I’m having a lot of trouble with my new blog page. In the ten years since I’ve been blogging, WordPress has jazzed things up quite a bit, and starting a new blog has gone from easy to nightmare. However, in case you are interested in following me, I’m sending a link. I don’t know if it will work. I don’t know if I will use it again (one entry now). But here it is.
Sanos y Salvos en España
That’s right. To quote the Whos of Whoville: We Are Here!
The title of this blog will be the name of my next blog, to which my husband is considering contributing occasionally. This entry will be the Culmination of Culminating Triad, so if you are a subscriber, please check out the new one. I am hoping to get to that this week, during our final, surely, hotel stay, at least for this year.
When we occupy our new apartment in Barcelona starting on November first, we will have been living in hotels (23 nights), one vacation rental (4), friends’ homes (29) or a sold house being packed and evacuated (9) since August 27th, that is, for 65 nights. The nomadic lifestyle has become strangely routine. Nonetheless, when I awoke this morning and looked out the window I had a Where am I? moment.
Although we’ve stayed in every situation from luxury digs to a quick overnight, and locations from the Redwood Forest to the Chesapeake Watershed with a side trip to Brookline, Barcelona looks different. It also feels different. We feel safe here.
Well, as safe as one can be in this world. The people who disagree with my assertions… that humans should be free to choose our own companions, lifestyle, and religion; that human governments’ primary function is to enable their citizens’ ability to be housed, fed, and healthy while living as free people; and that Earth is a place we should protect, not destroy…are not confined to the US, unfortunately. Some of the ones in Argentina were in the news this morning, and majorities in countries on every populated continent are in favor of autocracy, theocracy, police/military control, or all three.
So many people who feel entitled to be judge, jury, and executioner for so many others!
But let’s end on a high and hopeful note. We got turned around between the taxi and the hotel yesterday, and a stranger who observed us amid a sea of luggage scrutinizing our phones stopped of his own accord to help. After that we had lunch at a fabulous Indian restaurant in our new neighborhood, and then slept for 14 hours. Today we awoke to a perfect (California?!) sky, endlessly deep blue and absolutely clear in every direction, with temperatures in the 70s.
Today we’ll be picking up our apartment keys and starting the search for gap furniture while waiting for the NYK Demeter to arrive with our stuff. She has cleared the Panama Canal though, and will dock in Hispaniola tomorrow. So much to look forward to–and blog about!
For all of you I wish that you have at least one perfect adventure, one that suits you, enriches you, and enables you to live your best life, the life you choose for yourself.
Love, Jo
No Kings, None, Nada
We finally got to a No Kings rally today, one of the under-the-radar versions, in Glen Burnie, MD. There were I would say about 500 people there which was a great turnout for GB! It was fun. Our female host is more of a regular protest goer so we didn’t even have to make a sign, we took hers, since she had to work today.
We hadn’t been to a protest since Trump I, during which we participated in the Women’s March and the March for Science. In retrospect, those weren’t too fraught. Most of us thought Trump’s election was an anomaly from which the nation would right itself, and the Trump I team included a lot of reality-based (I’m talking World One reality, not reality-show reality, which is actually not related to reality, for those of you who remember reality) persons who were stopping much of the foolishness.
Obviously, we are no longer in that situation. World One is gone, at least from these shores. So say those of us on the ex-pat track.
What I did learn from today is that a group of people protesting together is no more likely to share core beliefs than any other group of theoretically like-minded people, including mothers of infants and coal miners. Some examples:
- There were lots of thumbs-up horn-honkers, but also a few deploying the American Eagle in our direction with vigor. The group split between, We love everyone, including chanting Love Heals; scorn, pity, or sadness for the Lost Ones; and Those folks are pro-violence or They should be locked up.
- Chants of USA! occationally broke out, a chant I personally feel is too ambiguous. People mean a lot of things when they chant USA, some of which will be racist or sexist or pro-war, given that this was not a gathering of historians.
- This was a very white crowd overall. I agree with that in this way: People of color cannot safely protest in public spaces while masked ICE goons are enabled to ship them to foreign prisons sans due process with the blessing of the Supremely Kangarooish Court. So it’s up to us white folks to take our chances with arrest to perhaps avert all of us living in the world of The Handmaid’s Tale. But I’m sure not everyone saw it the way I do.
- I imagine the crowd was all over the place on the religious spectrum, just as Christians these days range from turn-the-other cheek New Testament-based classics to burn-the-heretics, where heretic is your neighbor who thinks her middle schooler should be able to read Harry Potter.
- Some of the protesters were talking about Our Party and Their Party. That did not resonate with me at all. Democrats got us into this situation very specifically, including last year when their candidate could not stop pandering to billionaires, refused to engage with social media in the MAGAverse, and would not even acknowledge that the US might not want to be funding/arming a foreign theocracy committing genocide. If the choice is Dems or Trump, well, again I am moving.
Now for some fun signs! Notice it was a beautiful day in GB. If you look closely, some of you may find someone you recognize in one of the pictures.
And finally, the Raging Grannies sang some spoof songs specific to our times. This is a Glen Burnie branch of a nationwide organization so you can probably hear them online, though I haven’t tried that yet. Happy No Kings Day to you all!
Very Close to There
Are we there yet?, as in, Are my husband and I in Spain yet? Not yet, but very close.
The new news is that we have an apartment!
After rejecting several on their merits or lack thereof, being turned down by one landlord for being foreign, and missing a few great finds in this fast-moving market, we suddenly found ourselves with two applications accepted and a short time to decide whether to put a deposit on one of those or continue looking.
Eliminating the Continue Looking option was easy. We need to get out of here before flu season!
Both of these apartments are close to Ave Diagonal in the very northwest portion of Eixample, where it marks the boundary to Sarria and Gracia. The smaller one is a gem, with a huge master suite that includes a windowed gallery overlooking a leafy pedestrian way, and its building has a concierge. Sigh. A cozy retreat for us, but not much room for anyone else.
The second apartment is 30 square meters larger, still with a large master area, but not ensuite. It has two other bedrooms, and all the bedrooms and the two baths are grouped together at one end of the apartment. The kitchen is opposite the front door, and the living spaces are at the other end. The living/dining area is spacious and has a balcony, though its not wide enough to dine on. The building was built in 1900 and the apartment has been renovated. The views are not as appealing as in the smaller apartment, but there is a lot of light.
We chose that one, for the extra space and also because it has both A/C and heat. Many apartments in Barcelona seem to be lacking one or the other of those.
I would link you to the listing, but the realtors took it down today! I guess they accepted the deposit we sent this weekend. I also have videos our agents posted on Whatsapp, but I have not figured out out to share them.
In any case, we are here in charming Glen Burnie, MD, with water views in every direction, until Oct. 25th, when we will leave for Barcelona. We will be in a hotel for about ten days while we register ourselves, find a bank, sign our lease, and arrange furniture rental, then occupy our new place starting Nov. 5.
Furniture rental is a fun new addition to our to-do list. Our container MYK Demeter, rechristened by us as Slow Boat, won’t arrive until Dec. 14, so we need furniture between Nov. 5 and then. Moreover, our overpromising/underdelivering mover says clearing customs could take a week. We suspect it may be unwise to expect delivery during the festive season, since Barcelonians go big to celebrate Christian holy days, and we are having our kids out between Navidad and Año Nuevo.
We’re thinking we will allow a year to unpack when it does get here, because we have a lot of preferable activities planned. The joys of retirement know no bounds.
Bon Voyage to New England
As many of you know, we received our visas yesterday and are cleared to move to Spain. Late this afternoon we found that our furniture is scheduled to sail on October 7, which means it could arrive five weeks after that. We are finally starting to feel that the next chapter of our lives is close to beginning.
So here we are in New England, where I spend 35 years of my adult life and my husband spent 32 of his, staying in Brookline, where our kids grew up. What a great time we are having!
Day 1: Feasting at the home of former neighbors which included their new neighbors, the young Quaker couple to whom we sold our Brookline house, one of the best decisions we ever made.
Day 2: Drinking some of the freshest beer we’ve ever at that the successful taproom of one of our friends who gave up high tech to follow his dream and persevered. After that we went dancing, contras at the Concord Scout House, where we met in early 1988, while we both sought warmth by the stove.
Day 3: Hearing the BSO led by Andris Nelsons perform Mahler 4 and Debussey’s Nocturnes in Symphony Hall twelve days before the 125th anniversary of its opening. We treated our lovely hosts, then the four of us went to an amazing dinner at the newest location of Row 34 in Kenmore Square. In-between we viewed the latest art installation in Boston Common, a 20′ x 40′ (H x L) sculpture tribute to MLK and his wife called Embrace.
Today is Day 3.
Tomorrow, Day 4: Walking in the vicinity of Forest Hills with a good friend who is a former work colleague, then catching up at “home” (current edition) with our hosts’ son, who was our younger son’s close friend since they were both in Kindergarten.
Day 5: Meeting the aforementioned brewmeister and his wife at another brewpub, The Notch in Brighton, then visiting a couple who are both former work colleagues at their Seaport neighborhood home, followed by dinner at the nearby trending restaurant Yankee Lobster.
Day 6: Visiting yet another close friend/Brookline neighbor at home, then driving to Lee, MA to have lunch with friends we bonded with in Santa Cruz who now live in western MA. Then on to NJ and beyond–more on that next week…maybe.
We are honestly having trouble finding anything wrong with our lives right now other than wearing the same clothes repeatedly (most of our clothes are on the ship) and having a key ring with no keys on it. Not having an apartment in Barcelona yet is a bit of a nit, but we’ve got some gals working on it, plus one application in play.
We even dodged a bullet? The picture below, of our former California condo, was taken on the morning of Oct. 2; the cleaners left the driveway in their car the afternoon of Sept. 30, while we were flying to Boston. Happily for the new owner, this is an HOA problem.
Gatlinburg!
The first reason we were excited about getting to Gatlinburg was that it took us two days to get there from Estes Park, our longest back-to-back drive on this 3-week trip. We drove ten hours to Kansas City, where we had a nice dinner with a friend of mine from college and her husband, then we drove 12 hours to Gatlinburg.
We were in a zombie-like stage until we got to the adjacent town of Pigeon Forge, then Gatlinburg itself. The closest thing I’ve experienced to these two towns previously is the strip on Las Vegas. Not that there were a lot of casinos, but there were lots of rides and attractions and flashing lights and music and people of all types out and about, even on a Wednesday night.
The next morning, we could see what we had missed in the darkness, which was also what we had come to see, the stunning scenery of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We were surprised to learn this is the most popular of the 63 national parks in the United States, but much less surprised as we got to know at ourselves. The mountains are smaller and smoother than those of the Rocky Mountain National Park, but there are a lot of them, covered with beautiful deciduous trees, which were just starting to change color, and filled with black bears.
We really wanted to see a bear ,and kept asking rangers how we could see a bear, and the response was usually Oh, you’ll see a bear here all right. Honestly, that probably wouldn’t have happened if we spent most of our time near the visitor center, but we made an effort and we did see two bears, one while on a hike to Baskin Creek Falls and the other on a sunset drive through an area known for its bear population.
We only had one day in this beautiful area so we weren’t able to ride any roller coasters or play hillbilly miniature golf on a super steep hill or visit Ripley’s Aquarium, but we did make it to a local brewery with fabulous custom pizzas. We all agreed it was a place where we’d like to spend more time.
I should mention that while I planned the first part of this trip, from Santa Cruz through the wedding in Tahoe, our younger son planned the rest of it, including choosing the destinations. We will be leaving our 2013 RAV4 with him when we get to the East Coast, in anticipation of moving to Spain. I’m thinking I should culminate this blog and start a new one in Spain, though I may add a few more entries during the next four weeks or so while we are moving and visa-obtaining and taking a few more farewell trips.
If anyone has a good idea for the name of the moving-to-Spain blog please let me know.
So Many Mountains
How wonderful to be in Rocky Mountain National Park again! Also terrifying, at least for an acrophobe like me. I’m going to push back on the use of the word “irrational” in the definition though. As my fellow acrophobes know, we fear heights because we want to jump, or fall, or drive over the edge. We know it’s inevitable, even alluring, and also that we have to resist, which is hard.
Of course we are also scared when someone else is driving, which may be a little irrational.
I really am glad we were able to drive 25 or so miles of the Trail Ridge Road. Around every bend, one views oceans, fields, immensities of mountains, from near ones with discernable, rocky textures, to remote ones, a smear of hazy blue. There are 126 named peaks, 60 of them over 12,000 feet high. If you like mountains, and I do, the beauty and majesty are breathtaking.
The road is another matter. Peaking at over 12,000 feet itself, I would characterize it as despairingly twisty and primarily sans railings. There are opportunities to drive over the edge and plunge to certain death roughly every 50 feet. We did not try Old Fall River scenic drive, a one-way (up), 14′ wide unpaved road with drops on both sides which I surely would not have survived unless anesthetized.
I made the mistake of driving for TRR, for a short while. It was an excellent cardiac workout and also exercised my vocal cords. It felt like a video game in which I had to keep the car between the yellow line and the white line while ignoring the heart-stopping precipices, but for real, no respawn.
We also took a hike to lovely Emerald Lake, a hidden gem; saw a lot of elk, many hanging around our hotel grounds; and checked out the source of the Colorado River. The weather was balmy, even after dark. My husband and I made quite a few friends in the hot tub, a first for us. Ok that sounds weird, but it was quite a Midwestern group so no.
Happily we were able to make the most of our two days because we drove there. We had been at Lake Tahoe (6000′) for four days then Salt Lake City (4000′) for two more just prior, so we were well on the road to being acclimatized when we arrived at Estes Park (7500′).
This landscape earns its cliches, so I haven’t bothered to edit them out.
Fetid, Tepid, and Infested
The Great Salt Lake is Great in that it’s huge, and even huger prehistorically, when it spanned the Eastern half of current-day Utah. It’s also really flat, covered with tiny flies, and stinky due to one of its other two aquatic lifeforms, anerobic bacteria. Brine shrimp round out the water fauna trio.
Interpretive signs, and there are lots, point out that brine shrimp and brine flies draw migrating birds in their multitudes, and I imagine those might be nice to see, especially while wearing breathing apparatus. Boats offer to take visitors on a trip where one can float effortlessly, so my husband decided to try that from the shore, but ended up just wading, because it was “not really deep enough and kind of gross.”
The word “gross” had occurred to me before he brought it up. Approaching the shore, one crosses a beach composed of oolitic “sand,” which comes not from rocks but from biomass, and I just described the local bio types sourcing mass. It’s unpleasant on three counts: color, odor, and texture. Following that is deep black mud, which engulfed my husband’s legs halfway up his calves.
I noticed five interpretive signs I had missed outside the visitor center, and they turned out to be about the large copper mine just over the highway. GSL is a no-exit terminus for water and its associated mineral load, which is not just salt; the world’s largest open-pit copper mine/manmade excavation are here. Plus several smaller ones. So we can add tailings and mine sludge to the local attractions list.
To complete that list of amenities, I will mention wasps, spiders, heavy machinery, pelting sun with no shade escapes, and 30-square foot gravel lots for RVs. No plants? Well, maybe some scrub. I don’t really remember any.
Speaking of plants, the mountains here and in most of Nevada look to be made of dirt or rock and are mostly bare of trees, but can be quite majestic nonetheless, at least the ones that aren’t being used for industrial purposes. However, the wonderland of geo-sculpted formations and canyons that comprise four of Utah’s five national parks, as well as its fabulous ski resorts, are not near here. Maybe we’ll see some on the way out tomorrow.
Silence of the Woods
Today was our older son’s wedding! Currently we are in the afternoon rest break, and I am thinking about trees.
Last week we hiked in Redwood National Park and other wooded locations in Humboldt and Del Norte counties. This is Big Tree country. Many of the trees are coastal redwoods, but all of the trees are big. I was especially struck during the drive from northern Humboldt to southern Del Norte, 100+ miles of huge trees lining the roads nonstop. They were thick and tall and endless, an enormous wall of trees. Very few towns and dwellings have taken root. Most highway exits advertize no services, and mention rivers or canyons more often than town names. As you move north, the trees get bigger and somewhat more spread out–think old growth forest–but the overwhelming impression is that this is Tree Country.
Tall trees are old trees. Old trees are not like old people. Old people are the age of the saplings here. The trees have presided majestically for hundreds or thousands of years, during which the lives of indiviual people might seem to them like movie shorts flickering past, though probably they don’t even notice us. People feel ephemeral in such land.
Western forests are quite different from eastern forests. I’m not sure whether deciduous trees can grow as old as pines and yews, redwoods and Douglas firs, but even if they can, they have had little opportunity to do so since European colonization of the eastern US. Having denuded Europe of trees and megafauna, including wolves, and having observed no problem with that activity, newly arriving Europeans proceeded to kill as much of the flora and fauna of the New World as quickly as possible. If you are made of stern stuff, I recommend Wild New World, a 2023 book by Dan Flores, unrelated to the older BBC series of the same name. Warning though: it’s hard to take.
Most forests in the continental US have not returned to old growth or even near-old-growth status, but there are more in the Pacific Northwest, and these are the forests we visited. Notably, they are silent. Really, really silent. Occasionally we would stop moving and just listen. The silence is palpable, a presence looming just below discernment, yet in the end, only silence. You think you heard a sound, but you did not.
Eastern forests are alive with songbirds and wind and babbling brooks. Why are western ones different? Obviously different climates lead to different flora and fauna; the western forests are bursting with life, but not the same life. Elk and bears, raptors and owls abound, but don’t announce their presence vocally. Rodents and reptiles hide in the leaf litter or among the branches.
It is also much drier. The rare flowing water is either a tiny stream or an enormous slow-moving river. The distances are larger; looking down and a river with multiple rapids, you simply may not be able to hear them because they are so far away. There is also less weather drama, with most days like the day before.
We’re in Lake Tahoe now, another very heavily wooded region, yet the difference between this and the Pacific coast forests seems very clear. There are lots of trees here, and most are firs, but they not very tall–50-100 feet say, instead of 300-400. Their trunk girths are much smaller, and they are spread apart in a way that allows sunlight to penetrate, rather than forming a canopy, so hiking through is more of an exercise in sun protection than like wandering through a cool, towering cathedral.
I have no idea why this is, but I look forward to observing and experiencing more changes as we continue our trip. Coming up next is Salt Lake City, followed by Rocky Mountain National Park.
I Do Have Regrets
July 1, 2025 was not a good day.
Some things about me are improving as I age. I easily maintain my weight, I sleep great most nights, I rarely feel cold, and my daily life is relaxed and easy, because I’m retired so I do mostly what I want. On the other hand, I am physically less able than I prefer, have a few aches, am slower to accomplish tasks, and can’t remember and/or forget a lot of small things.
One thing has always been true of me and still is: When stressed, I my brain freezes.
The most horrifying example of this in my life happened in Exeter, New Hampshire on a family trip. We stopped at a park on one of the smaller numbered roads, perhaps route 27, and for some reason we lost track of our three-year-old and he showed up in the middle of the street. People started shouting and I looked up to see something impossible, namely, a small boy in the road facing a car stopped directly in front of him. His head hardly cleared the grill; I don’t even know how the driver saw him. I froze. My brain simply did not accept that this could be happening.
My husband raced past me into the street and snatched him up. Similar things have happened to me several times. If I’m nervous about a deadline, or trying to get something done in a hurry, I’ll forget the most basic things, for example my own zip code. Or I won’t be able to log into my computer, something I do multiple times a day, because I forgot my password. Stress sets my brain function to Off.
Interestingly, this wasn’t a problem in the workplace. Maybe because high tech work requires one to show no fear? I don’t know, but I faced many stressful situations at work with relative equanimity usually, and wrath occasionally, but never with brain dysfunction. But that was then.
The second most horrifying incident happened this morning. After months of tens of daily tries to schedule a visa interview online, I got through. Instead of Please try again, the screen said Choose your appointment time. I was stunned, but quickly clicked on the next step, which revealed that there was literally one appointment left in August. My husband had been up a lot of the night trying, and we knew for sure August appointments weren’t opened yesterday, so this meant that they were going very quickly.
I thought I nabbed that appointment but there were more steps, and soon I got to one that didn’t work. The computer wanted me to download a picture, yet it simply would not accept the one I had. I started to edit. I was using my phone rather than my computer, and I quickly realized I didn’t know how to fix it. I woke my husband and explained the issue and we both started working on it, but to no avail. There was a timer running and we didn’t manage to get through the registration process before it expired.
in retrospect, I realized I probably could’ve just skipped that step, or maybe entered a picture of something else then edited it later. I’m not sure. But basically I lost all my reasoning ability and freaked out and focused on this particular step without thinking it through. My husband was helping very much, but he had just woken up and he took my word for it that what I needed was this picture, which was a perfectly logical thing for him to think. I was the one whom logic deserted.
The bottom line is we had an appointment for a brief shining moment but now we don’t have one, and it will be another month before the September appointments are open. Things are getting worse at the San Francisco consulate. When the June appointments opened, they filled in four days. When the July appointments opened, they filled in one day. When the August appointments opened, today, they filled in two hours, which I know because I called to see if anyone could help me. The opening dates vary and are never announced; you just have to keep trying.
This is a big deal for us because an August appointment was our last chance of keeping our original schedule. Now we either can’t go to Spain at all, or we have to sell our house and move somewhere else before we move to Spain. We will probably do the latter because every single day another significant right is abrogated in our country. But this was a big, big blow. I wept. My husband cancelled his appointments and slept. We are both battling some despair and realizing we have to make a new plan but not feeling like doing it.
I used to say these are “first world problems,” but I don’t believe I live in the first world at the moment. I want to. That’s why this is so fraught, and fraught makes my brain freeze more likely.
Culminating Triad 