Hiatus

It’s been two years since I last posted anything on this site. My long hiatus is now ended. To say that life threw us a curveball or two during that period would understate the reality.

I suffered my own personal nightmares during the world’s ordeal with the Covid-19 pandemic. These included a health scare — now under control, thank God — and moving out of the house we called home for more than 33 years. We also bought, renovated and furnished not one, but two condominiums that we now call home(s). These moves were a lot of work, time-demanding, emotionally draining, and fraught with legal and financial complications. One casualty of all this has been my writing—I’ve done damn little of it over the past two years.

Our new view!

Despite all, these months did include many moments of joy. We attended numerous weddings and celebrated the engagement of our daughter Zoe to her boyfriend Matthew. There will be more to say about the wedding they are planning in the Valley of the Sun next spring. Babies were born to relatives and friends and children of friends. There were special moments spent with dear friends when things looked otherwise bleak. And lots of couple and family time.

Somehow, in all this drama, we found opportunities to travel. In the early months of the pandemic, we did short weekend road trips, exploring new places (for us) within a few hours of home and returning to places we love. One such spot is Charleston, an area that we’ve considered our second home all our lives. During one of our visits, we found and eventually purchased our new home there. Life comes full circle — it’s in the same small enclave in which we shared a second home with friends forty years ago.

As the pandemic wore on, we began to venture a bit further from home. Like so many other Americans, we decided to visit some of our wonderful National Parks. In fact, we made it to five of the most dramatic ones out west. Though I didn’t post anything about them then, I did take many notes and have since compiled them into a streamlined format that I am eager to share. More recently we declared the official end (for us) of the Covid-19 travel ban with an extended trip across Scandinavia and the North Atlantic.

Over the next few weeks, I will post brief glimpses of and reflections on these trips in my travelogue and hope to be up to date before we head off on our next adventure this fall. As always, I welcome your feedback and appreciate your willingness to spend time with my ramblings. Please pass anything you find interesting along to friends and family. I would love to add more readers to my site.