perfectly loverly

It is a perfectly lovely English home - Adam and Laurie, Charlie and Ollie Workman's house. After a month on the road staying in hotels, it is nice to be somewhere called home.


Adam's gift with flowers and plants is evident from the picture. In the back of the house, Adam is trying seven different varieties of grape vines to see which does the best. In a few years, who knows, he hopefully will be producing his own vintage.

it's a small world

One comes to the conclusion that it is a small world after all, when after traveling from Wichita, Kansas to Italy's Cinquetere, you run into friends from back home.

Dena and Craig Robinson stayed in Vernazza, just a stone's throw from Monterossa, two of five cities that make up Italy's Cinquetere. Dena and Craig are staying in a hotel on the main square. Look closely over Dena's head, you can see Craig's K-State t-shirt drying on the balcony. I can't resist the cliche, When in Rome...
 





You almost need to be a goat to make the walk from Vernazza to Monterossa. The marrow winding trail takes you up the hill over a thousand meters from sea level.

Dena and Craig hiked the route the next day and brought along trail friends from Australia with whom we shared a beer or two. David and his wife are retired ranchers and farmers from Queensland taking a five month vacation in Europe.

the morning after

Pictures can never words, they just don't give one the sense of sound, smell, and feel.

The morning after the storm on Lake Como the air is calm, the smell of coffee and fresh baked bread floats up to my room were I am still sleeping, and I feel as if life has slowed to slowest possible. Hardly anything is astir, with the exception of the hotel staff who are preparing breakfast and the birds who are already busy finding food.

Pictures are soulless, lacking movement and feeling and life. But, then if a picture told the whole story, I would be sitting back in Wichita, Kansas looking at a postcard rather then here.

still waiting after all these posts

Dialogue is a two way street. So, if you are out there, communicate. Otherwise, I am writing blindly - that is, without knowledge of whether my blogs are being heard and, if heard, appreciated. Blindly, because I can not see or hear the response to my blogs.

Communication is simple. Press the comment button and type. Don't be intimidated by misspellings, they are a natural part of life.

are you connected?

If the catch phrase of the sixties and seventies was Timothy Leary's, "Are you experienced?" - a multi-dimensional statement suggesting that drugs, sex, and drink are the means to experience - then the catch phrase for the here and now is, "Are you connected?"

"Are you connected?" refers to the simple fact that much of our life depends on our connection to the internet. The internet brings us our mail, our news, it allows us to communicate in ways that we have never before imagined.The internet exponentially increases our connections with the world in which we live and the people who inhabit that world.

My dependence on the internet was brought home to me this morning as I sit here in the drawing room of the Villa Poggiale. The hotel is an eighteenth century villa more designed to keep out the outside world out than to bring it in. Still, to accomodate guests, the villa set up wi-fi, so that businessmen could conduct business; and casual travelers could keep in touch with love ones at home and make the next reservation for the next hotel along their journey. Alas, I am without a connection. I cannot communicate with friends or family outside the sphere of this small villa.

This experience of being unconnected is disconcerting. Like the Robin Williams - Peter Pan character in the movie "Hook;" I on vacation with family, but constantly checking in with the internet to find what is going on back home. In Robin Williams case, it was a cell phone. His wife and children are exasperated, as are mine, with an obsession of staying connected to business clients while ignoring the needs of the family. In the movie, finally the son, I think, chucks the phone out the window and his connection is gone. Robin Williams, the Peter character grown into adulthood must now confront his personal fears.

My family surrounds me while I sit at the computer impatiently waiting for me to drive them to San Gimilgnano. I am unconnected. But, then perhaps the message is that connections can be interpersonal as well as digital. So, for a time, I need to connect to my family and friends in a way that does not involve a computer.

adam, laurie, charlie, and olie

Despite adversity, the Workman family arrived at Villa Poggiale.

The adversity was a car breakdown on the autoroute at Piacenza. This was the final resting place of Adam's Volvo V4o T4. Adam said that the car was once as fast as "shit off a shovel." Now it is just "shit". The temperature gauge went from 100 degrees to 140 degrees. "I got the hood up and there was oil everywhere," Adam said. "I put water in the radiator and, like a geyser, the water rose 40 feet in the air."

Travel insurance allowed the family to be towed into the city where they were put up in at a Holiday Inn. An evening at Bella Napoli, the restaurant where all the footballers go. Then, the next day they got a rental car.

Now the Workmans are in Tuscany. We are sitting here and drinking wine out of a box, South African Red Wine with a picture of a zebra raising its tail. The wine tastes like the picture.

friends and family

Kathy and Mike,

I got your comment. The best way to contact me is by posting a comment on the contact me post or email me at http://www.arthurhdavis@gmail.com.

I am heading to Italy after Spain. It is ten days or so under the Tuscan sun and then back through France to England.

While in France, I will visit Graffigny-Chemin, a small village in Haute Marne, the former Lorraine, where our grandmother was born and where she met our grandfather while he was fighting in World War I.

Grandmother Marguerite's maiden name was Chevalier and Meine. After World War I, she took the name of Chevalier because of anti-German sentiment. Kathy has the most information on Granny.

the search for intelligent life

I know that I am getting older. I think I can deal with that - that being the aching joints, sore muscles, and disappearing hair. What I miss the most is good conversation about life and what matters. It seems the older you get the less intelligent life there is. I mean, don't we all just pass by each other without making any significant difference in either person's life.

Some thirty years ago, NASA began a search for intelligent life forms out side our galaxy, SETI, and sent into space a rocket with a message for anybody who might be there to call back, to speak to us, to communicate an intelligent word or phrase; let us know that we are not alone on the planet earth. At the same time, scientists have trained huge listening antenna on the galaxies in space to see if somehow and somewhere our telescopes can pick up someone else's version of "I Love Lucy" on intergalactic space waves.

Is anybody listening?

If you are there, all you have to do is post a comment and say something, anything that demonstrates that life is not simply an existential nightmare of waking, eating, and sleeping - just kidding.