Art

You In Color

/ J. Eric Smith / 5 Comments

1. Today is my wife Marcia’s birthday. And today is also my daughter Katelin’s birthday. As a husband and a dad, that commonality has certainly made birthday planning easy for me over the years on one level, even if it took a little extra effort on another level to make sure that both of them were made to feel personally and particularly special on their shared magical day. That dual birthday experience has always made it an extended holiday of sorts around our house, worthy of celebrations that have often gone well beyond the natal day itself. And, any personal biases set aside, I’m all in favor of their birthday being declared a National Holiday, as it is in many countries around the world. Marcia wrote about the legitimate reasons for that on her own website, here. (Short summary: They were born on International Women’s Day). It’s more than fitting that two of the most formidable women in my life celebrate their entries into this our mortal coil on the very same day that much of the globe acknowledges the achievements, accomplishments and arduous ongoing efforts of women to advance their own causes, the causes of their global sistren, and the well-being of the communities in which they live, play, love and work. Just perfect, on so many fronts! So happy birthday to my beloveds, both of whom I adore more than I can express.

2. There are a lot of native Minnesotans (like Marcia) who live in our neighborhood, sensibly electing to spend all or part of their retirement years in climes balmier than those found in the North Star State. One of our good friends organized a “Minnesota Fest” this week, with three days of hiking and three communal dinners. There was no lutefisk or lefse served, alas, (or actually, phew!), but we did do some classic Minnesota Hotdishes. And we had cake on Wednesday night for Marcia and another friend with a birthday this week, as per normal protocol to extend the birthday celebrations as broadly as possible. I was asked by our host, along with another off-trail warrior, to come up with and guide a pair of signature hikes for the group, and was happy to do so. If you don’t connect with me on Facebook (my only social media outlet, somewhat begrudgingly, but useful for book marketing and such), I should note that I generally post all of my hiking reports there, rather than here. But for those who only interact with me here, I offer the photo logs of those two hikes below; click the images to visit the full galleries. I do enjoy hiking on my own, and I do it often, but there’s an extra joy to be had in experiencing these glories with friends.

MinnFest Day #1: Brin’s Ridge

MinnFest Day #2: Fay Canyon

History of the Future

/ J. Eric Smith / 3 Comments

1. I was looking at my website traffic reports this morning, as I do on occasion, and I realized that it had been almost four weeks since I’ve posted anything here. It hasn’t really felt that long, nor have I been particularly busy with discrete, explainable things to justify a long absence, but somehow I just haven’t found the time or the inclination to sit down and scribble. I know from long (28+ years) experience of running a personal website that activity ebbs and flows and waxes and wanes over time, and that the nature of the content offered also changes. For no particularly explainable reason, I’ve found that in 2023, some of the ongoing series type articles I’d done in recent years seemed to have run their course, and almost all of my posts this year have either been “omnibus” ones (like this one, with short bits about multiple topics), or related to the release and promotion of my books. Interestingly, traffic per post remains as high or higher than it has been over the past few years, though obviously total traffic is down a bit as I’m being less prolific. I’d posited a theory in early COVID days that websites like mine (either extant ones in 2020, or ones that emerged as people found themselves locked down with time on their hands) would experience a traffic heyday through the Anno Virum, then fade when life returned to something more closely approximating normal. That hypothesis has been borne out, both here, and with a lot of other websites that I read in pandemic days, many of which have gone silent or gotten quieter. Things are cyclical, always and everywhere, even in virtual space.

2. Speaking of my books, a reminder that Side by Side in Eternity would make a fine holiday gift for the military history aficionados in your family, while Ubulembu and Other Stories would very likely please the weird fiction fans among you. More information about both books, including where/how to order, is available here. I also have some copies here (along with a few stray Eponymous tomes) that I’d be happy to sign and send, should that be appealing; hit me up in comments or by email if you’d be interested in that option. As always, for those who have already read one or both of the books, I remain deeply grateful for your time, interest, and attention, and I’d be even more grateful if you’d be able or willing to leave a review in the online retail outlet of your choosing, or on your own platforms, where applicable.

3. As is likely painfully obvious to regular readers here, I love taking and sharing pictures, both ones with friends, family and loved ones in them, and ones that are primarily “artistic” views of interesting natural or man-made spaces and places. I have been using Flickr as my repository for photos since 2010; it’s a good and robust platform, no complaints with it to date. But as I was going through some old family photos a while back, creating the Fiat Colorum album of colorized black-and-white images, I started to get more actively mindful of the ways in which the 12,000+ photos on my online storage site may (or more likely, will) at some point become inaccessible to anybody who may one day follow in our footsteps and be interested in the lives we lived in our time. The act of printing images on paper bestows at least some hope that such images may endure; digitizing them seems an ultimately failure-prone approach, as evidenced by the number of things that I have on floppy discs, or cassette tapes, or created with expired/unsupported software/hardware, all of them no longer readily accessible to me, while my old cardboard boxes of pictures can still be trawled through anytime I want to see them. So over the summer, I took advantage of Flickr’s physical publication application and produced a coffee-table book of our family’s adventures abroad between 2010 and 2023, and gave it as a gift to family members. That one was a hit, so I did a follow-up this month of our various domestic trips and travels, and will be giving that one as this year’s featured family Christmas gift. While these tomes compile but a small fraction of all of the photos I’ve made and shared since 2010, they do at least represent physical collections that could conceptually remain accessible long after my digital platforms go dark. That feels satisfying to me, and I think I will do at least one more volume compiling the best of my “art shots” over the past decade-plus. I’m not selling or promoting any of these, other than to note that this was a fun and rewarding project, and one I’d commend to your own attention if you’d like to create your own lasting visual legacies.

Pleasing creative projects, happily shared with family.

4. While I haven’t been posting here very often, I have been busy with my writing partner, Jim McNeal, researching and writing our Crucibles: History’s Most Formidable Rites of Passage book, under contract with Agate Publishing, with representation by Mark Gottlieb of Trident Media Group. We’re scheduled to deliver our manuscript on April 1, 2024, with a planned publication date in early 2025. It’s been a most enjoyable project thus far, and we’re about two-thirds done based on planned final word count. Our premise, as explained in our accepted proposal, was as follows:

Crucibles: History’s Most Formidable Rites of Passage will explore the onerous initiation rituals of ~15 elite organizations. With stories crossing continents and centuries, Crucibles will detail the ways in which would-be initiates willingly push themselves to their breaking points and beyond, while striving to enter the worlds of the most secretive and powerful insiders.

Jim and I frame the book’s structure around our own Plebe Year at the United States Naval Academy in 1982-83, unquestionably one of the most difficult and formative experiences of our lives. We’ve already finished chapters on Marines at Parris Island, Shaolin Monks, the Knights Templar, the Gurkhas, the French Foreign Legion, the Dahomey Amazons, Mafia Made Men, Hawai’i’s Koa and “White Coat Ceremonies” for doctors. We’ve got Astronauts/Cosmonauts, Spies, the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, Freemasons, and Street Gangs in the pending queue, and may add another one or two if we have the space for them. The book will wrap with an over-arching assessment of commonalities and exceptions between our subject investigations, ideally to provide some meaningful sense of why, how, and whether rites of passage make meaningful differences to the elite organizations for which they serve as portals. Interesting stuff!

5. As I’ve been doing regularly this year, post-caving to streaming, I include with this post a link to one of my curated Spotify playlists, in hopes that some of you may find it enjoyable, entertaining, and maybe even educational. I’m picking my Gospel Playlist for this installment. Back during peak-COVID days, I’d posted a piece about what I dubbed “comfort music,” referring to the auditory equivalent of those gustatory delights that stick to the ribs and make us feel good anytime we listen to or eat them. And I noted in that article that the type of music sits best and most comforting for me, alongside a big tray of Stouffers Mac and Cheese and a brown paper sack full of boiled peanuts, is classic Southern Gospel Music, because:

While there may be no meeting tonight, alas, that doesn’t mean that good Gospel Music on the hi-fi can’t move the soul to swing. And, equally often, the hips and feet can get into the action too. There’s a reason that many-to-most of the 20th Century’s greatest soul, blues, pop and R&B artists got their starts in church choirs. This music is powerful. And I love it, dearly.

So set the playlist below to Shuffle, grab a log of cookie dough or a chicken pot pie or some leftover meatloaf or cold pizza or something made from pig parts and salt, and you should have a whole day’s worth of good and fuzzy feelings, warming both body and soul:

6. Speaking of comfort food and music, we’re off to Asheville, North Carolina, tomorrow for a big extended family Thanksgiving gathering at my sister’s house. When we get back later this month, I’ll be much more active here as the year’s end will be approaching, and that means it will be time for my annual reports on 2023’s best albums, films, books and other nerdy interests. Here’s wishing you all your own wonderful Thanksgivings, and I close this post with a public service item to help you maximize the goodness with your kith and kin if you find yourselves locked up together with too much food in the week ahead: Thanksgiving Rules of Decorum.

Spleen Merchant

/ J. Eric Smith / 4 Comments

1. Like much of the country, we’ve had a long, hot spell here since late May, often necessitating early morning hikes and afternoons hunkered down inside with the air conditioning running. But unlike most of the country, we can plan on a late summer spot of relief when the Arizona Monsoon kicks in. Our annual temperatures here typically peak in late June and early July, then a meteorological singularity sets for a couple of months, where we can receive about 75% of our annual total rainfall. After two-plus months with not a spot of rain, we’ve had a few storms and showers blow through over the last ten days or so, and this morning we’re getting what feels like the first good and proper monsoon thunderstorm. It smells so good out there when long-dry soil and rocks and plants get a thorough soaking, and I’m certainly willing to forego a hike or two just to know that we’re getting the bountiful rains that knock back wildfire season and moderate the daily high temperatures. Of course, monsoon also brings a massive explosion of mosquitoes and weeds and flash floods, but, hey, fair trade, I’ll take it.

2. I’ve posted a bit here over the past three years about the ridiculous variety of charismatic fauna that collectively run amok on our property, day and night, ranging from all sorts of interesting birds through snakes and lizards and on to various mammals of all shapes and sizes. I watch and snap pics of them when circumstances allow, but last Christmas, Katelin and John got us an automatic trail cam which allows me to more thoroughly monitor the goings-on around our property. It’s kind of mind-blowing, actually, just how much activity there is, as I often check the trail cam twice and day, and there are usually dozens of photos to upload each time I connect. The cam has been particularly good about capturing various baby animals who tend to only come out when their parents are confident that there aren’t any humans lurking about, so that’s been cool to watch little ones getting bigger over the course of the seasons. Since I can’t be outside this morning due to the rain, it seems a good time to share to some images of our furry and feathery neighbors, as proxy. (I’ve moved the camera to different spots in the yard at different times, hence different background scenes). Check ’em out:

3. Broken Record Warning, With Apologies: If you’ve read any of my books, recently or otherwise, I would be most grateful if you could take a minute or three to leave a rating or a review at the retail outlet or website of your choosing. As much as I write and as long as I’ve written, I’ve always been lackadaisical about such promotional appeals, but since writing is my main gig at this point, I need to do better about marketing that fact. I am always appreciative of all of the many direct responses I’ve received to these projects over the past few months, but (once again) it would mean a great deal to me if you’d also be willing to share those responses with others.  I’ve got some readings and signings and sales opportunities coming up over the next few months, but the more online reactions I can document, the better in terms of booking further such events. Thanks in advance for your consideration, as always.

4. As mentioned at length in my prior post here, we’ve been embracing the streaming music era here (belatedly, begrudgingly) by curating 50-150 song playlists, typically themed around a particular genre or era of music. I’ll be sharing one such playlist every time I write one of these multipart omnibus posts, and this edition’s offering is my Folk Playlist. The title is broad, but the contents are a bit more specific: it’s all by artists from Great Britain, offering a wide variety of traditional folk tunes and more folk-rock fare, including some wonderful ’70s folk-psych stuff, which tickles me deeply. It’s 100 songs long, so if you’re interested in listening, set your Spotify player to “shuffle” and let ‘er rip for as long as you’d like. This one is among the three or four most commonly selected ones each morning, as it provides a nice background to coffee and breakfast time, and then onward from there. Enjoy!

Earth Rocker

/ J. Eric Smith / 3 Comments

1. Marcia and I returned today from a six-day trip up into the Northern reaches of Arizona and the Southern bits of Utah, in a little effort to beat the heat by spending some time at higher elevations. (We live about 4,200 feet above sea level, but it’s still forecast to hit 105°F+ here today, so we had to go higher yet). We stayed in Kanab, Utah, which was perfectly positioned to allow easy day-trip access to three of the most amazing National Parks in the country: the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, Zion National Park (we hiked the sparsely-visited East Rim) and Bryce Canyon. All amazing hikes, filled with amazing vistas. We also did some shorter hikes and drives around Kanab, including the Sand Caves and the Paria (Ghost) Town Site, and we had some outstanding meals in Kanab, which really hits above its weight class in terms of quality grub; we highly recommend Wild Thyme Cafe, Kanab Creek Bakery, and/or Sego should you find yourself in the area. I took lots of pictures (duh), so if you’d like to see what we see, click the photo of Marcia being touched by divine light as she crests a crevice on Bryce Canyon’s Peekaboo Loop Trail:

2. I thank all of you who have been in touch in recent weeks to let me know that you’ve ordered and/or read Ubulembu and Other Stories. If you haven’t done so, and would like to, I’ve created a consolidated “Books” page here at Ye Olde Wybsyte with background and ordering information on all three of my extant tomes; you can see it here. I’m also making a game effort at promotional activities and have set up Amazon and Goodreads author pages, here and here. I would be most appreciative to any and all of you who would be kind enough to rank, rate, review, follow, or whatever else you like to do on these or other sites of your choosing, for any of my three books. I also have some unclaimed copies of all three books, so if you’d like a signed one for yourself or anybody else, let me know and I can make that happen.

3. Speaking of Ubulembu, I will be reading a selection from that collection at “Unleash Writers Read,” along with nine other writers in the Unleash Press stable. It’s a virtual room reading on August 3, and you’re welcome to listen and watch. If you’d like to attend, you need to register for the Zoom meeting here. (You can figure out your local time from that link more readily than I can give it to you, given the weirdness of Arizona not doing Daylight Savings Time and such, so that no one ever quite knows what time we’re experiencing here). I hope to see you there, with thanks!

4. The timing of our trip north also corresponded to a little change in work status for me: July 11 marked my final day as the Interim President/CEO of TREE Fund (returning to my former full-time salaried role from 2015-2019), at which point I did the Navy “I had it, you got it” salute and handed the reins to Dr. Paul Putman. I appreciated the opportunity to serve when asked to do so, enjoyed getting to know and work with new staff and board members who joined after my (first) retirement, and am most excited to see where Paul takes the organization in the months and years to come. The work is ever-more important, and the needs are ever-growing, so your support is always welcome and appreciated, and it will make a difference. (And, of course, this means have I time and skills on hand, should you find yourself or your organization needing to engage a nonprofit management advisor or a freelance writer. Holla!)

We Strive for Excellence

/ J. Eric Smith / 3 Comments

1. In my prior post, I celebrated the best new music of 2023’s First Quarter, including a special nod for Buggy Jive‘s outstanding new single, “Don’t Quit Your Day Job.” Buggy had written the song about the thought processes behind submitting a song to NPR’s acclaimed Tiny Desk Concerts series, then he submitted same song to said contest, because of course he did. And, no surprise here, given how wildly crazy I’ve been about his work over the years, NPR has warmly embraced it through the ongoing review process of over 6,000 submissions, featuring it prominently in a pair of promotional videos. Here’s the most recent one of those, its first third scored to those sweet and mellifluous Buggy stylings:

The winner of this year’s contest will be announced on May 11. Which happens to be this brilliant soul-rock singer-songwriter’s birthday. I hope and think everything’s coming up Buggy in 2023. Wishing him all best in the weeks ahead (and beyond), and am thrilled to pieces to see his fine work getting this level of attention. He deserves it, for sure.

2. I’ve been communicating closely with, and remain most impressed by, the team at Unleash Creatives as we work to bring my forthcoming collection Ubulembu and Other Stories to market in late summer/early autumn 2023. Jen Knox, Chris Shanahan, and their Unleash Press colleagues are a vibrant and creative and fun bunch, right up my alley, and they place a high value on building community among the writers they represent and publish, which also does my heart good, as a networking fiend. As we move toward the final proof stage of the process, Ubulembu has begun appearing as a pre-order on the various and myriad online bookselling platforms, which is exciting. Even more exciting: Seeing the cover concept coming together, wow! The aesthetic is right up my alley, as those of you who used to receive my black Christmas cards every year may well imagine, and the imagery is deeply meaningful to the title story, even if you don’t know what you’re looking at before reading. Behold!

I’ll obviously provide additional information on ordering as we get closer to publication date, with thanks in advance to any and all of you who choose to acquire it. It is a thrill to know that these stories will be finally set before a wide audience this year, in some cases after they’ve been sitting on my computers for decades. Slow and steady and such, yeah?

3. Also on the writing front, Side by Side in Eternity: The Lives Behind Adjacent American Military Graves is trucking along nicely in its post-publication life cycle. I have a few signed copies left here at the homestead, so if you’re interested in one of those, hit me up, sooner rather than later. For my Naval Academy peeps: I’ll be doing a signing with my co-author, Jim McNeal, in Annapolis on May 17, the day of the annual Herndon Climb. Hope to see some of you there! There will also be a local event in Sedona in September, and we are exploring some other options to discuss and present our work in other in-person or online settings. We’re both happy to present the project if you’ve got any virtual or meat-space opportunities to suggest. If you’ve read Side by Side in Eternity and posted thoughts about it anywhere, do share those with us, please and thanks, as we are working to acquire and assemble blurbs and reviews. We are still hard at work on our next book, Crucibles: History’s Most Formidable Rites of Passage, for Agate Publishing, and it’s been a fascinating and enjoyable process thus far. We’ve already written about our 1982-83 Plebe Year experiences together at the Naval Academy, and also about the French Foreign Legion, the Dahomey Amazons, the Koa (warriors) of Hawai’i, and the Shaolin Monks. We have another 14 chapters coming in the year ahead, plus our analytical synthesis of centuries’ worth of elite society trials, ostensibly to frame what works, what doesn’t, what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s just mystifying and fantastic and fun. It’s a great project, if I say so myself, and Jim and I are very appreciative for Doug Siebold at Agate and Mark Gottlieb at Trident Media Group, who saw its potential and share our enthusiasm for the work. Thanks, guys!

4. I’ve mentioned before that I’m back on Facebook, ennhhh, as a necessary evil for various promotional activities in 2023 and beyond. Since I spend much of my free time these days hiking, I’ve been doing little “photo essay” reports of various routes there, which people seem to be enjoying. One thing that I’ve noticed with all of the photography I do hereabouts is that it’s really, really difficult to communicate a sense of the scale of the rock formations within which we live and play. I’m a reasonably strong and accomplished hiker, and there are a lot of places I go which are struggles, up close and personal, but which in pictures look, well, too easy, I guess. If pressed to name my favorite hike in this area, it’s a loop that I do up to a summit that I can see from our back porch. It’s a tough one, but totally worth it. I decided to do something of a step-by-step documentation of it the last time I was up there, and posted it as its own Flickr album to see if it did a better job of communicating the scale we experience here. If you click on the first picture and then scroll through the rest, I’ve captioned each one to explain what you’re looking at in each case. I’m not sure that it does a better job of showing the bigness and majesty that I feel being in it in real time, but you can click the summit photo below if you’re interested in seeing it and deciding yourself. If you come visit me, I’ll likely propose we do it together. So be prepared.

5. And finally, speaking of hiking: Marcia and I have just booked a 14-day trek through the Alps for August-September, leaving from Munich, crossing Austria, and ending up in Venice. Want to join us? You can do it here. It would be a blast to experience it with friends!

Impetus

/ J. Eric Smith / 3 Comments

1. Side by Side in Eternity: The Lives Behind Adjacent American Military Graves (my new book with Rear Admiral Jim McNeal) is now available for sale at Amazon, and Barnes and Noble says they will have it next week. So you’ve got options for ordering. And options make everything better. Later this week, I should also have a stash of copies signed by both Jim and I. Hit me up by email if you’d like one of those, first come, first served. If you missed it, my prior post provides more detailed information about the book and its contents.

If you do score a copy, Jim and I are very interested in your thoughts and reactions, especially on which of the various chapters and topics we covered worked best for you. As we’re shaping our next book, nominally titled Crucibles: History’s Most Formidable Rites of Passage and constructed around a similar omnibus history narrative approach, it will be helpful to know which of our prior pieces hit the hardest with our readers. Also, if you’ve got any pull with libraries or local booksellers in your market, if you’re looking for a Book Club idea, or if you see an opportunity for Jim and/or I to speak or sign somewhere, do please advise. We’re ready for full-court press marketing at this point, and appreciate any and all help on that front.

Got my autographin’ pen out . . .

2. I’ve been enjoying fiddling about the colorization applications at Palette, applying them to a bunch of old black and white family photos. It’s surprisingly naturalistic looking, and I’ve produced an album of the photos I’ve reinterpreted, here: Fiat Colorum. I post a sample pair below, of my father (first picture) and my mother (second picture) when they were young children. These and others do a good job, I think, of powerfully capturing what the rural American South looked like, once upon a time. And still does, if you get away from the coastal, golf or mountain places where most Northerners retire to, or the ever-sprawling cities and their endless suburbs that have transformed the region during my lifetime.

My dad with Rose, who essentially raised him on a day-to-day basis while his mother worked as a teacher, and an unknown-to-me neighbor girl.

My mother with her dog, Lorna, and Lorna’s puppies. Love the debris pile in the background, classic Southern style. Why dispose of anything when you’ve got a perfectly good field to store it in? Who knows when you might need some of it again for something?

3. While 35+ years of living in the frigid climes of Idaho, Upstate New York, Chicago and Iowa certainly raised my non-native tolerance for foul weather, one of our primary motivations in moving to Arizona was to get away from all that. And, in relative terms, we certainly have, though long-time locals hereabouts concur that the winter of 2022-2023 has been, thus far, the worst in local memory. I woke up Monday morning to this view out of our kitchen window:

I do not approve. Nope. Not one bit.

Uggghhh!!! The one nice thing about this type of weather here, though, is that it generally all melts quickly, except in shaded areas at higher elevations. The day after I took that snow shot, I did a short-but-steep hike up the nearest major rock face to our house, and the view from on-high at that point looked like this, with the white stuff mostly gone from view:

Watch that first step. It’s a doozy . . .

Then yesterday, I went and climbed the snow-flecked mesa at the top center of this photo, looking back across our village at the red-rock face I’m standing atop in the photo above. You’d have never known we’d had any snow:

The formation in the center with the pointed green caps is where I do more hiking and climbing that anywhere else. Our house is at the base of that formation, at its left-hand side in this view.

I post these pictures and thoughts now, as we await the next forecast wave of snow, three to five inches expected through the afternoon and evening today. UGGGGHHH!! We will be driving to Las Vegas on Saturday to celebrate Marcia and Katelin’s shared birthday at Katelin and John’s house, so I’m hoping that this snow event also disappears quickly, as we need to climb up a few thousand feet en route from here to there.

4. I mentioned in an earlier post that I’ve reactivated a Facebook account to help with promotion on Side by Side in Eternity. I’m here, if you’re there, and you care. I’ve been posting information about the book and various hiking and other outdoor adventures in Arizona. But, somewhat predictably I suppose, the most popular things I’ve posted are photos of the charismatic (?) mega-fauna (??) that hang out in our yard:

I’m here to eat the bird food. Please spill some more here for me. Do it now. Snort.

Home From Spain (Yet Again)

/ J. Eric Smith / 5 Comments

Marcia and I made it back to our VOC digs this afternoon after a wonderful two-week trip to Spain, the foreign country we’ve visited more often than any other, except Canada. (Marcia actually spent a whole semester in Spain while in college, so it takes first place in overall time abroad for her, if not in number of trips). We spent the first part of the trip in Madrid, then went north to areas we’ve not visited before: Bilbao (and its suburb, Getxo) and Zaragoza. Then back to Madrid for a few more days, with a bus-trip over to San Lorenzo de El Escorial. We returned to some places we’ve loved before in Madrid, and also found some new favorites this time around. It’s a big, grand city, with lots to experience. And then we had a great time exploring the cultural treasures in Pais Vasco and Aragon, both ancient parts of the country with very distinctive histories of their own. We once again greeted a new year abroad, having done so before in Paris and Reykjavik. And we ate a ton of delicious food, most of it involving cod or various types of crustaceans or anchovies for me, with Marcia leaning a smidge more toward the terrestrial meat side of the equation.

I’m pretty whipped from travel and from what I think are still after-effects of COVID, and don’t really have the brain-power to write a big essay today, so will just post my photo album for now. If anything piques your curiosity there, ask in the comment section and I will be happy to explicate at more length. I may do so anyway here in a day or two, once my jets are less lagged. Marcia and I are off to Hawai’i for another two-week trip in ten days, so it feels great to be home for a spell of relative rest and relaxation. But, then, as good as it feels to be back in Arizona, we can tell that this was a great vacation, because we are already planning our next trip to Spain, rather than feeling sick of being there after two weeks. We’re thinking next time we’ll do a car journey, either from Bilbao west to Galicia, or from Barcelona around the Mediterranean coast through Valencia and Malaga. Decisions, decisions! We know we are most fortunate to be able to ponder them.

You can click on the image below of me interacting with Richard Serra’s monumental art at the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum to see the complete album. It’s a slightly bigger one than I normally post as a single album, so if you want to see the whole thing, you can click through to the second page at the bottom of the first one . . .

¡Hola, 2023!

/ J. Eric Smith / 6 Comments

Marcia and I greeted the New Year last night in the mobbed periphery of Madrid’s historic Puerto del Sol, which serves as Spain’s own Times Square for purposes of counting down the final seconds of one year, then welcoming the next one with fireworks and festivities. We both completed the Twelve Grapes ritual, eating a dozen green globes between the first and last tolling of Sol’s central clock tower, thereby guaranteeing us good fortune through 2023, per local tradition. It was exciting and interesting to be in the midst of such a felicitous public assembly.

This morning, we rose early and took two trains northward, one high speed to Zaragoza, and one not so high speed on to Bilbao. This is our first time in Pais Vasco, and both the countryside surrounding and the capitol city of this autonomous community are lovely on first day’s blush. We’ll be visiting Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum tomorrow, and we have two good meal options reserved to inundate in this region’s rich culinary traditions.

I’ll do my usual photo album of this entire trip when we get back, but as an interim teaser, here’s a bonus installment of my 10,000 Words series, featuring ten pictures taken during our first five days in Spain, in no particular order. We’re not even halfway through this vacation, which feels really great, for our first trip abroad in three years. We’ve got plenty more to see and learn about and eat. And then eat some more. Yum! (As always, you can click any photo to enlarge it, should you so desire).