Posted on by Jo Gent

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

Posted on by Jo Gent

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. 

 

Posted on by Jo Gent · 2 Comments

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.

Posted on by Jo Gent

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.

Posted on by Jo Gent

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.

Posted on by Jo Gent · 1 Comment

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.

Posted on by Jo Gent · 1 Comment

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.

Posted on by Jo Gent

No Drama Living

My husband and I had a consultation with a financial planner based in Italy today. Financial planning is very different in Europe, and he explained some of the changes we would need to make were we to move to Spain, which is our intention, although execution of our carefully constructed timeline is tenuous, mostly because the Spanish consulate in San Francisco is extremely busy right now.

One of the biggest differences is a dearth of places to leave money where it could earn interest. For variety of reasons, European banks don’t want to stash money, and not only do they not pay interest for the privilege of doing so, they often charge. Out of curiosity, I asked, What do Europeans do with their retirement funds?

The planner told me they mostly don’t have retirement funds, that salaries are lower there, so most people don’t set aside savings. That sounded terrible to me, until he explained it.

Europeans, he said, don’t view retirement as a time to stop working and start doing whatever they like to do. They spend their entire lives doing whatever they like to do; no one works 14-hour days, or stresses themself out to make a killing, or has to work multiple jobs to survive. They tend to live in the same house until it’s paid off, raise their families, and form communities, and nothing much changes when they retire.

Remember, he said, there’s no cable news in Spain recycling the headlines of the day into more headlines, endlessly. People aren’t barraged by frantic assertions that they need to act quickly to avert the next disaster. Speculation and fanaticism do exist in the realms of sport, celebrities, and the royal family, but not in a way that derails the routines of daily life.

Elections, he said, come and go without most people spending a lot of time on them, because there is not a lot to worry about. No political entity is going to take away health care, or close schools, or use legislation to “reverse” the discoveries of science. That’s why when a pandemic comes, or there’s a nationwide power outage, the people are mostly calm and compliant.

No Drama Living.

Now I’m really looking forward to moving. I try for No Drama Living every day, and as a retired person willing to ignore the news and able to live as I like on my retirement funds, I succeed most days. But the drama is lurking just around the corner, popping out in a guy you meet at a party whose daughter was arrested at a protest, or a member of your dance troupe who lectures on the “failings” of the “other side” during a team dinner.

Since I am an American, I also feel some obligation to keep up with the current dismantling of our society, mostly by skimming NYT and The Guardian daily, occasionally by contacting a representative or supporting an organization. I also delete quite a few inflammatory emails, despite spending considerable time unsubscribing.

My husband and I are moving, but our friends and family are not, so I’m sure I will always want to keep an eye on what is going on here. But I can easily picture it becoming more of a background hum then a headache-inducing stress. Should I try to be the person who makes the difference? I may have aged out of that behavior.

Or maybe that’s only a thing in the movies. Civil, stable, locally-oriented living is optimal for humanity. Without supervillains, no superheroes are required.

Posted on by Jo Gent

Exhausted by Eventbrite

I just spent 20 minutes trying to buy tickets on Eventbright and I got so tired I decided to stop and write this instead. The event is some goofy little thing in a largish city park where are you drive through a 15-mile route and view Christmas lights. I guess maybe they’re sort of animated; an exploding volcano is mentioned. I guess there are some sort of special effects; special glasses are mentioned. I guess it’s very popular, because it was hard to find a time during which a ticket for my size of car, a regular passenger car, was available.

Each of the snags was picayune, yet they continued to pile up, perhaps like the light lava from that volcano. The first page came up with available times on today’s date only. So I picked another date and chose a time, only to discover that nothing is available for my car size. So I started at the top again, and again, experimenting with dates and times to try to spiral into one that has available tickets.

Is this an example of the time-saving convenience of ordering online, or just slovenly programing which we have come to accept? A site doing such a poor job should go out of business, but Eventbrite has become ubiquitous.

Finally I found an available slot that was not ideal, but livable. This led to the reveal that the price for these tickets is slightly more than their face value because there’s an extra fee. I don’t expect Eventbright to do this for free, but it sure would be nice if the price was just the price, with all that stuff included. Actors and janitors are paid also, but I don’t have to get involved.

Next I had the option of buying special glasses, although still no hints about what the glasses do for you, so I passed, on the principle that if you want me to buy something, you need to tell me why. I think I’m old school.

After that, I had to agree to a list of statements that are not true, such as, Do you agree that you have received the special directions to the event? –which I need because they are not accessible using a standard navigator and these tickets are non-refundable. But I didn’t have those directions at that time, since I was still buying the ticket.

Even so I proceeded to the next reveal, which was that two pairs of glasses are included with my ticket but I can buy more when I arrive. We were planning on bringing four people and I had started to get the idea that the glasses are necessary, but still no exclamation of why and no idea about how much this might cost.

How much could they be? It’s not the point. It’s the disrespect, requiring people to commit to undefined purchases for undefined reasons, using a website designed by someone who never heard of ergonomics.

I’ve been forced to use Eventbright before to see something I really wanted to see, and it has never been a good experience. But Ticketmaster is much, much worse. Their fees are not to be scoffed at; since the government passed the law forcing them to reveal the fees, I have found them to be around 30% of the ticket price.

Like everyone else, I’ve become accustomed to being able to buy things while sitting on my duff at home, but it’s so irritating I would almost rather go somewhere. When I get a chance to go to a box office, or even call one, it’s so nice to talk to someone who can explain the features of the different seating locations, and there’s rarely an extra fee. Recently I’ve bought several gifts in stores and I’m certain I ended up with different choices than I would have after looking at pictures online, because someone was supplying me with useful information.

I’m sure this seems like a petty rant, because it is. Instead of staring at a screen, parsing the little boxes, guessing at the meaning of the myriad symbols, and working on my carpal tunnel syndrome, I feel like I should just go walk by the ocean.

So I think I will do that. It’s much more impressive than a light volcano anyway.

Posted on by Jo Gent · 2 Comments

Still Waiting for the First Amish President

When our younger son was in third grade he fell off the monkey bars and broke his elbow. The ER doctor was flabbergasted when she heard that we were watching when it happened. She couldn’t imagine why any parent would allow a child to play on the monkey bars, an apparatus that brought the hospital quite a bit of business. At the time I was substitute teaching, and spent plenty of lunch periods watching streams of children of all ages cross the monkey bars without incident.

Our life experiences shape what we believe, and that ER doctor and I will never agree on the monkey bars since we both know what the monkey bars are really like. However, that doesn’t stop us from having a lot of other things in common.

A lot of people on the Freedom to Play on the Monkey Bars party, having lost the last election, now profess complete shock that anyone on the Prohibit Playing on the Monkey Bars party could not see things their way, yet in retrospect the outcome seems sort of inevitable.

Workers like me who were both white and white-collar in the 1990s and 2000s had a great run. Our wages were high, our subsidized 401(k) programs were burgeoning in the stock market, and we fully believed we were the vanguard of the so-called meritocracy, which of course turned out to have nothing whatsoever to do with merit.

During that same time period, politicians of all persuasions were cozying up to billionaires for contributions, removing restrictions on corporate greed and overgrowth, sending manufacturing jobs abroad, cracking down on “crimes” such as the inability to pay bail, admitting immigrants from migrant farmers to engineers to increase the employment pools for corporations from Big Ag to Silicon Valley, and sending the children of small town America to fight and sometimes die in multiple wars in the Middle East. Those who tried to change their trajectories by going to college were saddled with inexplicably nondischargeable student loans, then released into an economy in which greed-frenzied CEOs colluded to minimize both the number and the wages of their employees, unimpeded by unions, which were reeling under attacks from both government and corporations mesmerized by capitalism.

I think we are the only developed country that went full bore down the rabbit hole of worshiping capitalism. Folks who think capitalism is some sort of moral calling remind me of folks who think hunger is an emotion, except it’s not at all funny.

The gang of Prohibits in the White House is not going to make any of this better in my view. However, I can certainly understand why a lot of people who think we need to get off the monkey bars because we’re all broken decided to crash the system rather than let it spend a fourth (roughly) decade impoverishing them.

I can also understand why the Freedoms, with whom I identify, feel beset by mobs seeking to control how we worship and what we read, and to limit our medical choices, especially when it comes to vaccines, demonstrably one of the most effective public health improvements in history, yet now completely prohibited in parts of Idaho and discouraged in Florida.

Banning vaccines certainly feels like going back, waaaaay back, feels crazy, to us. Some would even say “uneducated,” but that’s not fair. For Freedoms who want to seek common ground, I would recommend you meditate on what it would feel like to have your family’s net worth and opportunity for advancement continually dropping for decades. Might you not also get tired of waiting?