travel

First Day in the Loire: Amboise

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Last summer I lost steam recapping my summer vacation on MyPorch and gave up the chronicle about half way through. I think I was trying to include too much detail and tried to do a day by day chronicle. This proved more oppressive than interesting for me and probably for you all as well. So this year I will post as much or as little as I think you might find interesting. And I will intersperse it with other stuff so it isn’t like being forced to watch someone’s vacation slides.

After a flight that literally and figuratively flew by, we landed at Charles de Gaulle on August 22nd and hopped a fast train to the TGV station just outside of Tours in the Loire Valley. On the train there were two female backpackers that reinforced every stereotype Americans have about Europeans not showering enough. I have no problem with a little musk here and there, especially in the European context, but man oh man, did those ladies reek. Even the locals on the train were covering their noses.

We picked up our rental car without any problem and then drove to Amboise where we picked up our friends Ron and Barry at the train station. The weather was warm and sunny. Hot in the sun but really, really pleasant in the shade. We started things off with a little lunch on a lovely green garden terrace before we walked around town a bit and visited the chateau in Amboise.

40 by 40 Update: #24 Go Back to the House in Italy for 2 Weeks

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(Back in May of 2007 I noticed that a bunch of people in the blogosphere had created lists of 101 things to do in 1001 days. I was intrigued by the notion but felt I needed to change the parameters. So I created my 40 by 40 list. 40 things I wanted to do before I turned 40. Well on August 17th I turn 40, and I need to give $10 to charity for every uncompleted item. So it is time to see how I did.)

24. Go Back to the House in Italy for 2 Weeks – NOT COMPLETED
Running Tally: $120.00 to charity.

(The picture doesn’t do it justice.) This one was supposed to have been my 40th birthday present. We have been lucky in the past to spend a couple of weeks at a time at a wonderful house in Tuscany. The place is absolutely amazing. Not being millionaires, however, the way to rent this seven bedroom house for two weeks at a pop is to find friends and family who are interested in renting a room. Well, the house was reserved, the plans taking shape, but then the economy started to make several participants jittery so we ended up having to cancel it. Oh well. As a consolation prize we are taking trip to France and Switzerland instead of renting the house. Should be a lot of fun, but it won’t be the same thing as the house in Italy.

40 by 40 Update: #17 Spend a Long Weekend in Vienna, Berlin, or Barcelona

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(Back in May of 2007 I noticed that a bunch of people in the blogosphere had created lists of 101 things to do in 1001 days. I was intrigued by the notion but felt I needed to change the parameters. So I created my 40 by 40 list. 40 things I wanted to do before I turned 40. Well on August 17th I turn 40, and I need to give $10 to charity for every uncompleted item. So it is time to see how I did.)

17. Spend a Long Weekend in Vienna, Berlin, or Barcelona – NOT COMPLETED
Running Tally: $80.00 to charity.

We have gone on many amazing trips since I made the 40 by 40 list, but did not do this one specifically. From a road trip up the Eastern Seaboard to the Great Barrier Reef, to Kenya, to many weekend trips around the U.S., but alas no Vienna, Berlin, or Barcelona. These will remain on the list in my head.

40 by 40 Update: #11 Take a Cruise

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(Back in May of 2007 I noticed that a bunch of people in the blogosphere had created lists of 101 things to do in 1001 days. I was intrigued by the notion but felt I needed to change the parameters. So I created my 40 by 40 list. 40 things I wanted to do before I turned 40. Well on August 17th I turn 40, and I need to give $10 to charity for every uncompleted item. So it is time to see how I did.)

11. Take a Cruise – COMPLETED
Running Tally: $50.00 to charity.

As I blogged about back in January. John and I were both skeptical about taking a cruise. But we did and had a fantastic time. Our ship was the brand new Celebrity Solstice and it was perfect for us. The spa and fitness center was amazing as was our room and verandah. We still remain independent travelers at heart, but there are definitely more cruises in our future.

40 by 40 Update: #10 Finish My Business Plan

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(Back in May of 2007 I noticed that a bunch of people in the blogosphere had created lists of 101 things to do in 1001 days. I was intrigued by the notion but felt I needed to change the parameters. So I created my 40 by 40 list. 40 things I wanted to do before I turned 40. Well on August 17th I turn 40, and I need to give $10 to charity for every uncompleted item. So it is time to see how I did.)

10. Finish My Business Plan – NOT COMPLETED
Running Tally: $50.00 to charity.

Numbers 1 and 2 below should explain why this one didn’t happen. If things had gone differently in the world of travel planning, the plan was to strike out on my own and be my own boss. Thus the need for a business plan.

Sunday Smorgasbord

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I have been accused of being a slacker–three weeks off between jobs and I haven’t posted anything since October 29th. The trouble is I need to be inspired, annoyed, or bored to really come up with anything interesting to write. I have been really inspired by my new job, but I don’t really feel like waxing rhapsodic about that here. At any rate, to satisfy the appetite of those hungry for more, I will lay a few things out on the table for you all to nibble on.

My New Job
Number Two on my 40 by 40 list. I really love my new job. I know that most new jobs have a honeymoon period where things seem rosy, but I have been down that path before and feel confident that I have found a fabulous fit for my skills and interests. I am working as a leisure travel consultant and I couldn’t be happier. It is a great mix of being social, talking about travel, and organization. It is like the job was created for me. Not only that, but my new bosses actually appreciate my point of view and listen to me. What a weird feeling that is.

My Old Job
Number One on my 40 by 40 list. I am really glad to be done with my government career. With the exception of some great co-workers and friends at the office, my old work life–the one I spent $50,000 training for at Cornell–really sucked. I am still fascinated by urban planning but trying to do that kind of work for the federal government was worse than awful. And with the feds huge presence here in DC, it is impossible not to be impacted by their bad urban planning decisions even if you work at the local level or the private sector.

DC in the Fall
Everything looks better to me in the Fall. Crisp weather makes me remember the things I love about DC. Just walking down the leaf-strewn, old brick sidewalks under a clear blue sky is enough to “give me a groove” as the other Mr. MyPorch might say. Travel + Leisure just noted in their city survey, that DC ranked number 1 in Architecture (must be the old stuff, because the new stuff is as boring and as pedestrian as you can imagine), number 1 in Museums and Galleries (I can’t argue with that, the pickings are wonderful and free), and number 1 in having a “Worldly” population (I guess that is true, there are people from all over the world, but it still seems a little too provincial). During the hot, disgustingly steamy summer, none of these things matters. The only thing that matters is air conditioning. DC is the furthest south I will ever live.

Book Roundup
I have been reading a fair amount lately as you can see from the list at left. Ann Patchett’s new title Run did not disappoint. It might be my favorite of hers. The Ward Just was a little boring to me. I usually really like his stuff but this one I found tedious in places. Although it was written in the early 1980s, its descriptions of Vietnam-era Washington certainly have some resonance today. I’ve just started Emile Zola’s Lourdes which is on my Reading by the Decade challenge list. So far I quite like it. I am struggling to get through Philip Roth’s American Pastoral which is also on that list. The only other Roth I have read is The Plot Against America and I loved it. With AP, I don’t really care about any of the characters. I have a hard time identifying with anyone who, in old age, still idolizes someone from high school. Then again I never idolized anyone from high school.

My Book Roundup
While I was between jobs I did make some decent progress on my own novel. I think it may actually be worth reading at some point.

The Millenial Generation is Scary
Tonight on 60 Minutes they did a piece on the Millenial Generation. I guess it is roughly those kids leaving college today. What a bunch of overly-coddled, entitlement-assuming, wimpy bastards they are. Can you imagine having your parents involved in your job searches and your job performance reviews like they were taking part in middle school parent/teacher conferences? Why aren’t these 20-somethings embarrassed by this? One of these Millenial wimps who is making money describing the shortcomings of his generation said that it was because they watched their families struggle making ends meet, giving their all to their companies, and still getting laid off. Boo f’in Hoo. Like they are the first generation to have to watch their parents struggle to make ends meet. No, the real difference, if there is any, is that they had to watch their parents struggle to pay for a lifestyle that they could not afford. They watched their parent’s struggle to cope with crushing debt caused by their inability to say no to their precious children.

The point of the 60 Minutes piece was that in the future labor market, as Boomers retire, these Millenial adult infants will be all that employers have to choose from. One them even said that if he is doing well at work, he would appreciate a letter to that effect sent to their parents. Can you believe that?! Could the Fortune 500 companies of the world please unite today (like climate change, we don’t have a moment to lose) to not allow that kind of molly-coddling to go any further. You want a six figure salary? Then you better cut the damn cord and stand on your own two feet.

I guess I found something to be outraged about after all. I probably won’t sleep well now…

Australia Here I Come

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Hey everyone. The porch will be empty for the next few weeks. We are headed off to Australia. We will spend time in Melbourne and Sydney as well as five days on Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef. Sigh.
We managed to snag first class seats using frequent flyer awards (ah, the joy of planning vacation 331 days in advance). I can’t wait to sack out in my lie-flat seat on the 14-hour Pacific crossing.
So, a perfect time for all of you to catch up on previous posts. If you scroll through the archives there is a little something for every one.
For my birthday the other Mr. MyPorch had 12 of Sue’s world famous Whoopie Pies air shipped from Monhegan Island, Maine. As I note in this post from last year, Sue makes the best Whoopie Pies on the planet.

40 by 40

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Some of you may have seen on the blogosphere people posting lists of 101 things they would accomplish in the next 1001 days. As my 38th birthday approaches, I am putting my own twist on that challenge by making a list of 40 things to do by the time I am 40. I need to finish the following things by August 17, 2009.

(Updated 5/30/07–had too many travel related tasks, sadly not enough vacation time…)

1. Quit my job (completed 10/12/07 and again on 12/01/08)
2. Get another job (completed 10/13/07 and again on 2/5/09)
3. Go to my 20 year high school reunion (completed 7/28/07)
4. Pass the TAP Exam (completed 8/10/07)
5. Make four new friends (1 down, 3 to go)
6. Write a blog tribute to the Womenfolk (completed 6/9/07)
7. Finish my first novel
8. Submit novel for publication
9. Outline my second novel
10. Finish my business plan
11. Take a cruise (completed 1/18/09)
12. Become a homeowner
13. Reduce my cholesterol below 200
14. Make a timpano (see the movie Big Night)
15. Volunteer during the next Presidential election cycle (completed Oct and Nov 2008)
16. Get a letter published in the New York Times (completed 7/18/07)
17. Spend a long weekend in Vienna, Berlin or Barcelona
18. Start and finish the “Write Now” better handwriting program
19. Release 25 books into the wild through BookCrossing (abondoned 7/29/07)
20. Make pudding from scratch (completed 7/7/7)
21. Hear Mahler’s 8th Symphony again
22. Read at least the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
23. Finish the rest of the Modern Library’s list of 100 top novels of the 20th Century (except for Faulkner and Joyce-I just can’t do it)
24. Go back to the house in Italy for 2 weeks
25. Get the maximum Roth IRA for ’08 and ’09 (I got one for 2007 thinking it was part of the challenge, oh well, now I will be able to retire a week earlier than expected.)
26. Go a month without TV
27. See every best picture Oscar nominee
28. Go to the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum near Dulles (completed 3/08)
29. Go back to Ithaca, NY for a long weekend (completed 8/08)
30. Finish organizing my recipe files
31. Don’t curse for two weeks
32. Go to the Museum of Television and Radio (completed 12/08)
33. Streamline my wardrobe (completed 10/01/07)
34. Have a vegetable garden
35. Go to a BSO concert at Strathmore
36. Go to a concert at the Library of Congress
37. Find an opera/orchestra/concert buddy
38. Go to a concert at the Peabody Institute
39. Sing in a choir
40. Give 10 dollars to charity for every item not finished by August 17, 2009

Somerset Maugham and my Addiction to Spreadsheets

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Back in 1994, after getting through about 30 pages of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel Cakes and Ale, I realized that I had read it before. As a result, I began keeping a log of all of the books that I finished. I had a blank journal where I kept track of the title, author, and the date I finished each book. I loved watching the pages fill up and comparing what I was reading at the moment to what I finished a year earlier. Looking back at the titles on the list conjured up memories about where I was and what my life was like when I read a particular book. I finished Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone on a gorgeous sunny September afternoon in 1997 while lying on the grass in the Place des Vosges in Paris. Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto was finished on a frigid January day in Minneapolis while I was on winter break from graduate school. I finished Love in the Time of Cholera while I was lying in a hammock overlooking the Pacific on the island of Kaua’i. These are welcome associations I doubt I would make if it weren’t for the list.

As much as I love this handwritten log, over a decade of entries made it hard to gather information from the list quickly. I had a devil of a time trying to figure out which of Anita Brookner’s many novels I had already read. So I decided to enter all of the data into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. And so the mania began. Once the information was entered into a spreadsheet I could instantly sort the list to figure out which of my favorite author’s still have books out there that I haven’t read yet. Sadly, I have already read all of Maugham, Forster, and the late Carol Shields and almost finished Iris Murdoch’s prolific output. Happily, I have a whole lot of Trollope to go and Ward Just, Anita Brookner, Ann Patchett are still alive and writing.

I still keep the handwritten log–there is nothing I like more than adding a title–but now I also add each book to the spreadsheet. In fact, I actually get pleasure from the act of adding data to the spreadsheet. It is busy work that I find deeply satisfying.

Since I started the book spreadsheet I have also created one for every concert and opera that I have been to, one that lists every work of music contained in my 350+ classical CD collection, one that organizes music festivals I want to go to, and even one that indexes all of my favorite recipes by category and tells me which cookbook contains the recipe. Perhaps my magnum opus, is the spreadsheet I created when I was trying to decide which city to move to once I finished my planing degree at Cornell. That spreadsheet has 13 cities and about 22 categories of ratings. Everything from weather, to average airfares to Europe, to the quality of each city’s symphony. Each category was weighted by priority and totalled to give me a city ranking. It was a joy to behold, helped me make my relocation decision, and has proven accurate five years later.

This weekend I plan to create a spreadsheet of all the places I have travelled to.

It’ll be a hoot. You should give it a try.

Oh, the Buskers I’ve Known (or Death to the Peruvian Pan Flute Mafia)

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A good busker can turn the crankiest of commuters (me) into the happiest of humans no matter what the time of day. A bad busker can drive me to fantasies of instrumenticide. For me the difference between a good busker and a bad busker is not always related to level of talent but has much more to do with the artistic honesty of the performer and the performance.

The worst offenders are those guys with the Peruvian pan flutes playing their crappy, amplified garbage. They generally wear some kind of “native” dress to fool the unknowing rube into thinking that their craft is somehow genuine. It may have been genuine at some point, but the fact that they seem to be in every city in the world leads one to believe that somewhere there is an academy churning out pan flute trios to terrorize the world and make big bucks for some musical pimp. (Kind of like the time Homer Simpson went to Krusty the Klown Clown College…) Since 1989, I have seen these groups all over Europe and North America. The bland homogeneous nature of their music makes them the McDonald’s of the busking world.

And like McDonald’s, their omnipresence displaces a wide variety of performers that are much more original and life affirming. The most egregious example of this I encountered here in Washington DC. At the Dupont Circle Farmer’s market a few years ago, there was a group of three junior high-aged kids playing their instruments. No amplifiers, no CDs to sell, just three kids making music and a little extra money. The following week the Peruvian pan flute mafia showed up with their overly loud amplified garbage and drowned the kids out.

The beauty of busking is that it showcases variety, creativity, and oftentimes musical expressions that have roots in the local area. I have heard buskers that have moved me to tears or made me smile uncontrollably.

Some of my favorites have included:

  • an old blind woman in Lisbon singing traditional fado music in a haunting contralto with nothing but a triangle to accompany her
  • an accordionist playing on a warm summer’s evening who made Washington DC feel like Paris on the Potomac
  • two guys with acoustic guitars covering Indigo Girls tunes in Munich.

Some of the weirdest include a gorilla playing a trumpet on the London Underground and a bunch of shirtless guys banging on boxes singing “We’re Not Going to Take It”. Some of the more annoying ones (beside the pan flute mafia) include the guys who sit for hours playing the same monotonous rhythms on some old buckets (enough already, it was creative the first 82 times I heard it…) or the guy who regularly plays the trumpet really loudly on the street in DC.

I know not everyone feels the same way that I do. Most people really don’t care a whole lot about buskers. Recently the Washington Post did an experiment by placing the world famous virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell at a Metro stop in DC and no one paid much attention to him. I am not sure if I would have recognized Mr. Bell, but I do know that I would have stopped to put some money in his case. I alight from that very same Metro station every weekday and on the rare occasion that I hear a busker as I ascend the long escalator I am immediately drawn out of my morning funk. Unfortunately, I missed Mr. Bell’s appearance but I guess that means I have an extra dollar for the amateurs that are out there trying to make a buck by making me happy.