in the works, though without quite the sharpness of angst about the future that was felt 2 years ago when I was in the same position. I guess it’s a good lesson to have learned so thoroughly, given the state of the global economy. It is a good fight, so I will certainly keep fighting it.

“A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her.”
~David Brinkley

Change, hopefully with restraint

Boy did we narrowly dodge some interesting (in the way the Chinese curse someone to live in interesting times) developments in Egypt. That people are already gathering at the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo to forestall any looting or ransacking of that extremely important vessel of the human record is heartening, but a bit scary. Hopefully people will be able to get back to peaceful conditions without many being hurt, as well as many works of art and sources of understanding of those that went before being lost or damaged. With similar demonstrations of dissatisfaction and discontent happening in Tunisia and Yemen, one wonders what might be afoot in that part of the world.

Good luck to us all.

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.”
~Abraham Lincoln

Backtracking: more Turkey & NYC

The circle of the trip then brought us back to Istanbul for a few more days, though the lame travel agency nearly shafted us by not booking the plane tickets it was supposed to have set up sometime earlier than 45 minutes before takeoff. Istanbul had loads to see, and we had a great time in the archaeological museum there seeing many relics from places we’d visited and other places (the Alexander Sarcophagus was indeed amazing). Hagia Sofia, which is one of those amazing buildings from antiquity still in use in the 21st century, consumed much space on memory cards with way too many photos being taken.


The Topkapi Palace, where the sultans hung out consumed nearly an entire day of the trip. The roofs on the towers shown below and the conical tops of the fireplaces inside the palace totally reminded me of gnomes and other fanciful creatures. There were also plenty of riches to be seen there, including the famous Topkapi Dagger, with its rather large emeralds on the handle.


After a long flight from Istanbul, we arrived just prior to a nor-easter storm dumping a bunch of snow on New York City. The icy wind was really blasting the next morning when the view was taken in (here, of the Flatiron Building) from the lower observation deck of the Empire State Building.

In true “Ghostbusters” fan fashion, the pilgrimage was also made to the New York Public Library, with its fabulous main reading rooms.

A considerable amount of time was spent acquiring tickets for and attending a taping of the Late Show with David Letterman, which was a fun change of pace. Seeing place that the Beatles played way back when was pretty interesting, too. It's amazing how brief the time line of events in this country is compared to other places in the world.

So, other than a marathon stint in the Greyhound bus system for just over 30 hours, I made it home in one piece, though pretty tired. This trip garnered me my 41st country and my 7th continent on my life’s travel list, and seemed to be just jam packed with cultural and historical treasures, not to mention a wide variety of landscapes.

What comes next? That's a good question, which I'm working on now, but who knows what will actually come to pass? Life keeps itself interesting in that way, for sure.

“Next to seeing land, there is no sight which makes one realize he is drawing near home, than to see the same heavens, under which he was born, shining at night over his head.”
~Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

Backtracking: Turkey Part 1

A couple hours in an airplane changed the dynamics of our surroundings drastically, as we hit the ground running seeing the sights in Istanbul, Turkey. The first afternoon we saw a couple sights, including the Blue Mosque (not pictured) and the Basilica Cistern. That latter sight (pictured below) was one of those places I’ve always wanted to visit, since seeing a movie at a young age that featured it. In this case, the movie in question was “From Russia With Love”, and the cistern totally did not disappoint.

It was then off on a whirlwind trip of western Turkey over the next three days. The first stop was the World War 1 battlefield on the Gallipoli Peninsula. We mostly visited the more northerly sights, including this small graveyard near ANZAC Beach, with “the Sphinx” in the background. Visiting here reminded me of the battlefield at Gettysburg, with lots of much-fabled locations and names and events that took place during the battle. While this is not a battle that is paid much mind in the U.S., having lived and worked around plenty of Aussies and Kiwis, I understand why it figures so importantly in the relatively brief histories of their countries.

The next day we visited a place some guy named Homer (not Simpson) wrote about a few years back: Troy. Yeah, Troy. This is a real sleeper of a destination. It’s not the most visually striking or breathtaking, but it really felt like a very special place. Nestled amongst sleepy farmlands, this multi-layered city is still just hanging out there with its record of ancient human habitation through the ages. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have someplace like this just hanging out in the neighborhood. It was pretty cold that morning, so there was frost on the grass in the shaded areas and frozen pools of water in the hollows atop some stone pillars.

In the afternoon of the same day, we visited the Acropolis of Pergamon looking over modern-day Bergama. This set of ruins was home to the famous Pergamon Altar, which now resides in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Germany. It also sports one of the steepest amphitheaters of antiquity, and a masterful work of engineering in just the foundation to support the Temple of Trajan there.

And then we had to wait a few hours overnight before seeing another fabulous set of ruins in Ephesus, a bit further south. This Roman city has a bunch of public buildings in pretty good condition, which reminded me much more of Jerash in Jordan than Pompeii in Italy. It also, like Troy, used to be on the coast, but a couple thousand years of silt now leave it quite far inland. The third Ancient Wonder of the World was visited here, too. All that remains of the stunning Temple of Artemis at Ephesus is a single column, capped with a stork nest and flanked by a gaggle of honking geese.




We're getting there; one more post should do it.

"Sing, goddess, of Achilles ruinous anger
Which brought ten thousand pains to the Achaeans,
And cast the souls of many stalwart heroes
To Hades, and their bodies to the dogs
And birds of prey."
~Homer, “The Illiad”

Backtracking: Egypt Part 2

We got back to civilization at the neat-o Siwa Oasis, which I will remember most fondly (seriously, it makes me laugh every time I hear it) for the sound of its many donkeys braying in protest at being made to pull their little carts around town. The town is surrounded by orchards of date palms, and has lots of ruins of its old fortress-like district called the Shali.

We then headed north to the Mediterranean coast and made a brief stop to pay our respects at the Commonwealth graveyard for soldiers killed in World War 2 at El Alamein.

Alexandria was the final stop after that long day of driving, and the view from my hotel room included the Qait Bey. It was a first for me to be able to see the site of one of the seven ancient wonders of the world (Pharos Lighthouse) from my bed.

The last stop in Egypt was back in Egypt, and a day trip to the far edge of town included the oldest stone monument in the world (step pyramid at Saqqara) and the Dahshur area where pyramid building techniques were refined, with a few mistakes along the way. That included the Bent Pyramid, which shows how the builders had to reduce the angle of the pyramid’s slope to prevent it from collapsing. Whoops!



That wraps up Egypt, but hang in there for more from the road.

“Fare on then, for nought are ye laden with sorrow;
The love of this land do ye bear with you still.”
~William Morris, “The Roots of the Mountains”