Travel – Page 3 – Zing Blog 2

Pacific Coast Origami Convention 2023

Been to two back-to-back origami conventions. Catching up with my blog now, picking up the story where we left off…

The 2023 Pacific Coast Origami Convention (PCOC) was at a big fancy hotel right near Union Square. This conference was supposed to happen in the fall of 2021 but got delayed due to a resurgence of COVID, so we were all really looking forward to it after all this time.

We arrived Thursday evening and ran into a bunch of origami friends in the lobby, including Maria from Bogota, Colombia. Jeannie and took the cable car down to Fisherman’s Wharf and had dinner Pier 39, right on the bay near the Golden Gate bridge and Alcatraz where the sea lions hang out. Total tourist stuff, lots of fun. We got back to the hotel for the first of several late-night folding sessions. I practiced my Halloween Spider, which I was teaching the next day, and made a small but important improvement to the folding sequence.

First thing Friday was the exhibit setup. I brought a shoebox full of models in my backpack, which I’d been carrying around the whole trip. Luckily everything survived being bumped around for a week and was in good shape. It was a good assortment of animals, spaceships, and single-sheet polyhedra, including most of my newly folded stuff and things I was teaching. I had a nice, new large elephant folded out of a golden-yellow paper, because I’ve been folding elephants lately to donate to OUSA’s annual holiday tree.

My Halloween Spider class was full and it was among the more complex models I’ve ever attempted to teach, despite my aim to design a relatively simple and easy spider. The class went over really well, and everyone finished. I had a document camera to show a close-up view of my work in progress on a projector, and that helped alot. One kid folded tiny one out to 3″ paper. Very impressive.

We found a Japanese restaurant near the hotel that served udon and sushi. Several other groups from the convention were there, and I was able to borrow some paper to fold with, and made an Octopus and Cuttlefish for model menu.

That afternoon I took Jared’s class, a Sea Lion. We kinda ran out of time toward the end and didn’t really get to do a proper job of the sculpting and shaping. Too bad, because his version of the model looked pretty nice. During the class I was able to fold my own California Sea Lion, a new model which I’d only folded once before, two years ago, so I could submit diagrams of it to the convention collection of 2021. I found out later there was a table or California themed models in the exhibit space, so I put it there.

That evening there was a reception with drinks and food, very yummy, followed by some activities. I won a copy of Tomoko Fuse’s book Origami Art, and later on she signed it for me. Tomoko Fuse is one of the world’s great origami artists from Japan, so it was great to meet her. The book signing was in the shopping area, and Paper Tree was the vendor, so I bought lots of cool papers. From there we all went into the hospitality area for more folding, which ran well into the night. At one point I went out with some friends on a beer run. When I returned, Jeannie had brought down the last remaining beers that Dazza had gifted us to share with our table.

Saturday morning I decided that the golden elephant in my exhibit didn’t really go well color-wise with the others I’d folded for the museum, and anyway it was nice enough that I kind of wanted to keep it. So I began folding a new elephant in my hotel room. It was the nicest one yet, made of a 50cm square of whitish marble wyndstone, a.k.a. elephant hide that I’d brought with me. I folded as far as I could before making it 3-d, then stuck it in the book to finish when I got home.

That morning my first class was Peter Engel, who was explaining a system of bird designs he came up with for a commission for a sculpture in a corporate lobby. After that was Tomoko teaching a spiral shell made out of four sheets of paper. I also took a class to fold the Columbus Cube, a cube variation with a sunken corner. It was a modular but an interesting shape, and during the class I worked out how I could fold it from a single sheet.

At lunchtime Jeannie and I walked to Japantown to visit our friend Linda’s store Paper Tree, one the finest origami shops in America. I was happy to see they had my Animal Sculptures book for sale there and prominently displayed. Also lots of paper, other books, and display cases of folded origami, many by Robert Lang. He’d just done a gallery opening there the night before the convention. I bought a cool little metal model of a Japanese temple that you can assemble. We went to a place called Bullet Train Sushi for lunch. The food was really good, and it was delivered by little trolleys in the shape of the Japanese bullet train that ran the length of the counter.

That afternoon I taught Octopus and Cuttlefish. This class was full and went over really well too, and gave me a chance to plug my book. After that I hung around the exhibit for a while, and the hospitality area, talking to other artists. Saturday night was the banquet, followed by more activities including Chocogami, run by my friend Maria, where you fold a model of a thing depicted in the wrapper of a chocolate bar from Colombia. This time I got a shark, and it came out pretty well. It seemed like alot of people asked my to sign their copy of my book at this convention. Maybe I’m a hit out on the west coast, or maybe I just don’t get out there very often. In any event, my book is now on its second printing, which is quite gratifying.

Sunday I slept in and then hung around the exhibit and hospitality. At lunchtime Jeannie and I took a walk to Salesforce Park, the High Anxiety hotel, and the Embarcadero, all together in the same neighborhood. It was a beautiful day and great to see some of San Francisco and the bay.

After lunch I did my polyhedron talk. Again it was very well attended, and Tomoko Peter Engle both attended. At the end there was time for questions, and I got into a great discussion with Peter about single sheet polyhedra and the whole philosophy behind it. This discussion carried out into the hallway after the class was over. I’d never met Peter before; he never comes to New York. It turns out he’s a big fan of my work, particularly my animals. This was a great compliment to me, because I consider Peter one of the original masters, and his book Angelfish to Zen was a big influence on me early on, in particular the way it connects origami to art, design and philosophy.

Later in the afternoon I took Goran’s class. He’s doing really interesting stuff with pleating and curved folding. I also won a book at the silent auction. It’s an older book in Italian, about folding boats. I went thru a phase of designing boats after I’d done airplanes and spaceships, and one of the models on the cover reminded me of one of my own designs.

By Sunday evening I was pretty tired. Lots of our friends were going out to dinner but Jeannie and had dinner at the hotel, because after that we had to catch a cab to the airport. Before I left I gave my golden elephant to Maria for her collection for the Bogota origami group. The flight home was a redeye, and I was able to get some sleep. We landed in NYC as the sun was coming up, and when I got home I went straight to work. By Tuesday I’d caught up on my rest and was back to normal. Only a few short days until the next event. More on that next post.

Dream of Californication

Just got back from a trip to PCOC, the Pacific Coast Origami Conference in San Francisco, and along with it a fantastic vacation in California. Last time we visited the Bay Area was almost fourteen years ago. Oh oh, what I want to know is, where does the time go?

Jeannie and I flew out from New York on Friday night. Last few times we flew I’ve felt pretty anxious about the whole airport thing, but this time I’ve been so busy with work the last couple months, it was actually a big relief to be hanging around waiting for our flight.

We stayed the first couple of days at a hotel on the peninsula that we knew from previous trips. It was a cute place with a courtyard and giant pots of succulent plants. Saturday we met up with my friend Dazza, who lives in Oakland. He took us to a park near his home with a lake and a very cool botanical garden with all kinds of plants you don’t see back east, and in the middle of that a bonsai garden with carefully grown miniature trees, some of them hundreds of years old. We went back to his place, in a condo complex with all kinds of fun amenities, then out to eat at a really good oriental place with yummy dishes featuring great big rice noodle. I must say, Oakland has become trendy and quite nice since we lived in the bay area in the ’90s, much like Brooklyn. Or maybe I just never had been to the nice parts of Oakland before.

That afternoon we helped Dazza out on a very special beer run. He had ordered several cases of a Polish porter, that apparently is very hard to get, from a wine shop in San Mateo back on the peninsula. So we gave him a lift out there to pick it up. After that we took Dazza for a drive around our old haunts in Silicon Valley in Palo Alto and Redwood City. We went for a hike up to the radio telescope in Parcel B at Stanford, and then a drive-by tour of the office park where Interval Research Corporation used to be, right near the HP campus. Strangely, there’s now camper vans and RVs parked all along Page Mill Road and El Camino Real. One of the most rich and prosperous places in the history of the world full of people living in their vans. At the end we went back to our hotel and Dazza shared a few porter ales with us and we talked on into the night.

Sunday Jeannie and I went up Skyline Road to Sky Londa intending to go for a hike at Windy Hill for a hike. But as the day unfolded it turned rainy. We did a short wet hike up to the summit the view obscured by clouds, and not the long winding one we had in mind. Apparently it was the first rain of the fall. The day before we noticed all the hillsides were yellow with dry grass, a hue you don’t see in the landscapes at home. Since we were already up in the mountains, we thought we’d cross over and see the ocean, where it was not raining. But, being the first rain of the season, there was an accident up ahead (apparently a very bad one, judging from the number of ambulances and fire trucks that passed us), so the road was closed and we had to turn around. There’s only a few roads over the coastal mountains, so we went up to the next one twenty miles away, but it was backed up with traffic too. So we decided instead to light out for our next destination, Lake Tahoe up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, one of our favorite places in California. It was raining pretty heavy for most of the trip, all the way past Sacramento and a ways up into the mountains. In case you’ve never been there, the Sierras are way bigger than anything on the east coast. The pass over the mountains is above 7,000 feet, and the mountaintops are well over 10,000.

We stayed at a really charming hotel right on the beach, and since it was off season they upgraded us to a suite with a fireplace and view of the lake. Very nice. There was a restaurant in walking distance out on a pier with a view of the sunset over the lake. We were still kinda on east coast time, so next morning we watched the sun come up over the lake from our hotel room. We took a walk on the beach, where I found a massive pinecone from a ponderosa pine, which must have just fallen and washed up on the shore. The main activity of the day was to hike up to Eagle Lake in the Desolation Wilderness Area, above Emerald Bay. This is beautiful forest and mountains with great views. It was a pretty big hike, over 3 hours, and 800 feet vertical, about 5 miles of very rocky terrain. Afterwards we went into town to the area of the base of the Heavenly gondola, right near the Nevada border, which is all built up compared to last time we were there. That evening we went to the casino, but the scene there was beat.

Next day we drove to Yosemite National Park, another one of our favorite places in California. This was another long drive thru the mountains. We took the back way thru Nevada, past Lake Mead where Kamasi Washington did one of his album covers. The last half of the trip was into Yosemite via Tioga Pass, which gets above 10,000 feet. We stopped at a scenic overlook where you could see Half Dome far away. We have a picture from that spot with the kids when they were 10 and 7 or so, last time we passed that way. After alot more driving thru winding mountain roads we arrived at Mariposa Grove, home of the giant sequoia redwoods. These are the larges trees in the world, and grow over 300 feet tall and over 30 feet across at the base. They’re thousands of years old.

We had expected to get lunch there, but instead things were under construction and there was no food, the road was closed, the parking was two miles away and the tram wasn’t running. I guess it’s good that they’re redoing access to the area with an eye toward forest conservation, but it added 4 miles and several hundred vertical feet to the hike. By the time we reached the area where the parking lot used to be, Jeannie was pretty tired and had to sit down for a while. Luckily, we met some kind fellow travelers who shared some trail mix with us, and our energy rebounded. We got to talking and the dude was a Consumer Reports super fan, and was asking me about the auctions they have for the used cars they test, and if I could get him in on it. The redwoods themselves were amazing and the whole glade had spiritual vibe that reminded me of La Familia Cathedral in Barcelona. The kind of thing you just can’t capture in photographs. Overall the hike was about 4 hours, 6 miles and over 600 feet vertical, but not nearly as stony.

We were staying at the Yosemite Valle Lodge, and the was another hour drive back the way we came (Yosemite is huge). This is the first time we stayed in the park in a building with solid walls and running water. By the time we got there it was dark. Had excellent cocktails and steak and wine at the bar and restaurant there. The breakfast place had for some reason computerized kiosks where you order food instead of telling a person what you want. However, some food was not on the menu, so when I wanted a banana they just gave me one cuz no one could figure out how much it cost or how to pay for it. I can hardly wait for the fad of having computers everywhere in situations where human interaction works perfectly well breaks and starts to recede.

Anyway, the main hike that day was up the valley towards Vernal Falls and Nevada falls. Interestingly, the first mile or two of the trail was paved, which made it faster. Last time we were here it was pretty natural, dirt with some stony sections. The middle part was still like this. The last part before the falls was a huge uplift that was mainly stairs made of hewn and stacked up natural rock, a serious Cirith Ungol vibe, but in a beautiful forest, not an orc-infested wasteland. Naturally, going down was harder than going up. This was the longest hike yet, over 7 miles and nearly 1400 feet vertical.

Next day we left the mountains and drove back to San Francisco. This was the most adventuresome drive yet, another long and windy one, with one memorable section descending several thousand feet in just a few miles. Had to go like ten miles per hours thru endless switchbacks. I feel like this may be where they filmed the opening scene of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. We made it safely back across the central valley and thru the Livermore Pass (the windmills have grown quite a bit in the last twenty years) and finally over the bay. We made another attempt to get out to the ocean and this time we were successful. We went out to Half Moon bay, where we found a burrito place and got our lunch to go, and ate yummy California burritos on the beach. We walked around a while and stuck our toes in the Pacific, then drove up the US 1 coastal highway thru Pacifica to San Francisco. We dropped off our rental car and checked into the hotel for the origami convention, and immediately met some friends in the lobby.

But that’s a whole ‘nuther adventure.

Cadence and Cascade

Over the last month I’ve been really busy with our product launch at work. The name of the project is Permission Slip, and at its heart is an app that acts as an agent for people excising their online privacy rights.

The main app is on ios, with a brand-new version now on android, and a backend made in python/django and postgres. The main development was contracted out to an external software house in Canada. There’s been some churn over there, and we’re on the third round of managers and engineers. I’ve been doing tech leadership with the team, which coming to the end meant lots of code reviews, acquiring credentials for all the different systems, coordinating with the product and marketing teams, and with apple and google, and doing develops, CI/CD, setting up pipelines from github to our deploy servers. Lots of extra drama about goggle ad tags, goggle auth keys, and back’n’forth with legal over the privacy policy. And oh yeah, building the web site.

Building the web site was actually kinda cool and fun, if not for the deadline pressure. Got to learn about QR codes, and do some nice responsive mobile layout in CSS. By the end of the last week we were in QA, fixing bugs to the very last minute. We did a pre-launch deploy of the web site and backend, and submitted the app to the apple and google stores. Everything came together and went fine and there were no bugs or glitches. Monday we got approved and for sale on google (the ios app already was released) and updated the web site with the goggle links. We were live, and could take a deep breath of relief.

Tuesday morning our app went live with the “true launch”. The marketing push included an article in the Washington Post, and on NPR. Around 11:30 in the morning the app is getting slow due to heavy and we start investigating.

The app had previously gone thru a beta phase, then a soft launch last winter, and we had about 12,000 users. In about six hours we had over 20,000 new users. Two days later we were above 50,000. That was our goal for the whole year. Over the weekend we passed 100,000.

Being deployed on the cloud, we scaled up our app dynos and added workers, and migrated the DB to a container with 4x the ram. Investigating, we discovered that the database was the critical bottleneck. We looked at what are the heaviest queries in terms of both invoked the most often and most expensive to run, and began optimizing the code there and pushing new changes on the backend into production. Amazingly, all this actually worked, and within a few hours the mischief was managed and things were trending back to normal. It took until after midnight to get all the loose ends tidied up. A long day that started with panic, but ended with a big victory. Being more popular than expected by an order of magnitude is a good problem to have.

Over the next few days we reviewed all the patches we made, and deeper, more robust fixes where necessary. We were able to deploy and roll back the commits one at a time to really understand the performance impact. I’m certainly glad now I spent time upfront to develop a deploy pipeline integrated with our code repo; it really paid off. A few months ago the devs were just deploying from their local dev environments, that would’ve been a huge disaster. I’m also happy about having in metrics and analytics in place that gave use info we could use and respond to with code changes in real time. Most of all, I’m very impresses with how everyone on the team came together in problem solving mode and got it done quickly and effectively.

You should know that my job is running a software R&D group within the company. We have a peer group, that’s more directly tasked with commercialization and productization of R&D projects, and indeed they worked closely with us on the marketing and other things. But they lost a few key people in the tech and leadership areas in the last few months, so we had to do what was necessary on our own. And, like I said, we made twice the target number of new users for the year in just three days. Happily, now our corporate enterprise department wants to migrate our app into their infrastructure, so down the road my team won’t have to worry about devOps and can get back to doing R&D.

That was just one adventure last week. The second was that it was time to make the class schedule for the upcoming Pacific Coast Origami Conference, happening in San Francisco at the end of October. This has actually gotten fairly routine. The tool that Robert Land and I build it working and stable, with the latest round of improvements making it easier to match teachers that want A/V equipment to classrooms that have it. Also this convention is alot smaller than the OUSA New York Convention in June. Still the work is over a weekend and tends to be late and night, and there’s always some last minute changes, shuffling, and special considerations to be accommodated. Anyway, we got it completed without any problems.

Also over the weekend we took a trip up to Buffalo to visit my parents and my kids. It was a pretty quick trip, we drove up Friday night and home Sunday night. Saturday we visited Michelle on campus, saw her new apartment, which is quite nice, walked around the campus and later went out to dinner at Pizza Plant at Canal Side. Pizza Plant used to be one of our favorite places when Jeannie and I were dating. It’s nice that they’re still around and their food is yummy. Sunday we watched the Bills game with my parents, which for some strange reason was being played in England, where they have an entirely different game called football, and was on at nine in the morning. After that Lizzy came over for dinner and we all enjoyed and nice afternoon. And wouldn’t you know, it was rainy on the drive up and home again.

In other news, we’re closing in on the release date for The Global Jukebox 3.0, and I’ve turned the corner from tacking to mixing on my song A Plague of Frogs. Today I layered up a nice fat, 80’s style synth sound for the part called “Synth 1”, using an analog lead sound, synth brass and strings.

Reach the Beach

We spent Labor Day weekend out on the beach in Maryland. It was a chill and fun time. I was feeling kind of tired and ill the day before we left, but Jeannie did most of the driving, so I got some extra rest on the ride, and was basically alright by the next morning. We did spend a good amount of time just hanging out in the hotel room sipping our coffee, or later on in the day a beer, watching and listening to the ocean, which was nice and relaxing.

Saturday we went out to Assateague Island, where we did the classic Swamp Walk. There were a few wildlife encounters we’d never seen before, including a pair of giant horseshoe crabs swimming along the shore of the bay, and a good-sized ray, as well as some gar and the usual crabs and fish and birds and wild ponies.

One new thing we did this year was to bring our bikes, so after the hike we took a ride all around the whole national seashore. It was a good day for it, not too hot, and we were able to get around to all the different places alot more conveniently than walking or by car, and explore a little more. We checked out the various campgrounds cuz that’s something we’ve always been interested in doing, and concluded that the bay side would be alot easier than the ocean side. We’ve been doing enough biking this summer that an eight or ten mile ride on (very) flat terrain felt easy and breezy. We ended the afternoon with a trip to the beach, then back to the hotel. That evening we went out to dinner on the boardwalk and met up with our friend Terry, who just happened to be in OC the same time as us.

They allow bicycles on the boardwalk before noon, so the next morning we rode from our hotel up around 30th street down the whole length of the boardwalk. The boardwalk is abut three miles long, and it’s always fund to see how its character develops as you get further downtown. We took it at a leisurely pace, and when we got the end, we we explored a little bit around the inlet and harbor. Another eight or ten mile ride. By the end it was getting pretty hot. We spent the afternoon on the beach in front of our hotel. We went out into the water a few times, but didn’t get out past the breakers to do much actual swimming. The waves were pretty rough and there were warnings up about severe rip tides and undertow. We saw the lifeguards jump into action a few times. Indeed it was a challenge to just to keep your balance in waist-deep water.

I usually don’t miss my kids when they’re not around, but as the weekend went on, a strange nostalgia for the time of my kids growing up times emerged. We used to go Ocean City almost every summer from the time Michelle was four to Lizzy was in high school, and we’ve gone back only a few times in the years since. So in my mind it’s sort of an end-of-the-summer happy place, just before back-to-school time. It’s funny how some things never really leave your mind. Those years coincided with the years I worked at MTV, and memories of old programming and business problems that was thinking heavily about back then began washing up into my consciousness like dead jellyfish on the beach.

The last day we went out for breakfast rather then lounging in our room, then went down to the boardwalk one more time and ended up in an arcade playing skee-ball and old pinball and video games. The ride home took a long time because of the traffic, but was pleasant enough because we there was fun an interesting stuff on the radio, mainly a countdown of (somebody’s idea of) the top forty albums in 1983, skewed heavily to AOR and hair bands. In fact there was alot of classic rock in the air the whole weekend, and the band we kept hearing over and over, surprisingly, was Styx.

Leave the City Behind

Just got back from a great camping adventure up in the Adirondacks. Michelle went back up to school on Friday, and less than hour later Jeannie and lit out for Saranac Lake. We met up with our friends Mark and Kelly. The plan was to go camping on Fern Island in Lower Saranac Lake. The site is accessible only by boat, so we were going to paddle out there on canoes, bringing everything we need with us. This is a whole level more compact and lightweight than car camping, so apart from our tent, sleeping bags and warm clothes, we only brought a minimal amount of cooking stuff and food.

Unfortunately, it was raining most of the drive up, and after looking like it was clearing up, began raining again on our arrival. So we decided to bag it the first night and instead went to Lake Placid to see a movie. The Barbie Movie was the best thing playing, so that was our choice. It was fun and entertaining, especially the part where Ken gets all patriarchy happy. I think it completes a trilogy with Toy Story and The Lego Movie, although I’m not sure what the higher level meta-point is of three of them take together.

Saturday morning the weather started to clear up, so we decided to go for it. Mark and Kelly have a pair of small, lightweight canoes, almost like open-top kayaks. In addition, we borrowed a larger two-man canoe from Mark’s friend and neighbor Morgan, who had been our D&D party over the winter. It was a super nice canoe, made of kevlar, light enough to lift with one hand. We loaded up all three boats with our camping kit and a big load of firewood, and were off. Mark and paddled the bigger boat with most of the stuff. It was about two miles to the island, about forty-five minutes of paddling. We started in a small bay but the last part was in open water, and the wind started to come up, the rain clouds blowing by overhead and even a few drops of rain.

But by the time we got to the island the rain had basically stopped. We unloaded and set up out stuff. There was a fireplace and a picnic table and a latrine there. The island was hilly and rocky, so it was a bit of a challenge to find two relatively flat places to set up our tents. Mark and Kelly had really compact folding chairs and and generally everything about their kit was a bit more efficient then ours, being optimized for canoe rather than car camping.

After that it was peaceful and beautiful. We took a hike to the other side of the island (we were the only people there) and looked the lake and more islands over there. We built a fire and cooked dinner and sat around watching the fire and the water, talking about life the universe and everything well into the night. The next day it was basically the same thing, and the sun even came out! We spotted some wildlife on the island including a giant toad, some newts, a loon up close, and heard an eagle in the trees.

Mid afternoon it was time to go, since Jeannie and I had to drive back to New York City. So we packed down our stuff and loaded it onto the big canoe. Mark came along with us in one of the smaller boats so he could restock the firewood supply; he and Kelly were staying another two nights. Jeannie was a little nervous in the big canoe with all our stuff, because a couple summers ago we were canoeing up there and we capsized after a power boat passed us and swamped us with its wake. But she did fine, and I generally steered our bow into the wake of any passing boat to avoid side-to-side rocking, and she got more comfortable handling the waves and being out in the water with motorboats around.

We stopped for dinner on the way home at Lake George, at a restaurant overlooking the lake and the marina. Nice end to a great weekend.

Fire and Rain

We went for a camping trip this weekend up in Mongaup Pond in the Catskills, with Martin and his family. We haven’t really done a camping trip since before the pandemic, so it felt really good to be back. We went up on Friday. The whole packing and loading in went smoothly, except that we forgot to pack lawn chairs, so we stopped at a Target on the way. And traffic was really heavy. What’s normally a two-hour trip took almost four hours. Anyway we got there and got set up and the weather was fine. Grilled some meat and drinks some beers and stayed up talking around the fire into the night.

Martin’s kids are at and age where they’re lots of fun to hang out with. They were into pulling a prank where they’d jump out of the woods and attempt to scare you and tell you you’re being mugged. First time they tried it, Alley and Matthew set it up with a story about how the woods were full of robbers and muggers, and we were walking on the sketchy trail. I was confused, but when they sprung the trap it was hilarious. The second time they actually got me, and I hollered out in shock and surprise. They’re also pretty helpful and can build a campfire and keep it going.

In the morning we hung out and had coffee and Martin and I played guitars. Surprisingly, we don’t know that many of the same songs, so mostly we were showing each other different tunes. Today I put more time and focus into my guitar practice than I usually do. In the afternoon we went down to the pond and the kids swam, and later went for some walks or maybe light hikes. We felt a drop of rain in the afternoon and so set up the shelter just in case.

In the evening, when were just about the start making supper, the skies turned dark and ominous, the thunder began to rumble. Soon it began to rain. Right at the start, I made a good fire, put on alot of wood, and Jeannie put tinfoil on the grate to keep it dry. It poured for a good hour, and we sat under the shelter and played an epic game of Fluxx. The rain finally subsided, and we started thinking about cooking again, and that it would be getting dark soon. But the respite didn’t last and soon it was pouring once more. We had heard from the park rangers it was going to continue rain much of the night. Kathleen and Martin decided it would be better to break camp, and Jeannie agreed. We did our best to stay dry as we packed down, but finally we had to take down the tent and the shelter, and it became futile. Ah well, at least the car was fairly organized with the wet stuff all being in one place. And we could run the heat together with the air conditioning on the drive home to dry out.

Amazingly, the fire was still burning strong as we finally pulled out of the campsite. It was probably the worst rains storm I can remember on a camping trip, which was a bit funny, because before we left the forecast was for a thirty percent chance of scattered thundershowers. When we got out of the park and had cel phone service, we learned there was a tornado warning for the sight that night, so it’s just as well we didn’t try and ride it out. It rained most of the way home too. We got home Saturday night and Michelle was surprised to see us and that we threw in the towel. “I wasn’t even aware it was an option,” she said.

We got what we wanted out of the trip. It was a great time despite the rain. It would have been nice if it lasted longer, but we would’ve just gotten up Sunday morning and packed in the rain then. Sunday we put all the wet stuff out in the driveway, the shelter, the tent and the tarps. Also we didn’t cook alot of the food we brought so we had steak yesterday for dinner and we’ll have burgers tomorrow.

A Trip to Italy, Part IV – Venice

Venice is of course the legendary city on the water that we’ve all seen in countless movies. This one was a pretty short train ride and we arrived mid-morning. The train into the city goes over a long bridge, and in most of the city there’s no cars, so there’s a big parking lot on the island next to the train station. The station lets out into the Grand Canal. Coming into the plaza, we all just stood there for a while taking it all in, trying to grok that this was indeed a real place.

We were staying out on Lido island, which separates the lagoon from the Adriatic Sea and is known for its beaches. To get there one takes a water bus or water taxi. Jeannie, being a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker with a fondness of public transportation in all it’s forms, had this all worked out and had us get 48-hour water bus passes. Lido is only five minutes away from the main part of the city, but the bus took a circuitous route thru the Grand Canal and three-quarters of the way around on the north side before it crossed the lagoon, so the trip was more like forty-five minutes. Very scenic tour of the city.

The boat landing at Lido was like an extension of the main part of Venice, with canals penetrating the island. However, here there were also cars. It was a five-minute cab ride to our hotel on the beach side of the island. It was lovely small hotel, the best one yet, right at the edge of the beach. Our room wasn’t ready yet, so we walked down along the beach until we found an “American style” outdoor beach bar for lunch. I had the “big American” burger, which had prosciutto and an egg on it, a distinctly non-American twist.

The music here was American rock. The Red Hot Chili Peppers seem particularly popular in Italy; we heard them several places. Interestingly, when we were in South America last year, pretty much all the music was some kind of salsa, with a clave instead of a backbeat, even the remixes of rock music were salsified. The main exception was some songs had a reggae beat. In Europe there were some dance remixes but alot of it was straight up rock and pop like we have at home. It wasn’t until we got to Venice and saw pseudo-classical/folk/gypsy ensembles playing at the tourist cafes that we heard anything distinctly European. More on that soon.

After lunch we checked into the hotel, and our room was on the fourth (top) floor, with a view of the Adriatic Sea, all blue and beautiful. It was a ten-minute walk back to the water bus station, and then fifteen minute boat ride halfway around the island to St. Mark’s plaza, the epicenter of downtown Venice.

The scene there was fantastic, with a glorious palace right past the boat landing, then an equally impressive and ornate cathedral, a great big bell tower, and big fancy renaissance architecture on all sides. The square itself was full of kiosks and restaurants and live music. Going under an archway in the back of the plaza led to a maze of narrow twisting streets with frequent footbridges over the canals. The streets were lined with shops, restaurants, hotels and churches. The whole thing had a dreamlike quality, and it was something to try and imagine how this place came into being, and now hundreds of years after it’s peak of power and influence remains a world famous tourist destination.

Just as Florence was famous for its leather shops, so Venice has lot of glassworks. I saw lots of glasses, vases, bowls, ashtrays, etc., plus alot of handblown sculptures ranging from kitschy knickknacks to works of art as large and expensive as you want to go. There were dragons and devils, and cuttlefish and octopi and all kinds of things. Some of the animal figures reminded of origami in that the artist was following a known pattern, with variations in the finishing to give each model its own expressiveness. I bought a nice glass dish, azure like the Adriatic, perfect for putting guitar picks in. And I set my mind to find a nice, handblown octopus sculpture.

We did the classic gondola ride, which give you another, unique perspective on the city and its architecture. We wandered as far as the Rialto, a big fancy bridge over the Grand Canal, lined with shops. We found a place along the canal for dinner, another long lingering affair with appetizers, pasta and wine. By this time the kids were telling us every evening that this was the best family vacation ever. I really can’t disagree.

At the end of the night we made our way back to St. Mark’s square. The tide was now high, and when a police boat sped by it’s wake splashed up onto the plaza. The water bus ride was breezy and refreshing and on the walk back the hotel we passed some really nice villas. Ended the night up at the hotel listening the the sound of the ocean and the distant strains of American pop music.

I now have a new quest, a bit more in depth than finding the right glass octopus sculpture. In a few years when I retire, I want to spend a few months as an artist-in-residence at some cool and picturesque place in Europe, and spend the weekends traveling and sightseeing as much as I can.

Next morning it was another beach day. Lizzy and I were the most enthused about this. I like swimming in the ocean, and she mainly wanted to work on her tan. Jeannie was happy to sit on the beach but didn’t go in the water. Michelle came out to the beach but then decided she’d rather go back to the hotel and rest inside in the cool. Anyway, it was super nice for swimming. The water was clear and blue and warm, and the waves were gentle. No big breakers like you get in Long Island. The second time I went out for a swim Lizzy came out with me. At one point I was just enjoying how amazing everything was and I said to her “I feel completely relaxed. I mean I just can’t get any more relaxed than this.” And so we hung out in the water and the sunshine. Came back in and laid on the beach, and went back out for yet another swim.

In the afternoon we went to Murano Island, where the glass blowing shops are, as well as a famous glass museum. We first took the water taxi to St. Marks, then crossed by foot over the Grand Canal to the north side of the island, to catch another water bus to Murano. Along the way we grabbed a quick lunch of panini from a food stand. Murano was alot like the main island with more canals and shops and restaurants. The museum was was cool, and had alot of historical Venetian glass as well as some modern stuff. Afterwards we checked out the glass shops, but I did not find what I as looking for. Then it was was drinks and appetizers at a place on the waterfront.

We took the water bus back to the main island for more wandering around looking at the shops. I finally found the perfect souvenir, a glass octopus maybe 8″ across, with a good heft, and a really cool pattern of white and blue inside the glass. I named him Otto, which means eight.

After dinner at yet another quaint and charming place we lingered in St. Mark’s plaza listening to various musical groups playing in different quarters of the square. The ensembles seemed to be a variation on a basic setup. Piano and standup bass, no drums. The frontline was some combination of one or two violins, an accordion, a clarinet and sometimes a saxophone. Some of the groups leaned more classical and traditional, some were more euro-pseudo-jazz renditions of pop songs. Mostly it was about setting the right mood. All were very good. My favorite thing that I heard was an interpretation of Billie Jean by Michael Jackson.

The last day I woke up early and watched the sun rise over the Adriatic from my hotel room. The beach was empty and I was tempted to dash out for one last swim before it was time to go. As it was, we left Lido pretty early, for a marathon relay of eight different vehicles for the journey home. It started with a cab from the hotel the the water bus dock, then the water bus into downtown Venice. This time it went the other way around the island so in the end we circumnavigated it all and then some. From Venice we took the bullet train back to Rome, and then the express train to the airport. In the airport there was a little tram the went from the main concourse out the the gate. Then of course the plane itself. We were back in New York City sometime after nightfall. Then it was the shuttle bus back the the car parking service, and finally the drive home. Whew. What a great trip.

It took us a few days to catch up on things like laundry, mowing the lawn, and getting back into our routine. It was in the mid-seventies here the day after we returned, and it felt downright cold. The weekend was hot again, and I spent most of it doing yardwork, edging the driveway, walkway and patio, and trimming the hedges. All caught up now. Even got on my bike once or twice, and took the mustang out for a ride.

Italy, Part III – Florence

Maybe it’s a good time to circle back and mention the hotels. We stayed at smallish, European-style hotels. The place in Rome was well over a hundred years old, as was the whole neighborhood, on a narrow one-way street paved in flagstones, with a sharp right turn halfway down the block and a steep slope down to the main street. Our room had a little courtyard garden. And as I mentioned it had a lovely rooftop bar.

The place in Naples was a similar building, but the lobby was in a modern style with a lemon theme, and the bar was in the lobby. The air conditioning was a little stronger, or maybe the heat wave had subsided to normal hot summer weather. It was about a block off the main plaza where the train was, and again the whole area was older buildings, with narrow streets paved in flagstones.

All the hotels we stayed had breakfast, and it was pretty similar everywhere. There was usually scrambled eggs and Italian style bacon, a.k.a. prosciutto which had been pan-fried, and various local cheeses. Also fresh cantaloupe, and peaches and pears in syrup (and in one place even plums) like I used to have as a kid. Also various pastries and croissants, juices and coffee. Some places would put a pot of coffee on the table, others had advanced coffee machines that would do espresso, cappuccino, etc. if you could figure out what buttons to press.

Anyway, the last night in Naples was the halfway point of the trip. We checked out, wheeled our luggage back to the station, and got on the train to Florence. This was a trip of over 300 miles, but the train was really fast and we got there by lunchtime. The hotel and the neighborhood were similar to the others, but this time we were on edge of the old renaissance-era downtown, which is now a high-class district of shopping, restaurants, churches and museums. Our first stop of the day was the Uffuzi gallery, home to lots of great renaissance paintings and sculptures including many renditions of the Madonna and child with assorted saints, which this kids dubbed “ugly baby” paintings, and they weren’t far from wrong. Also featured were a myriad of Greek and Roman mythological gods and heroes including Botticelli’s famous Venus on the halfshell. Impressive stuff. I think my favorite painter of that ilk is Donatello.

After that went to see the Duomo, which is a very elaborate cathedral skinned in ornately carved multicolor marble slabs. We were too late to go inside, so instead we sat in a cafe on the piazza and enjoyed more Italian food and drinks. Afterwards we went around shopping. Florence is famous for it’s leather goods, and it turns out the girls had their eyes on various wallets and handbags. I was really impressed at the variety of bags, purses, cases, etc., and even though the dictates of fashion prescribe that such things are not manly, started to devise various pretexts in which I might put to use a really awesome leather handbag. Baroque scientific instruments, material components for spellcasting and that kind of thing. In the end, Jeannie bought me a really nice leather jacket, which amazingly they had in my size. The shopkeeper called me Rambo, and I had to explain to him Stallone is actually a short guy. It was way too hot to do more than try it on, but I look forward to wearing it in the fall. We ended the night on a medieval bridge over the river, full of gold and jewelry shops.

Next day we stopped by the Duomo again, but the line was way too long get in. We spent the morning at the Accademia Gallery, which featured more paintings and sculptures, and a cool collection of antique musical instruments, including the world’s first piano and a bunch of related instruments. The inventor lived in Florence. The centerpiece of the museum the famous David by Michelangelo. It was really impressive at about twelve feet high, and really beautiful, rightly renowned as a masterpiece. I was a bit disappointed there was no matching Goliath.

In the afternoon we went on a wine tasting tour in the Tuscan countryside. We went to two different places, the about and hour’s bus ride out of town. The first was a charming villa in the countryside that did smaller batches of bespoke wines in large wooden casks. The wines were excellent, served with salami and cheese and a backstory for each one, in a cool dining hall in the middle of the wine cellar. The star wine was a chianti, so we learned what made that special to Tuscany. They had several other varieties, including a great desert wine. The vibe of the place reminded me of what I’d seen in Hungary. In addition to grapes, they also had olive orchards and pressed olive oil. The second place was similar but bigger, and also did industrial scale winemaking with three-story high metal tanks. The tasting was out in a shaded patio, and again several different wines with meat and cheese and bread. It turned out the people sitting next to us were from our same home town in the States, and live only a mile or so away.

A Trip To Italy, Part II – Naples

Next day we got up early and took the train to Naples. Italy has high-speed rail so the the trip was quick and easy, although our train was delayed leaving Rome so it took longer than expected. We got to Naples and checked into our hotel. It was in the old town in a neighborhood near the train station. Like Rome, Naples is a real, large city.

The main activity of the day was to check out the famous Roman ruins of the city of Pompeii, a short ride from the city on the commuter train. The Bay of Naples is dominated my Mount Vesuvius, with Naples to the north and Pompeii to the south. Pompeii was fascinating. Although not as rich and fancy as downtown Ancient Rome, it was much more expansive and much better preserved. You really could understand the architecture and the layout of the the town and get a feel for how people lived and worked. Towards the back was the amphitheater where Pink Floyd filmed their famous concert movie over fifty years ago. There was a little exhibit about it underneath the grandstand. The amphitheater was more intact than the one in Rome, and there was a feeling of intense energy standing in the middle of it.

We had thought about maybe taking a trip up to the top of Mount Vesuvius, but even though it was no longer 100 degrees, it was probably still about 90, and after several hours of wandering around we had had enough. It stays light really late in Italy in the summer, so back near the hotel we found a restaurant and had another long languid dinner of pasta and that sort of thing. This place had wine for seven euros a bottle, so we had three of four before we finally left, and then another drink at the hotel bar.

Next day the goal was Sorrento. We got up early and took the city subway to the harbor downtown, just a few stops away. Jeannie was delighted to see a cruise ship she follows on the internet was in port. We hopped a ferry across the bay, very beautiful. Sorrento is a charming seaside resort town atop some cliffs; down at the shore they have a series of little beach resort clubs where you can rent a beach chair, umbrella, towel, etc. for the day, and have drinks and food brought out to you. The beach itself is pretty minimal and most of the place is built out over the water on piers and breakwalls, creating a semi-enclosed swimming area. Still it was very nice; the water was calm and warm and blue and beautiful, and the whole vibe was very relaxed. Beautiful views of scenic seashore and cliffs and mountains dotted with villages, with yachts and other boats crisscrossing out on the bay. The music was euro dance remixes of American pop and rock hits, mainly from the 1980’s. The food included things like octopus and tuna tartar.

When we were done there we went up to the town and walked around and looked at the shops. We took the ferry back to Naples and had another great dinner the next restaurant down from the night before.

A Trip to Italy, Part I – Rome

Just got back from a long, long trip halfway around the world. We’ve had alot of pent-up energy from not being able to travel much for the last three years. Around Xmastime Lizzy asked if we could do one more family vacation together this summer and Jeannie happily agreed. We brainstormed some possibilities and decided to go to Italy.

Our flight left NYC at midnight Saturday night and arrived in Rome Sunday afternoon in the middle of a heat wave. We stayed in a hotel right in downtown Ancient Rome, walking distance from the Colosseum. The first evening we took a short walk down, and seeing the Colosseum in real life just knocks you out. We had dinner at a restaurant right across the way, wonderful Italian food, pasta and wine, and the girls started a long streak of drinking Aperol Spritzes. After walking around a while more, we went back to the hotel and cranked up the AC. Let me tell you, European air conditioning is not up to American standards.

The main event the next day was a tour of the Vatican. It was a hundred degrees out. We were part of an organized tour that met outside the Vatican walls, so we arrived early had lunch nearby, drinks and desert. The tour itself was quite interesting, first of all because the Vatican is somehow technically it’s own country, separated from the rest of Rome by a medieval castle wall, so there’s this customs and security checkpoint. Our tour guide called it the world’s richest and weirdest country. Inside of course it’s all about the renaissance artwork, numerous galleries of sculptures and paintings and artifacts, with a big focus on Michelangelo and his muscular nude men, languidly posed and casually yet precisely composed. Honestly to modern eyes it looks pretty strange and festishistic, and not always exactly spiritual or uplifting. Kinda made me want to hit the gym rather than contemplate God.

Still there’s something impressive and admirable about the talent and vision behind it all, the scale and technique and craftsmanship, the dramatization of characters and scenes from the bible freely mixed with ancient mythology, and the whole renaissance project of revitalizing and connecting to the aesthetic of an civilization that’s been gone for a thousand years. I studied art and architecture in college, and had seen alot of this in books. Still, it’s something else seeing it up close and in context at real life scale. Everything is so visually busy, the art, architecture and sculpture all merge into one giant system. The famous ceiling of the Sistine Chapel looks kinda like a comic book, telling a story in a set of panels with bright primary colors. That doesn’t really come across from the photographs. I must say the Pieta was genuinely beautiful and moving.

The last thing on the tour was St. Peter’s Basilica, which is just absolutely massive and incredibly ornate, with probably thousands of statues and paintings and other ornamental items, all rendered in carved marble with a few mummified old popes as well. My favorite thing there was the window behind the alter, which wasn’t stained glass, but rather different kinds of stone in different colors, cut so thin as to be translucent.

We took a cab back to our hotel. Air conditioning never felt so good. Later when the sun began to sink toward the west, we went up to the bar on the roof of the hotel and enjoyed some drinks and the view of city. Then we went out to dinner on Tiber Island at a very charming restaurant. Afterwards we walked along the river and checked out the shops and the whole scene.

Next day it was even hotter. The main item of the day was a tour of ancient Rome, starting with an area containing the ruins of the Forum, the temples of Jupiter, Saturn, and other important temples and public buildings. Next, up the hill was the former palace of the Emperor. The guide gave us alot of interesting info about the history of the place, how it was built of over time, then fell to ruin, and later excavated and to some extent restored or at least made worthy for public display. Alot of active archaeology still going on.

The last stop was the Colosseum, and we got to go inside. This was truly impressive for its massive scale and its ancientness, but also how its conception and layout as a sports arena still feels very modern. One side of it is standing relatively intact, while the other side partially collapsed in an earthquake centuries ago, and the stones were hauled across town to use in the construction of St. Peter’s. So it was with alot of structures after the empire fell. The floor of the arena had been excavated and partially restored, and we did epic battle with the sun god while our guide explained the history and various used of the place throughout the ages.

Afterwards we retreated to a nearby Irish pub, because Jeannie had read that the Irish pubs in Rome tend to have good air conditioning. Well it was okay by European standard but not actually cool. Still it was much better than outside, and the drinks were refreshing. The food, nachos and chicken fingers, was pretty terrible, but we weren’t that hungry anyway.

We finally mustered the energy to walk back to the hotel and took another break. That evening we went to the famous Trevi Fountain, which was wrought with statues of Neptune, very beautiful. Lizzy posed for pictures. Dinner at a nearby restaurant, then more checking out the shops. Jeannie bought a bobble head of the pope.