stevenpiziks | Entries tagged with travel

Last month, Darwin and I joined my cousin Mark and his wife Tamara for a week in Puerto Rico. It was a delight!

Once we got there, anyway.

The day Darwin and I were supposed to fly out, a snowstorm swept in and delayed our flight from Detroit, meaning we'd miss our connecting flight in Charlotte. We ended up having to wait until the next day--and THAT flight was delayed on the runway because the plane needed to be de-iced and it took a lot longer than normal. So we were going to miss that day's connecting flight, too! I have to say, though, that American Airlines stepped up. Darwin and I spent an unhappy four hours in the air, wondering how the hell we were going to get to the island before our vacation actually ended, but when we landed and our internet was restored, we got alerts that American had automatically rescheduled our connecting flight to one that was leaving promptly after we landed. We did have to sprint through the airport, but we made it and finally ended up in Puerto Rico. Whew.

This was my and Darwin's second visit to PR. We absolutely love it there. When I left the airport and the summery air swept over me, I marveled at how much I felt at home.

We picked up our rental car without incident and met Mark and Tamara at the flat we'd all rented. To tell the truth, I was a little uneasy at first. Mark and I grew up together and we shared a number of family vacations right up until we were teenagers, and things always went perfectly well. But we hadn't traveled together since then, and we've gotten rather older in the intervening years. We're close as adults, but we hadn't done any overnight travel together, let along with Darwin and Tamara. Would we get along?

Short answer: yes!

We actually had a formal discussion about vacation stuff before we left and decided not to overschedule ourselves as a foursome in order to avoid stress. The only things we set up in advance was a hiking and kayaking trip, a visit to Old Town San Juan, and a visit to the fort El Moro. For the rest of the time, we gave all of ourselves permission to do what we wanted, either together or separate, and no one should feel pressure to do stuff together the entire time. This worked out very well. And Mark and Tamara proved to be easygoing flat-mates.

The four of us took a hiking trip through the rainforest that culminated in a visit to a waterfall/river/swimming hole. We enjoyed that very much. Then it was time to go on a sunset kayaking tour of the bio-luminescent bay, where the local plankton spark when you hit the water with a paddle or your hand. It made for a tiring but enjoyable day.

The trip to Old Town was also fun, especially when we came across the bird park, which is filled with thousands of aggressive pigeons. Tamara bought a sackful of feed and quickly found herself covered in birds from head to foot. We tried and failed to find the ice cream shop Darwin and I loved last time, but we did find the fantastic restaurant we remembered and had a wonderful lunch there. I really have to learn to make empanadas.

The four of us shared some meals and also wandered along the ocean walk. The Atlantic is a stunner. We also enjoyed perfect weather all week--seventies at night, low eights during the day, only a single afternoon of light rain. It was like the island was flirting with us.

We spent the rest of the week idling around the island. Mark and Tamara took an all-day hike on the western side of the island one day, and Darwin and I re-explored Candado in San Juan. We slept late with the windows open to the ocean breezes. On impulse, the four of us took another kayak tour around the lagoon near our flat building. I went swimming a couple times in the sheltered bay in Condado and got a perfect tan. And Mark and I re-connected, and the four of us regular-connected. Darwin haven't done much vacationing with other couples, and we had a fine time doing so with Mark and Tamara. I told Mark, "Yep--we're vacation-compatible. No small thing!" He laughed and agreed.

The week went by too fast. Darwin and I are giving serious consideration to moving there after we're both retired, or at least doing the snowbird thing. We'll see what happens.

The flight home was straightforward and without incident, but it was sad in that it meant we were leaving. I'm already trying to figure out when we'll go back.

Darwin and I very much enjoyed our cruise last year, and this year when our friends Michelle and Steve proposed the four of us taking one together, we decided we were in!

We didn't want to go all the way to Europe this time, so we scouted the Caribbean. This turned a little problematic. Some cursory research showed that a lot of Caribbean countries don't handle same-sex relationships well. Some are outright hostile. I know that lots of places that are homophobic toward their own people are very tolerant of gay tourists--they can't afford to turn away People With Money. But there were still some places that were flat-out NO.

We finally found one that took us from Tampa to Cozumel to Belize to Costa Maya and back. And we signed up and we paid for all the things.

The arrival in Tampa went without incident, and we spent the night in a cheap hotel we aren't in a hurry to visit again but was tolerable for one night. Bonus: it provided shuttle service to the cruise port. Met up with Steve and Michelle and duly waited our turn to board.

My and Darwin's cabin is smaller than the one on our previous trip, but still nice, and it has a balcony. We spent the first day and night at sea.

And I got seasick.

I never get seasick! But the sea was very choppy, and I swear there were times the deck dropped so fast, my feet left it for a split-second. I finally went down to the medic to ask for a shot, which they gave me (to the tune of $300). It ended the nausea, but it made me sleepy for the next couple of days.

Anyway, our first stop was at Cozumel, where we had signed up for a visit to Mayan ruins and a chocolate-making demonstration. The best I can say about the ruins is that they were rinkydink. Seriously tiny---a rough altar, a governor's house (which you couldn't go into), a tiny temple (ditto). The most interesting part was that you could see the colored handprints left by the original builders. But we saw everything there was to see in ten minutes. The chocolate-making demonstration was also mildly interesting. The guy showed us the Mayan way, which involved pulverizing cacao beans with other spices on a rolling mortar and pestle.

At sea, we ate and hung out and watched some mildly interesting shows put on by mildly interesting performers.

When we got to Belize, we were supposed to go ziplining through jungle and tubing through caves. But we were politely informed that the excursion was canceled because the caves had flooded completely. And all the other excursions were full. And they didn't offer to at least take us ziplining.

Annoyed--I've never been ziplining and had been really looking forward to it--we decided to check out Belize City. We ended up hiring a local guide who drove us around pointing various spots of interest: schools; a graveyard; a store; an embassy; a factory. It was about as interesting as it sounds. And poverty and squalor everywhere. It was depressing. When we weren't in the car, we were surrounded by more guides and beggars and artists, all of them desperate to get our attention. Darwin couldn't help giving a handful of money to a boy who was about our older grandson's age. I've heard people say Belize is beautiful, but we didn't see any of it.

We did see several shops that sold life-sized wooden penises, each with a bottle opener sticking out of the front end. They're a local fertility symbol. Imagine opening a frothy bottle of beer with one to get the proper image.

We spent the rest of the day hanging out, eating, and seeing mildly interesting shows.

Last night the sea was BAD. Tropical Storm Alberto is making mischief elsewhere in the Gulf, and we're feeling it here. It didn't bother me, but it was an interesting experience.

This morning we were supposed to go kayaking in a famous local lake, have lunch there, and have a chance to sunbathe or swim. But ... you guessed it ... we were canceled. The sea is too rough for the ship to stay at anchor, and the shuttle boats (tenders) can't travel safely between ship and shore. So now we have ANOTHER day at sea, followed by yet ANOTHER one tomorrow.

Our excursion fees were quickly and cheerfully refunded, and I'm not hugely upset. But it turned what should have been an exciting vacation into one of mild interest.

Today I decided to set up shop at a table by the pool and write so I can tell people part of the WIP was written in the tropics.'

I really wanted to Get Out of Michigan for mid-winter break (when the winter blahs really set in), and I investigated Puerto Rico as a possibility. There are many advantages! Since PR is a US territory, it means American citizens don't need passports, custom stops, foreign cell phone plans, or any of the other annoyances that go with travel to a different country. And it's warm! I found a short-term rental in the party district of San Juan, and off Darwin and I went!

So far we've been loving it. The weather has been in the mid-80s in the day and the low 70s at night. We're on the ocean, and get the lovely ocean breezes. We get to wear shorts and t-shirts and sun hats. In February. Incredible!

One thing that's caught my notice is that the sun sets about about 6:30 PM every day. In Michigan, that means it's winter and COLD outside. But down in PR, it's summery. So we have early darkness but warm weather, and I =love= warm summer nights. It's heaven!

We've explored large chunks of San Juan, including El Morro, the fort Spain built after the Dutch almost took the island away from Spain in 1625. Over the next 100 or so years, the fort was expanded and redone until it became a huge stone edifice with a labyrinth of levels and corridors and lookout posts and cannon platforms. So many cannon platforms. And a deep dry moat that would be instant death to any invading soldier that went into it. Nowadays it's a big tourist attraction and World Heritage Site. The land it sits on juts out into the ocean, and there's a long, long, long road leading up to it that crosses a flat expanse of lawn. This is on purpose--if you wanted to invade the fort by land, you'd be exposing yourself to cannon and gun fire for a good half mile. In the Dutch invasion of 1625, the area was covered in thousands of corpses from the battle. Today, people fly kites on it. I think the modern way is much better.

Darwin and I, as we always do, speculated what life for the average person was like at the fort. We saw drawings of soldiers in many-layered woolen uniforms and boots and hats. They must have been miserable most of the time! The food was awful and you had to pay for it, meaning most soldiers had no money at all. You would think that Spain would want well-fed, well-trained soldiers at this place, since it's the gateway to the Caribbean, but...nope!

We also explored the Old City, dissecting the architecture. We poked our heads into the shamefully-shabby cathedral of San Juan. We checked out many shops and strolled along some remains of the original wall that used to surround the city. Always fun.

Yesterday, we went hiking in the rainforest as part of a tour that also took us to an eye-popping rocky series of pools and waterfalls, one of which has a natural waterslide that, at the end, dumps you several feet into deep, cool water. There's also a high-dive rock (yes, I jumped the 30-odd feet downward), and a good old-fashioned rope that lets you swing out over the pool for a breathtaking plunge into it. All this involves a lot of rock and tree climbing, which I absolutely loved. Acrophobic Darwin was content to watch me from the sidelines.

After that, we squished our way to a kayak tour at sunset. The group of us started on the ocean and paddled into a river lined with mangrove trees. At sunset. It was both eerie and romantic, with the trees creating a low tunnel and the coqui frogs calling and giant fish splashing. We emerged at a bay filled with micro-organisms that flare with bio-luminescence when they're disturbed. Usually this means every kayak is surrounded by a soft blue glow and every dip of the paddle creates a little burst of light, but tonight the little critters weren't having any of it, and they only sparked a little. It was still pretty awesome. The evening kayak ride through the mangroves alone was worth the price.

And we've eaten. Darwin has been uncharacteristically daring and has been trying new foods. Wonderful! At a hole-in-the-wall restaurant by El Morro, we tried Sancocha, a stew of simmered beef that originated at El Morro as a way to make the awful dried meat imported from Spain edible. Now it's a national dish, and it's wonderful. So is Mofongo, a base of plantains and garlic with the consistency of cornbread that you stuff or top with a protein (shrimp, pork, or beef) and a luscious sauce. And arroz masteado ("mason rice"?). And much other deliciousness that is new to both of us.

The kayak tour yesterday was tiring, so today so far we're just hanging out on the balcony, enjoying the warm weather. Who knows what trouble we'll get into later!

The vaporetto dropped us off in our old neighborhood Dorsodura near Zaterre. Our flat was only a couple blocks up the canal from our previous one, which made everything so much easier—we already knew the area.

If you visit Venice, find a place to stay near the Zaterre station in Dorsodura. It's easy to get to from the airport—the vaporetto takes you right there for 15 Euros—and all the good stuff is within easy reach. St. Mark's Square is either a 20-minute stroll or a ten-minute water bus ride away. The Guggenheim is in Dorsoduro. There are great restaurants. The Grand Canal is an easy walk away. But the best part really is that ease of access from the airport. Large parts of Venice aren't accessible by vehicles, and we saw lots and lots of sweaty, unhappy tourists towing huge piles of luggage through the streets because their hotel wasn't reachable by car or boat.

Anyway, our new studio flat was quirky fun. The flat is accessible through a little green door that opens into what looks like a short staircase upward that ends in a blank wall. When you push on the wall, though, the wall rises up. It's a secret door! When you finish climbing the staircase, you're in the flat proper. The secret door drops back into place behind you, and you see that it's become a bench with a little rope handle at the bottom so you can lift it back up when you want to leave again. The whole thing is a clever use of space.

We arrived a few minutes after check-in time, but a cleaning lady was still finishing up from the previous renters. She spoke very little English and we spoke very little Italian, but we were able to communicate perfectly well: "We leave our luggage and go eat?" "Good! Bathroom first? It's through there." "Thank you, yes."

Our favorite restaurant was only a block away, and yes, I'm afraid we've become the kind of people who have a favorite restaurant in Venice. Over a luscious lunch of lasagna (me) and roasted chicken (Darwin), we canal-watched and figured out how to get back to the airport tomorrow. We'd come to Zaterre from the airport twice, but never done the reverse. The schedule we found online said the boat came every half hour, so we should be safe, but tomorrow was Sunday, and sometimes public transit runs a different schedule then. We couldn't find anything that said so. Still, we crossed our fingers.

I had thought to Do Something on our last day in Venice, like go to a museum or tour a cathedral, but after two weeks of many such things, we were in information overload. Neither of us was in the mood to do anything that required thought or concentration. So instead, we went back to the flat (the cleaning lady had gone, leaving the smell of vinegar in her wake), showered, and went back outside, intending just to stroll the lovely Venice streets.

There was one tiny snag—the sun. Boy, was the sun strong! And Dorsodura faces west, so our street got the full brunt of not only the sun, but the sunlight that reflected off the canal. It was like walking into an oven lit by klieg lights.

Fortunately, we only had to dodge down a side street. The moment we were out of the sun, the temperature plunged and the air became soft and pleasant. We wandered the wonderful little streets and alleys of Venice, often hand in hand, noticing details that had escaped us before—this church was actually over 1000 years old, that block had an actual lawn, this building had the remnants of old carvings high up on the walls. And the insanely romantic canals everywhere. Really, Venice has become my favorite European city. (Sorry, Heidelberg!)

When we got hungry, we stopped at another canal-side restaurant and shared a prosciuto pizza. Did I mention how romantic all this was? Well, it was.

We climbed into bed in our secret Venetian flat. What a fine day!

In the morning, we got up early, rolled our luggage down to the Zaterre stop, and the vaporetto zipped up right on time. We endured the usual long lines (I love Venice, but its airport is on the bottom of my Nice Place list), boring waits, and one sprint for a connecting flight, but at last made it home. It was the best vacation ever!

We're already planning the next one.

After Croatia we spent one more day at sea. Days at sea are great for the guests and hell for the crew. All the guests are on the ship all the time, which means everyone wants to eat all the time. And drink. The bars are crazy. The pool is mobbed. Darwin and I were content to hole up in our cabin and sneak out to the dining room every so often.

The following morning, we put in at Trieste. Final disembarkation was the next day. Our cruise was almost over!

We hadn't explored Trieste the first time we were there, thanks to the cruise's shortfalls in communication. I hadn't signed on for any excursions this time, but the main town was within easy walking distance of the ship and I wanted to go have a look. Darwin said he was tired and not really interested, so I went off on my own.

I discovered that although settlements at Trieste date back to the stone age, and that although Trieste has been an economic powerhouse for centuries, its buildings are very new. By European standards, anyway. The grand government buildings that make up the town square and the nearby cathedral were built in the mid-1800s. A huge church up the block was built in the 1950s. A famous hotel in the 1920s. And so on. I didn't find anything older than 1830. I'm sure somewhere in Trieste are buildings considerably older (the famous Roman theater, for example), but I didn't see any.

The buildings in question are quite grand, though. So much ornamentation! So many Roman statues! I took to taking photos of them so I could show them to my mythology students later and play "Name That God." The ringer is a statue of a half-naked man. It's only when you look closely that you realize he has a lion skin wrapped around his waist, which means it's Hercules—a demi-god.

The town square also houses an impressively ugly fountain. No, seriously, it's awful. It looks like a cement mixer pooped and someone stuck some random statues into the mess before it dried. It dates back to the 1750s, which means the designer was probably tarred and feathered instead of put into the stocks, but he deserved whichever one happened to him. After it went up, the thing was moved four times, probably because no one wanted it in their yard. It's been subject to vandalism several times, including from a slightly deranged man who eluded police long enough to climb to the top and knock the head and arm off one statue with a lead pipe. If they'd been smart, they would have let him finish the job.

That said, the rest of Trieste was delightful. I explored little streets and unexpected open-air markets and wandered through a church where the pipe organist was practicing and gave money to street musicians. A man was panhandling in mixture of English and Italian with a Swahili accent. I gave him a Euro. When we went our different ways, I wondered at the long, long series of events that had to flawlessly come together so that a man from North America might meet a man from Africa in an Italian city and exchange a coin minted in Greece.

Eventually the sun grew hot and I grew hungry, so I ambled back to the ship for a shower and a change of clothes.

And then the packing began. Our main luggage had to be in the corridor outside our cabin by midnight so it could be bundled off to customs for inspection. Meanwhile, disembarkation was at about 8:00 AM. So everything had to be done up the night before. This took considerable time, but at last we had it all ready, with only a few bathroom items left out for morning.

In the morning, we had breakfast and left the ship one last time. The stories of Darwin handcuffing himself to the balcony rail and howling that he wasn't leaving, not ever, are slightly exaggerated.

We weren't actually leaving Italy just yet, though. We had one more night in Venice. We got on board the cruise's shuttle—yes, there had been one from Venice, too, but no one told us about it—bound for the Venice airport. By now we were experienced Venetians and we trotted straight to the vaporetto taxi and our final night in Italy.

In the morning, the ship was off the coast of Korsula (KOR-shula) in Croatia. Croatia is a country made up of over 100 islands, and it's gorgeous. The climate is mild, the sea is clear. It's a lovely, lovely place.

Korsula can't handle a big cruise ship, so it anchored off-shore and everyone took shuttle boats to shore. Darwin and I had signed up for a short excursion—a 90-minute walking tour of Korsula.

When we boarded the rocking shuttle boat and took up seats, I heard a familiar voice yammering at everyone within earshot. Maggie. Oh, lord. She didn't notice or recognize us, but that was probably because she was yapping non-stop at her bench-mates, just like before. As the boat pulled away from the ship and bounced toward shore, Maggie started talking about spirituality. "I don't believe in that reincarnation stuff," she blithered to an Indian family. "It's all right for some people, but not for me. I need something more believable."

"Don't," Darwin murmured to me.

I didn't say anything, but I did listen. Maggie blabbered on, but she didn't actually proselytize or whip out one of her little cards. Ah ha! Someone from the cruise had spoken sharply to her. Good.

To our relief, Maggie wasn't in our little group, and we left her behind to fall in with Luka, our shockingly handsome young guide. He looked like a magazine model—tall, dark-haired, chiseled face, and big brown eyes. He led us through Korsula.

Korsula is a tiny town officially dating back to the fourteenth century, though it's really been around a lot longer. Over the centuries it's been handed around to different occupiers. Luka said that people born in the early 20th century became citizens of five different countries. These days, however, Croatia has its independence. Korsula's architecture is blocky, with little carvings everywhere. Narrow alleys with apartments and shop entrances, just like in Venice. Large market square with big, blocky church named St. Mark's, just like in Venice. It used to be a cathedral, but got downgraded when the seat of power for the bishophric changed.

The inside was elaborately done. This was Catholic, not Eastern Orthodox. Statues and carvings and shrines and a big pipe organ and water fonts. I did some counting and leaned over to Darwin.

"Seven altars, no waiting," I said.

We also saw a little museum about Korsula. The recreation of a kitchen was most interesting to me. The kitchens in Croatia were always on the top floor in case of fire—easier to escape if the flames are above you. The kitchen displays had utensils from the Middle Ages to the 1940s. Interestingly, there was a stone basin in the corner with a drain in it. This, it turned out, was the toilet. You did your business in a pot—Croatians didn't treat bathroom functions as private—and dumped it down the kitchen drain.

When we left the museum, Luka lectured about the public square some more, and I spotted an ATM. We were almost out of Euros, so I made quick use of it, but it took longer than I expected, and when I was done, the tour group had vanished.

Oops.

I tried raising Darwin on my phone, but there was no connection. I hunted for the group, but no luck.

I wasn't worried. Korsula is tiny, and I knew where the ship was. It was more annoying than frightening. I wandered about on my own, then ambled down to the docking area and waited there. About half an hour later, Darwin and Luka strode into view. Darwin was a little worried, but not hugely upset. We compared notes. He had called and texted me. I had called and texted him. Nothing had gone through, though.

Reunited, we bid good-bye to Handsome Luka and went to lunch at a seaside restaurant housed in a 400-year-old building. Darwin had aged steak and I had seafood pasta, and we both had fresh focaccia garlic bread and the ocean gleamed and the sun poured down and the umbrellas gave us shade. It was wonderful.

We boarded the shuttle boat—no sign of Maggie—and bounced our way back to the ship. Thank heavens Darwin and I are completely unaffected by motion sickness! We spent the rest of the afternoon doing Nothing Much, which was also wonderful.

The ship spent the next day and night at sea. Darwin and I were glad about this. Crete was a great experience, but it was also stressful and exhausting, so we were glad to have a day of doing nothing but sitting, reading, and gazing out at the ocean.

The evening was a Fancy Dress Night, though, and we had dinner reservations at the ship's upscale restaurant. Last time we did this, we dressed up and found we had spiffied up more than most of the other passengers, but we dressed fully again anyway, just because we could.

Good thing, too. When we arrived on Deck 2, we emerged from the elevator and found ourselves in a crowd of glitterati. Men in high-style suits. Women in gowns. Even the children were gussied up. Roaming photographers took pictures, waiters wandered about with trays of chocolates, and bartenders slung drinks. It was a giant cocktail party where Darwin and I didn't know anyone. But we looked good!

At the restaurant, the hostess said our table wasn't ready just yet, so we waited in the bar. I tried a negroni and discovered it was awful. Bitter and nasty. Who would want this thing? Yuck. I abandoned it.

Darwin and I engaged in sparkling conversation with each other until the hostess came to get us. She led us to our table and then had a moment of flummox. She pulled out a chair to seat the woman of the couple, then realized there was no woman. Oops. I simply guided Darwin to the chair and took the other one.

The food was amazing, and there was a lot of it. I had cream of mushroom and truffle soup, grilled lamb chops, and sauced asparagus. Darwin opted for a strip loin and potatoes and sauteed vegetables. Dessert was key lime pie and baked Alaska. It was marvelous, but way more than we could eat! Our waiter, who had a French accent, asked if everything was all right, and we told him the food was fantastic, but the portions were more for teenagers than 50-something men!

We were still tired from the Crete excursion, so when we were finished, we went up to our cabin and to bed.

I have realized that cruises are a very easy vacation. The quarters are better than a hotel or rented flat. You don't have to do housework, or even laundry. (Darwin and I opted for the ship's all-you-can-eat laundry plan.) You don't have to do the "Where are we going to eat?" thing. The view is always changing and always interesting. If you want to have an adventure, you can. If you want to relax, you can. People hand you whatever drinks you want, and you can eat anytime you like. It's easier and less stressful than planning a week in a foreign city yourself. We want to do more of them! :)

THE CRUISE: KNOSSOS

In many European towns, it's difficult to find major attractions. This is because Europeans take gleeful joy in refusing to post signs or clear directions anywhere. This wasn't the case in Heraklion, however. Heraklion is a modern town with busy traffic and lots of signs. KNOSSOS THIS WAY! and THE RUINS OF KNOSSOS! and TURN HERE FOR KNOSSOS! and HEY, DUMMY! DON'T MISS KNOSSOS!

I wound through Heraklion, following the signs and the GPS, until we reached the place. Hoo! It was CROWDED. Like visiting Ikea on a Saturday. There was a single hilly parking lot and it was packed with cars and tour buses. I drove through it twice without finding a spot. Darwin finally said we should check the streets, which allowed parallel parking, and we actually found a vacant spot. In the shade. Only a block away from the ruins. With many thanks to the parking gods, I took it (with a little wrangling, as those who have parallel parked a stick shift on a hill will confirm) and we tromped down to Knossos.

I thought Knossos was on the top of the mountain like the Akropolis, and that we'd have to climb a lot of stairs to get there. The day was already hot and muggy, and we weren't looking forward to this. But it turned out Knosses is in the valley. Hooray!

An entrance a lot like an amusement park's gate was there. It was shaded by pergolas, thank goodness. There were posters everywhere with QR codes on them. BUY TICKETS ONLINE! I scanned one and bought tickets (cheap at 15 Euros). I had a bad moment when the web site refused to show me the actual tickets, but then I checked my email and found them there. Whew!

Our tickets gave us entry from noon to two o'clock, and it was about thirty minutes until then. While we were standing around in the crowd, a little man in a big safari helmet approached us. "Guide?" he said. "You need guide?"

He was wearing a state ID tag, and the gate had a sign advertising guides, so I said, "How much?"

"Fifty Euros for the two of you."

"Can you get us in early?" I asked, my eye on the clock. Cruise ships wait for no one.

"Yes, yes."

I paid him and we waited while he rounded up a few more people—from Germany, it turned out—and he led us past the line and into Knossos.

Knossos is in a grove of olive trees. You traverse a wooden walkway through dense foliage and then find the ruined city spreading out in front of you. It's broken into many levels, following the contours of the hillside. Knossos was the seat of Minoan culture and it ruled the Mediterranean for centuries. It had a grand palace, wealth (a great deal of which came from extremely rare purple dye), amazing art, and technology that included heated floors and flush toilets. But when the volcano Thira a couple hundred miles to the south when KABOOM, tidal waves and earthquakes utterly wrecked Knossos. Thousands died. By the time the place recovered, the center of civilization had moved to the Greek mainland, and Crete was relegated to second-class citizenship.

The original city of Knossos was, well, a labyrinth of streets, alleys, buildings, and the central palace. Bulls were a sacred animal to the Minoans, and they amused themselves by tossing teenagers into an arena with an enraged bull. The teens did acrobatic tricks to avoid getting gored or trampled, with mixed success. Deaths were (probably) considered a sacrifice to Mithras, the bull god. Out of all this, we eventually got bullfighting, the running of the bulls, and the legend of the Minotaur.

The guide herded us into the shade of an olive tree and gave us an introduction to the history of Crete and of Minoan culture. There were two problems with this. First, he didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, and second, his lecture was long and meandering and dull. We were all losing interest and patience in equal measures. Finally, I broke in.

"This is really interesting," I said, "but our time here is short. Could we see the city?"

The guide agreed he could do this, and he led us forward, to the evident relief of the German family.

There were lots and lots and lots of people there. Whoever is in charge of these things had actually set things up so a series of walkways and draped ropes and other things would lead you through the ruins. Thoughtfully-placed signs in many languages explained what you were looking at. Meanwhile, our guide kept pausing for long, dull lectures (many of which lamented the fact that people didn't know their history very well), and I realized that hiring him had been a mistake. I would have been a better guide, to tell the truth.

So I ditched him. I took Darwin's arm, led him away, and we didn't look back.

Knossos was smaller than I expected, but still a grand ruin. I explored almost everything I wanted to, and saw a lot of the surviving artwork, including the famous prince fresco. The great spiral staircase that leads from the surviving pillars of the palace down into what was probably the throne room wasn't open to visitors, though. I was disappointed, but not surprised. Visitors are hard on archaeological sites, and the dolphin murals and other important artifacts down there are too easily damaged.

I took lots of photos and recorded video lectures for my students. It was awesome!

I had allotted two and a half hours of time at Knossos, but after about an hour and a half, we'd seen just about everything (including the ruined theater where the king and queen had probably greeted important visitors), and I noticed the GPS was reporting it would take longer to get back to Chania that it did to get there. I had everything I needed, so we left.

After extricating the car (more stick-shift wrangling), I decided that no matter what the GPS said, we would stay on the A90 all the way back to Chania. Darwin agreed this was a good idea.

The drive back was just as laborious. The car had trouble with the long uphill slopes, until I figured out the AC was draining engine power. So on the climbs, I shut it off, and the car did better. I was worried the poor thing would go BANG and die on us or something, but it proved to be the Little Crete Car That Could and puttered along steadily, if slowly.

We had a minor kerfluffle when we got back. The directions took us to Chania port, but the ship was at a different port. Oops. Fortunately, we figured out what had gone wrong, but by now it was 3:45, and the last all-aboard was at 4:30. This made ME nervous. But the other port turned out to be only 15 minutes away, and we found it without more difficulty. I left the car in the port authority lot with the key under the mat, as the car guy had instructed, and we trudged back to the ship, hot and sweaty and ready for supper.

So I drove a car all the way across Crete and visited the ruins of Knossos and learned a lot of new stuff. Go me!

THE CRUISE: DRIVING ON CRETE

This was the nerve-wracking one.

I wanted to see the ruins of Knossos on Crete. They're (likely) the source of the legend of the Minotaur. I've been teaching about this myth and about Knossos for years and years, but I've never been there. This was my chance.

But the cruise ship wasn't docking anywhere near Heraklion, where the ruins are. It was docking at Chalia, 50 or 60 miles away.

So I did the adventurous thing—I reserved a rental car online and announced to Darwin that we'd pop over to Knossos and back during our eight-hour stay on Crete.

Darwin was less than thrilled at this. Any kind of driving in a foreign country makes him uneasy. (He flatly refused to drive in Ireland.) And we'd be in an unfamiliar car in an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar street signs. Finally, we had a deadline. The ship was docking at 8:00 AM and leaving at 4:30 PM. If something went disastrously wrong, we could be stranded on Crete.

I take another view. This was probably my only shot at seeing Knossos. I've driven in Europe before and never had a problem, even in Ireland. GPS would prevent us from getting lost. And I'm generally fearless about exploring new places. I lived in Europe for a year and have visited several times, and have learned that sometimes you just have to go for it. So off we went!

When we disembarked and crossed the huge concrete lot to the Chania port authority, we found a man holding a sign with my name on it. The car was being delivered as promised. But ... it was a stick shift. Hmmmm. I didn't remember asking for one, but that's what they said I ordered. The car guy asked if I knew how to drive one, and I said that I did, though it's been a few years.

The car was a little thing, but it had AC, and since the weather was forecasted to be in the 90s, this was a big plus. I signed the papers, paid the fee (about 100 Euros), played with the car in the parking lot and discovered I'd lost none of my stick shift skills. I called up the destination on my phone's GPS, which said Knossos was two hours and fifteen minutes away. Plenty of time to drive out, explore the ruins, and drive back. We headed out.

Darwin sat in the passenger seat, trying not to panic. I assured him I would drive like a little old lady and concentrated on the driving. The car guy said that today was an Orthodox holiday (a feast day for a saint), so traffic was light. Good. We made it out to the highway without incident.

Crete is a long, thin island, and the A90 highway runs along its backbone. It dips in and out of the mountains, heads uphill and down, runs alongside the sea and away from it. (Spectacular views of mountain and ocean, but only if you aren't acrophobic.) The driving was an education. Greek drivers aren't scary or aggressive, but they do have slightly different rules. The highway is one and a half lines wide on each side, kind of like a road with a generous bike lane. If someone wants to pass you, you're expected to move over as close the shoulder as you can and let them zip around you. This is a feature, not a bug. Also, motorcyclists don't pay any attention to anything and will pass you on either side, or will scoot between cars to get to the head of a red traffic light. I don't know if that's legal in Greece or not, but it made the American a little nervous.

We stopped for gas and discovered Greeks don't go in for self-service pumps, though you have to pay inside with a card.

I noticed an oddity. Scattered up and down the roadway are tiny churches the size of birdhouses. Some are battered and broken, others are perfectly maintained. Some are simple, some are elaborate, with icons painted inside and little lights burning. You never know when one will show up. I took to pointing them out and saying, "Church!" to Darwin's utter lack of amusement. We later learned that the tiny churches serve one of two functions: either to commemorate the site of a deadly accident, or to bless travelers and wish them good journey. You get to guess which. One spot had three churches within a few yards of each other. Darwin wanted me to drive extra careful there.

The only adventurous part of the drive came when the GPS abruptly ordered us to exit the highway. A little mystified, I obeyed. This took us down a side road, along an olive grove, through a tiny village where people sat in the shade and watched us go by, down into a valley, and back out of it again. The latter involved uphill hairpin turns on switchbacks. The little car labored, and I was changing gears like a chimpanzee on cocaine. Often we came across breathtaking (or heart-stopping) drop-offs without guard rails. I was actually calm about it all—I was too busy to get nervous—but I think Darwin would have happily bailed out and walked back to Chania.

And then, just as abruptly, we were back on the A90. We were both mystified. Why had the GPS told us to leave it? The A90 is a mostly straight shot from Chania to Heraklion. I finally realized that the GPS had figured that leaving the highway and going through a torturous cross-country jaunt would save us three minutes or something. Oi!

But after the appointed two hours and change, we arrived safely at Heraklios.

THE CRUISE: ISTANBUL

The ship cruised toward Istanbul, a city it never occurred to me that I might visit. It straddles the border of Asia and Europe across the Bosphorus Strait, and it's =busy.= Boats and ships chugged in all directions and the city rose on hills behind it all. At night, it's all lights and color. The place rivals New York for busy-ness and cosmopolitan-ness.

Darwin was nervous. I'd looked at the different options for shore excursions, and one that caught my eye was the chance to hire a private car and guide. The excursion was in the evening, from seven to eleven. Darwin wasn't sure about the whole thing. He had a negative mental image of Istanbul as a dangerous place, especially for gay men, and we were walking straight into it—and with a total stranger, to boot. I think he had visions of being snatched away by kidnappers, or picked clean by pickpockets, or (more realistically) getting into trouble because we're two married men.

I did my best to reassure him. The guide worked with the cruise company and would therefore be trustworthy. But he was still uneasy.

The tour was supposed to start at 7 PM, but we got a call in our cabin at 5 PM. The guide was available now. Would we like to start our tour earlier, when more stuff was likely to be open? Yes. Yes, we would.

We left the ship, walked a considerable distance inside Istanbul's very modern, very clean port authority building, and found ourselves in an underground parking lot where we met Sennur ("sheh-nur), our guide. She was a thirty-something lady dressed in a smart skirt suit with her hair pinned back. The car was a limo-style SUV that would seat eight people comfortably, and it had a separate driver, which surprised me—the description of the outing made it sound like the tour guide would also drive.

Darwin was immediately relieved. I later learned he'd been thinking we'd be in a rattle-trap hatchback or something.

Sennur was very friendly and knowledgeable of Instanbul. The car made its way through horrendous traffic across the Bosphorus bridge (it has two levels—one for traffic and one for shops), where dozens of men were casting fishing lines into the water.

"For many of these men, this is retirement," Sennur explained. "They retire and then they don't know what to do with themselves, so they catch fish and sell it at the fish market."

I wanted to see the Grand Bazaar, and since it closed at 7, we went there first.

The Bazaar has existed in some form or other since the 16th century. It started as an outdoor thing, but was eventually enclosed and roofed, and now it's the world's biggest indoor shopping place. The impressive stone gates and heavy wooden doors (hundreds of years old) welcome you into a maze of corridors, vaulted and mosaiced ceilings, and shops, shops, shops. Most of them are very small by American standards, about the size of market tent from the old days. This allows the Bazaar to cram thousands of shops into one area, though. As Sennur put it, the Bazaar sells stuff that ranges in prince from one Euro to one billion Euros. You can buy anything you care to name there.

We wove our way through the loud crowd of people. The shopkeepers stand outside their shops and try to lure shoppers in like barkers at a carnival.

"Come in! I have the best purses and bags in all the world! Good prices!"

"Glittering diamonds! Finest quality! Your wife will adore you when you bring them home!"

"Try my chocolates! Turkish delight! Tea! Free sample! Come inside—you are my guest."

I've been to similar situations in the past and knew that it's not rude to ignore or brush away the shopkeepers. I did stop outside one confectioner's shop, to the delight of the owner. He welcomed me into the shop like I was a long-lost relative. The shop was floor-to-ceiling bins of brightly-colored candies, chocolates, teas, baklava, and other delights. No prices on anything, I noticed. The shopkeeper kept trying to steer me toward some of the more exotic teas, but I ignored this and pointed to piles of varicolored candy—orange and yellow and purple and pink.

"These are chocolates?" I asked.

"Yes, yes. These are orange chocolate, rose-hip chocolate, hazelnut, and many more!"

This was interesting to me. In the USA, of course, chocolate is brown or dark brown. It's not colored to look like hard candy or a gemstone. I warily tried a few, and they were delicious. Well, then! I pointed out some of the ones I wanted, and the shopkeeper started shoveling them into a box with a big scoop.

"No, no!" I admonished. "Too much. Put some of that back." (Sennur later said, "You're good at handling shopkeepers.")

The shopkeeper also thrust sample cups of tea at us. "This one is good for the digestion. This one good for helping you to breathe. This one will help you with the ladies." This with a sly wink. Hoo boy.

A side note. Istanbul is more accepting of LGBTQ people than the rest of Turkey, but it's still not a great place for us. Darwin and I tend to touch each in public quite a lot—hand holding, ruffling hair, rubbing backs. It's a habit, really. However, we had decided it wouldn't be prudent to be husbands in public here. Hands off. And correcting a shopkeeper as to my relationships with women was a definite no.

One shopkeeper did surprise us earlier. He approached Darwin, trying to lure him into a shopful of purses. "Your wife will love one!"

Darwin laughed a little. "I don't have a wife."

"Girlfriend, then!"

"Nope. No girlfriend."

"Ah. Boyfriend?"

Darwin blinked in surprise. "Actually, that's my husband over there."

The shopkeeper didn't miss a beat. "Maybe he would like a handbag!"

Anyway, I did ignore the chocolatier's winking and innunendo and I tried the teas. Wonderful! I bought some rose tea and some saffron tea. The camphor tea wiped out my sinuses with one whiff, and while I figured it would definitely be good for a cold, I decided against.

Darwin, meanwhile, picked out some baklava and coffee and Turkish delight.

Another side note. Turkish delight, you may recall, plays a significant part in the book (and movie) THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE. When the White Witch offers Edmund whatever treat he wants, he asks for Turkish delight, and it's so good, he becomes willing to betray his family for more. As a kid, I'd always wondered what Turkish delight was like. I imagined something cookie-like, maybe a bit frothy and chocolatey. In my thirties, I finally came across some and eagerly tried it. Yuck! It was a rubbery thing coated in powdered sugar that tasted like weak Jello. Edmund was willing to give up his siblings for this?

The shop at the Bazaar also had Turkish Delight for sampling, but it looked different. More like a candy log. I tried some. Ahhh! More of a marshmallow texture than gelatin, and stuffed with hazelnuts and chocolate and pistachios. If this was what the White Witch gave Edmund, he made the right choice.

The shopkeeper bundled everything up and, to my surprise, used a vacuum thingie to seal everything. I paid for it—no bargaining in this particular shop—and was shocked at how low the price was. Sennur hefted our bag with an expert feel and announced we had about a kilogram of stuff. It cost less than twenty dollars.

The shopkeeper continued plying us with samples and offers until we finally left. We explored more of the Bazaar and it was fascinating. It was indeed a place where you could by anything. And get lost! We kept a close eye on each other. If we lost Sennur, we were done for!

After the Bazaar, we walked toward Istanbul's historic zone, but we paused several times along the way to sample sweets at different places. More flaky baklava. Chocolate so dark it was black. Rich ice cream. Sweet Turkish coffee. The tour acquired an impromptu filter: desserts! It was a lot of fun.

We strolled across the historic zone of Istanbul, pausing so Sennur could explain the significance of this monument or that. We saw a lot of stray dogs, and learned that Istanbul doesn't have animal shelters. Instead, they capture strays, neuter or spay them, give them their shots, and turn them loose again. The government and private citizens put out food and water for them. Interesting! The entire city basically becomes an animal shelter.

No visit to Istanbul is complete without visiting the Hagia Sophia, and that's where we went next. The HS was the biggest cathedral in the world for a long time. Over time it became a multi-use church. Christians and Muslims both use it for prayers and services.

The bathrooms are separate, outside the main building. Darwin and I needed to use them, so we headed over. The squat toilets are inside private closets, and there are rows of sinks where many men were scrubbing up like surgeons before an operation. There was also a footwashing area. Certain Muslim rituals require extensive cleansing.

I found the Hagia Sophia's outside more impressive than the inside. The outside is majestic architecture, soaring spires, and rounded domes. The inside is kind of dark and even dingy. Sure, it's HUGE, but it's still gloomy in there. Part of the problem is the utter lack of windows. They have chandeliers at head level, but no lights up in the high ceiling, which is more of the problem.

In the Hagia Sophia, you have to take your shoes off. They provide cubbies to put them in. The stone floors are covered in green carpet, and people are EVERYWHERE in there. They meditate, pray, sleep, converse, laugh, and so on. It's very noisy. During Muslim prayer time, women aren't allowed into the main part of the building, which put me off, though I didn't say anything. As it happened, a muezzin called for prayer just as we were arriving. The males in the big room stampeded over to the eastern wall to join him.

Darwin and I didn't spend long there. There wasn't really much to see, to be honest. Besides, the Hagia Sophia is a working church/mosque, not a museum, and I felt like an interloper instead of a visitor.

Then it was time for some supper. Sennur took us to a different bazaar and got us outdoor seats at a restaurant where she knew the proprietor. They brought us sample platters so we could try a bunch of different foods: chicken and lamb kebab, minced lamb, baked eggplant, roasted peppers, and of course the big, round pillowy bread Turkey is known for. It was all fantastic!

By then it was time to return to the ship. We tipped Sennur and the driver heavily and headed back to our cabin. It was a fine, fine day.

I have to back up a little. On the first day of the cruise, Darwin and I were wandering around one of the swimming pools on the top deck when a plump, blonde woman in her 70s engaged us in conversation. Her name was Maggie. She was friendly, overly so, and talked and talked and talked. She said she was born in Ireland but traveled all over the world and was a US citizen and her husband in Ohio was this and that and the other. I was trying to figure out how to extricate ourselves when she abruptly asked if were a couple. Darwin said we were married.

"Oh, that's so nice!" she gushed. "I have a nephew who's that way, and I love him just as much as I love anyone in my family."

This put both of us off. The subtext to statements like this is that the default setting for LGBTQ people is that we're wrong or bad, "But I love you anyway." (Don't ever say something like this when you meet a member of the LGBTQ community.)

Before either of us could respond, though, she whipped out a business card. "I want to share this web site with you," she said. "You'll get all the answers you need there." The web site in question was for a conservative Christian group.

At this point, I just said, "Well, we have to go now. It was interesting meeting you." And I walked away with Darwin in tow.

Fast forward to the Temple of Apollo tour. Maggie was on the bus, sitting just ahead of us. She had trapped her seat mate into one of her interminable conversations that were mostly about herself. I felt sorry for the woman, but not sorry enough to pull Maggie off her!

When we got off the bus, Maggie stopped at the driver out in front of the bus. She handed him one of the cards and talked at him, too. "Go to this web site. Once you read it, you'll become so knowledgeable and wise."

I couldn't let this pass. I caught Maggie up and said quietly to her, "You know, this is Turkey. It's a Muslim nation. You were proselytizing to a Muslim. I don't think this country takes that kind of thing well."

At this, Maggie exploded. She started yelling, actual yelling. "I don't know who you think you are! I can say what I want. I have free speech and—"

"No, you don't," I interrupted. "This is Turkey. There's no First Amendment here."

"I =know= this country," she screeched. "I was =born= in this country. I—"

"You said you were born in Ireland," I shot back.

"Well! You don't have the right to tell me anything. You don't—"

"I thought you said we had free speech here."

At this point, I turned my back and walked away, leaving her yelling at the empty air. I turned my attention to the tour at this point and ignored Maggie. She trapped yet more people in conversation and raised her voice whenever I wandered within earshot. "I'm a nice person, unlike SOME PEOPLE who think they know everything!"

Darwin and I rolled our eyes and continued examining the temple. (The irony of a supposedly Christian woman visiting a major Pagan shrine apparently eluded this woman.) I did take a photo of Maggie when she wasn't looking, in case I needed it. This turned out to be a good idea.

Meanwhile, Maggie wasn't done. When we all got back on the bus, she plunked down in her seat across the aisle and ahead of Darwin and me and set about passive-aggressively snarking at me with more, "Unlike SOME PEOPLE" comments.

One of these comments she delivered over her shoulder to me, which was what I was waiting for.

"Don't talk to me ever again," I snapped. "No one wants to hear from you. Keep your religion to yourself."

"Well, you—"

"DON'T TALK TO ME!" I boomed in my most powerful teacher voice. The entire bus vibrated from it.

One of the other tourists leaned toward Maggie. "Now, children, do I have to send both of you to separate corners?" Her words fit either of us, but she directed them straight at Maggie.

"Thank you," I said.

And at that moment, a hand slid into view from behind my and Darwin's seat. The woman behind us was giving me a thumbs-up gesture. I turned and thanked her, too.

Maggie was revving up for more, but just then the tour guide came on the sound system and she closed her mouth. She was actually quiet for the trip back, though she went right back to her passive-aggressive commentary when we got off the bus and boarded the ship. I let her get far enough ahead of me that I didn't have to hear her anymore, then ambled down to the ship's customer service desk.

"I'm afraid I have a complaint," I said to the rep at the counter.

"How can I help?" she said.

I told her what had happened, adding, "I felt wildly uncomfortable when she started proselytizing at me and my husband. I'm also worried that she might get into trouble if she does this on shore again."

I gave her Maggie's first name, though I didn't have her last name. "She said she's from Ohio. I'm afraid that's all I know. Here's her picture."

I spun my phone around so she could see it. The rep's face clouded. "I know who she is," she said, and typed rapidly at her computer. "I definitely know her."

At this moment, a man I'd met at the pride meeting, who was also at the counter, turned and said, "Are you talking about Maggie? She gave me a card, too! I didn't know what to say."

I jumped on this. "If she's done it to me and to you and to the bus driver, she's definitely doing it to other people."

The rep said she would file a report, check with the bus driver to see how he was feeling, and would "handle it from here."

In my mind, one of the ship's officers would stop by Maggie's cabin and tell her if she handed out one more card, she be keelhauled. In actuality, I have no idea what, if anything, the cruise personnel did to her.

I'm glad I confronted her. Apparently so were a bunch of other people. I don't countenance bullies. So many times people let bullies get away with their crap because they're afraid of making a scene. But the bully makes use of that fear to get away with their crap. We can't let them. Make a scene.

So many temples, so little time.

For today's outing at Melitus, we had to get up extra early. Darwin was losing his enthusiasm for ruins, especially after the hot, crowded tour from yesterday. But we persevered and boarded yet another bus for Melitus and the Temple of Apollo, which are in modern-day Turkey.

We had an excellent, outgoing Turkish guide who narrated the history of the area while we were riding the bus (other guides hadn't done this). At Miletus, we explored the little archaeological museum there and then hit the town of Miletus.

Miletus was a fairly big deal back in the Bronze Age, with a population of 80,000 or so, but it fell into ruin over the centuries. The big thing for me was the amphitheater. Miletus has the remains of a huge Greek theater! I've been teaching Greek theater for a long, long time, but all my information came from reading and from photos. Now I was actually at one!

The theater was impressively huge, and could seat several thousand people. The stage was gone—it had been made of wood—but the stone supports were still there. I immediately identified the parts of the theater—the parados (where the chorus entered and exited), the altar, the skene (or where it used to be), and the orkestra (which evolved into today's orchestra pit). I only half-listened to guide, who was saying stuff I already knew. It was much more interesting to explore the place and see all this for real. I tested the acoustics by clapping my hands several times and yep—they were as good as everyone said Greek theaters are. I didn't know about the tunnels and archways for the audience, though, and I didn't know that the Greeks chipped out the bottom of the stone seating so you could tuck your feet under the benches when someone wanted to get by.

I could have spent the whole day there, but we had to move on to the next stop: the Temple of Apollo.

The bus took us down the road to the ToA, which is in a tiny, tiny town that only exists because of the Temple tourists. We disembarked and I saw that =this= was a temple!

The Temple of Apollo (and Artemis) was huge and impressive in its day. The front steps led up to a forest of 25 huge, HUGE columns. Each was at least 10 feet in diameter—and all of them were broken. The temple had been destroyed twice, once by Muslims and once by Christians. The Eastern Orthodox Christians, as they often did, also erected a church on the temple grounds to "reclaim" the land. Alexander the Great had the temple rebuilt after its first destruction, but after the second, it stayed a ruin, though the church was removed after a couple hundred years.

Once you're past the columns, you find yourself at another staircase that leads up to a big slab of marble with columns flanking it. It was here that the Oracle made pronouncements. Apollo's Oracles (soothsayers) were usually women, but in this temple, they were often men, too. The Oracle got high and went into a trance behind one of the columns, and another priest would put a petitioner's question to her. She would mutter incoherently, and the priest would emerge from behind the column and translate what the oracle had apparently said. If it made no sense ("Should I marry this woman?" "When the bats fly at sunrise, the crows will build their nests on the far mountain." "Wait—what?" "Okay, next!"), that was your problem.

The rest of the temple was a huge open area, unroofed these days. Darwin and I listened to our guide, then poked around for a while, trying to imagine the place filled with pilgrims and priests and workers and slaves and others. Now the only inhabitants are a few stray cats who accept petting from visitors with varying degrees of amusement or hostility.

When our time was up, we headed back to the bus, and out front of a souvenir shop, I found some statuettes for sale: Ares, Atlas, and Tyr and Fenris. Which one doesn't belong? :)

The next morning, we boarded a bus and drove to Athens. Athens didn't look like I'd imagined it. I knew it's a modern city, but I was expecting more of an older look to the place, like Venice. But the Athens I saw was very, very modern.

The bus dropped us off at the bottom of the hill, and, urged on by the guide, we climbed through groves of laurel and olive trees, sacred to Apollo and Athena, respectively. We climbed and climbed. There were lots of other tourists, too. Lots and lots and lots.

When we got to the top, we found the place was packed. So many, many people. It was like visiting Disney World on a weekend. A massive queue maze was set up to handle the line. We worked our way through it. Darwin was nonplused and put off, but the Akropolis is Greek's most famous attraction, and I was expecting this. It was a bit odd, though—the stones we stood on were thousands of years old, but the queue maze was totally modern. However, it occurred to me that this was probably how it was back then, too. The Akropolis was basically a small town with several temples and other buildings. People from all over Greece visited, and they would have been standing in line with their sacrifices of cows, goats, chickens, incense, flowers, and more. It probably wasn't ever quiet or contemplative.

A set of college boys jumped the queue maze line by climbing over some rocks. The line guy caught them and made them go all the way back to the end of the line. Everyone applauded.

Finally we got into the Akropolis proper. I got to see it at last! Ruined columns and broken altars and empty stone buildings. I'm good at using my imagination to "see" what it looked like in its heyday, and I loved it. The crowds were relentless, but I managed to get some photos that made it look emptier.

And it was HOT. I had brought a safari-level sun hat with me. It's ridiculously large and, frankly, ugly. I was hesitant about using it at first, but once I stepped into full sunlight, I clapped that sucker on and I felt the difference immediately. It was like having my own portable shade tree.

When it was time to go, we threaded our way down, down, down the mountain stairs to the touristy shops at the base. We passed several street performers, and I tipped them all, including the guy holding the big sign that said I HAVE A BRAIN TUMOR.

Darwin and I browsed the shops but didn't buy—we aren't big souvenir shoppers. We did stop for some gelato, and in doing so, we broke a gelato rule: never buy brightly-colored gelato stored in big heaps in a display freezer. Such gelato is factory-made for tourists and is nowhere near the quality of the real stuff. The gelato we got was, frankly, awful. Bad texture, poor taste. I didn't know it was possible to get bad gelato, but turns out, it is. We'll never break that rule again!

At last, we were herded aboard the bus and we trundled back to the ship for showers and a delightfully AC'ed cabin.

The ship traveled all night and in the morning when we got up, we were already in port at Melitus.

We spent one day at sea, coasting along from Trieste to Olympia. Darwin and I rested and got rid of the final bits of jet lag. The next morning, we had a half-day tour of Olympia (the Temple of Zeus) and another one at the Akropolis. Both places have been written up extensively elsewhere, so I'll just give my own thoughts here.

I've taught Greek mythology for decades, but I've never visited any of the places I teach about, which is one of the reasons I've wanted to go on a trip like this. Darwin knew this, and it's why he arranged it. Isn't he wonderful?

When the ship arrived on the coast of Greece, I could just make out the Akropolis at the top of the hill. Just. Below it, brown mountains. Below that, white, square buildings.

We met our tour group in the ship's auditorium, disembarked with them, and boarded a well-appointed bus. I looked out the windows at the Greek landscape. It hasn't rained in months, and just last week it was in the 100s every day. Today, the heat was only projected to be in the high 80s, for which I was grateful, but I wondered how difficult it's been for the natives. The landscape was brown and pale green, very, very dry.

The bus arrived at the Temple of Zeus. I shouldered my backpack (water bottle, sun hat, sun-blocking umbrella, snacks). We had to hike quite a ways along an occasionally-shaded road to the temple, and I was sweating heavily by the time we arrived.

The Temple of Zeus is really a complex of temples that includes the grounds where the first Olympics were held and multiple ruined, columned buildings. It was very interesting to poke around the ruins and listen to the guide's commentary. It was my first Greek ruin!

Tomorrow was the big one: the Akropolis.

Our cabin on the Oosterdam ("oh-ster-dahm") was bigger than we expected—the size of a decent hotel room. Queen bed, lots of closet space, two-sink bathroom with a jetted bathtub AND a phone booth shower.

Everyone told us that when people get on board, they head for the buffet and it's a madhouse, so you're better off going to one of the ship's sit-down restaurants. But we checked the buffet (conveniently located one deck above us), and it wasn't busy at all. Good—we were starving! And the food was very good.

I'd visualized being seated in groups with strangers at meals—a large table with people we'd introduce ourselves to and hope we got along. But the dining area was filled with tables of all sizes, from two-person to eight-person, and everyone sat where they wanted. I was glad of this. I've never been comfortable with forced socialization, though I've learned to be good at it. On vacation, I'd rather eat with my husband, thank you.

We LOVE having a balcony. Love, love, love it! I'm perfectly happy looking out at the Aegean/Ionian/Mediterranean while the fresh, soft sea breeze wafts over me. The balcony has room to sit two people comfortably with room left for a pair of small tables and more standing space. The view from the eighth deck makes Darwin a little dizzy, but mostly he's been fine with the height.

The ocean is a dark, azure blue, a color I've never seen in a large body of water before. The Great Lakes are a murkier blue, and the Gulf of Mexico has a green cast to it. The Pacific at Hawaii is a paler blue. I've never seen such a rich ocean blue before, and it's stunning. The ocean has behaved itself so far. At night a couple of times it's been a tiny bit choppy and we've had some stiff wind, but nothing worrying.

The O-dam is a largeish ship with about 1600 passengers (coincidentally, about the same number of students attend Nameless High School). It has two swimming pools (one indoors and one out), several bars, a casino, a stage, an art gallery, several restaurants, and ridiculous little shops filled with high-priced jewelry and other oddments that apparently interest enough passengers to justify their continued existence. The diamond seller went into hard sell mode when we wandered by, trying to entice us. "Something beautiful for your wife or girlfriend!" he crooned.

Boy was he selling up the wrong tree.

The activities began right away, including a Pride Meetup. I decided to attend and met some very nice people. I also learned that several other people had the same problem we did—they arrived in Venice, expecting to board there, only to discover on short notice they had to be in Trieste. It wasn't just us! Not only that, the cruise line had a shuttle service from Venice to Trieste, but they didn't tell us—or anyone else, apparently—about it. There was a fee for it, but it wasn't anywhere near 450 Euros!

I complained to the cruise line about the issue at the customer service desk. The short version is, they can't do anything about it until the cruise is over, but they gave me a case number and official complaint status. We'll have to follow up back home. If they refund us the difference between the cost of the shuttle and the cost of the taxi, I'll be satisfied. We'll see what happens.

From some of my fellow gay cruise liners, I learned that our ship has an unusually high number of days in port. We only have two days at sea for our two-week cruise, and usually it's more like six or seven days at sea. Interesting. More excursions for us!

We unpacked and took a refreshing shower. Meanwhile, the ship backed slowly and steadily out of port, and we were off!

The first morning at sea, we ordered room service breakfast just because we could. We had eggs and bacon and toast and coffee out on the balcony above the blue, blue ocean with the refreshing breeze. It was lovely.

THE CRUISE: WAIT—WHAT?

When our boat taxi arrived to take us to the harbor, the driver helped with our luggage and we sped off toward the port. The driver asked where in the port we were going and we showed him our electronic boarding passes.

"No, no," he said. "This is for Trieste."

Yes. Our boarding passes said "Venice (Trieste)" as the start of the cruise.

"Trieste is two hours away," the driver said.

Um ... what? We thought Trieste was a part of Venice, like Zaterre. Turns out it was an entirely different city much farther up the coast. So why the hell did the cruise say the trip started in Venice? Ohhhhh, we were upset. And angry. And upset. And angry.

The taxi driver called dispatch and said they could take us to Trieste right now. It would cost 450 Euros.

Fuck.

We decided to do it. What other choice did we have? I didn't know if a train would get us to Trieste in time, and the thought of navigating the Italian train system for the first time alone with a pile of luggage made me shake. So we paid it.

The driver, it must be said, was great. He wound along highways and roads. We did get to see a lot of interesting Italian countryside, mountains, and villages, but it wasn't worth 450 Euros.

We got to Trieste just in time to make boarding. I gritted my teeth and tipped the driver heavily. It's not customary in Italy to tip taxis, but he certainly hadn't been planning to drive four hours to Trieste and back that day, and he got us right up to the port. "I know this isn't usual," I told him, "but please take this." He didn't refuse. :)

Once we were there, the boarding process went smoothly. We did discover that our cabin had been moved from the stern to amidships, which surprised me. I had called and asked a week ago if it were possible (I'd heard that the passengers in the stern were more likely to get motion sickness, since there's more motion), but the rep said all the cabins were wait-listed, and I shrugged it off with an "Oh well—we tried." But now our cabin had indeed been moved. No idea why.

I was glad for it. The cabins amidships (and their balconies) are slightly larger than the stern ones because the ship's hull bows outward, creating more space. And the ride is smoother. Later, we also discovered it was quieter. The stern is, of course, right above the screws, and at sea, they churn the water VERY LOUDLY. So this was a definite plus!

And we set out to explore the ship.

Darwin and I are taking a cruise, our first!

We started in Venice, where we stayed a couple days before the cruise. Our flight was uneventful and only got interesting when we landed. Venice, you see, is built on 120 islands out in an ocean lagoon, but the airport is on the mainland. So getting to the city from the airport is a bit of a puzzle for newcomers. However, our thoughtful BnB hosts had sent us careful instructions. There's what's basically a shuttle bus (but it's a boat) that runs from the airport to various stops around Venice. Jetlagged and with lots of luggage in tow, we arrived at the water taxi stop.

It was strange to see water instead of a parking lot and boats instead of cars, I have to say. To Michigander me, boats are for recreation, not transportation. But Venice has a different point of view.

Anyway, I bought tickets at a kiosk. Darwin, who's a Europe newbie, doesn't like trying this kind of thing, but I'm fearless about it. The shuttle only cost fifteen Euros each, a bargain when a private taxi to the city was at least 100!

We joined the line of people at the dock and the water taxi arrived. It really was a floating bus--long, with rows of basic seats and a diesel engine. The (enormously handsome Italian) ticket taker asked, "Where are you going?" in English.

I paused, confused. "Venice?"

He laughed. "What part of Venice?"

Ah. "Zattere. Does the bus go there?"

"Yes, yes. They will announce it."

So we boarded with a pile of other people. It was great fun for me. The empty water stretched in all directions. Traffic was expected to stay within a narrow lane between Venice and the mainland marked by pilons. Other boats breezed past our chug-chug-chug bus, but I didn't mind. We got a great initial view of Venice. Astounding architecture everywhere you looked! Delightful!

We landed at the Zattere dock, and after a problem sorting out the directions to the flat, we arrived, hot, tired, and panting. But the flat was cool and inviting, right on the big canal (not the Grand Canal, which runs through the city--the giganto canal that runs south of it). Our third-floor windows had a spectacular view of Venice, and when we opened the windows, soft ocean breezes wafted through. The building was at least 300 years old, and we could see the original hand-hewn beams in the ceilings.

We powered through jet lag, forcing ourselves to go out and about. We explored Venice quite a lot, and it was lovely. We had to walk nearly everywhere---no cars allowed in Zaterre--though I became adept at using the water-borne mass transit system.

Venice is everything you've heard. It's an incredible mix of ancient buildings and new technology. Romantic canals snake in every direction, and bridges that range from toy-sized to mega-huge cross them. Lots of narrow streets that Americans would call alleys with shops and restaurants and private dwellings. High balconies, wooden shutters, cobblestone streets. The weather was sunny and hot, but among the stone buildings the air was pleasantly cool.

We arrived Saturday afternoon and were leaving Monday morning, so a lot of the more famous attractions were closed during our visit, but we didn't mind. It was plenty interesting and diverting to explore the streets. We wandered St. Mark's Square and learned the photos don't do it justice. It's HUGE. You could play a game of NFL football in it and have room for a couple little league games. The Basilica sprawls across the south side near the Doge Palace, and at night everything is lit up. There are thousands of people there at any given time, including at night, but it doesn't feel crowded at all. We also came across what I think was a dance school that did an outdoor street performance. These kids (young teens) could DANCE.

We ate, too. Lasagna and pizza and gelato and squid ink pasta and more. Sorry, Italian-Americans, but Venice has your cooking beat in every way.

One of the nicer moments was the little seafood restaurant where I tried the above-mentioned squid ink pasta. Darwin and I sat right under an umbrella on the sidewalk next to a narrow canal. The weather was charming, the service wonderful, and the food fantastic. It was excruciatingly romantic and delightful.

We went on a gondola ride, of course. Darwin wasn't sure he wanted to do something so tourist-y, but I told him, "We're going to go on a gondola ride. In Venice. With a gondolier. As husbands. BECAUSE WE CAN."

There are gondola rides all around Venice. They're tightly regulated by a guild, so they all cost the same and none of them try to cheat anyone. We went to a cluster of them near St. Mark's Square. They were in a spot where several canals came together in a big pool. I promised Darwin a Handsome Gondolier Guy, and right when we arrived at the dock, just such a gondolier moved up to pick us up. His name was Alessandro. I asked about going under the Bridge of Sighs (if you kiss at sunset under the BoS, legend says your love for each other will remain eternal), but it was way far away and would increase the cost by quite a lot, so we decided against.

The gondola was lushly appointed, with velvet seats and black lacquered wood. Alessandro stood behind us with the tiller/oar under his arm and we were off. It was wonderful. It was an entirely different view of Venice--back "alleys" and docks and narrow, twisting ways. We drifted past sparkly people dining in golden-lit restaurants and heard distant music. Alessandro didn't sing, but he did whistle from time to time. He had to duck when we went under most of the bridges, and I asked him about that.

"It's because Venice is sinking," he explained. "Three hundred years ago, the water was a meter lower, and no one had to duck." He also told us that the buildings are all built on wooden foundations, not stone, but the clay under Venice is anaerobic, so the wood doesn't rot. The oldest building in Venice is over 1000 years old. It's the one they wiped out in CASINO ROYALE, if you were wondering. The whole trip was lovely and romantic and a delight.

Sunday evening, we repacked and got everything ready for our taxi to pick us up. We decided to hire a private taxi rather than risk misreading the bus schedule, you see. In the morning, ready to leave for the cruise itself, we ran into a small problem....

My sister Bethany recently moved to Colorado. It was a difficult move that involved packing up a house she'd lived in for more than 20 years, along with her two horses, all their gear, and even an outdoor riding pen. Then there was the unpacking. You may gape in awe!

Eventually, she got out there, but still felt nervous and unsettled. She only knows a couple people out there, and they're mostly work-related folk. So my brother Paul organized a family trip for him, my mother, and me to go see her. Plane tickets were reasonable and Bethany has plenty of room for guests, so no need for a hotel. It was a win!

Mom drove down to Paul's house, and they drove together to Detroit Metro Airport, where I met them. My mother has some mobility issues these days, and we discovered that this is both a minus and a plus at an airport. Minus in that arranging for and maneuvering a wheelchair through an airport is a bit of a trick, plus because a person in a wheelchair goes straight to the head of the security line, and so do the people traveling with her. I guess it was a wash.

The flight itself was boring, which is just how I like it. We landed in Denver and dealt with a wheelchair bobble--there was supposed to be one waiting for us at the entry gate, but it turned out THREE people on the flight had requested wheelchairs, and only one chair actually showed up. This caused some back-and-forth, and in the mess, I got separated from Paul and Mom. But we all managed to find each other again through the magic of cell phones. Mom co-opted a skycap to wheel her out to the car rental company shuttle bus (we tipped well), and we found ourselves at Hertz. Here we had more bobbles with memberships and credit card numbers, but it was finally all ironed out. Paul and I each got a rental car--the advantage of mature adulthood--so we wouldn't have to coordinate miscellaneous driving.

Bethany lives in a small town about an hour outside of Denver. Her house is incredible. A sprawling two-story ranch with a walkout basement floor that's basically a house all by itself. This is where Paul and I stayed. It has an enormous, luxurious barn for the horses, too, complete with a warm-water washing station and self-filling water stations and lots of pasture.

Paul and Mom and I, of course, first noticed the air. Not only is Denver arid, it's also low pressure. Bethany's house is actually higher than Denver's famous mile-high stature, and we noticed the difference! I didn't quite struggle for breath, but I got winded way easier--a flight of stairs got me panting--and I found myself having to concentrate on my breathing. Every so often, a wave of "a little hard to breathe, here" would hit me. And I was thirsty almost all the time! It was a strange experience.

On the first day, we helped Bethany do a bunch of finishing work on her house, mostly hanging pictures (she has a =lot= of pictures to hang, and many of them require multiple people) and arranging furniture. We also went out to eat at a wonderful Mexican restaurant in the town. Here we had the Dreaded Pepper Incident. My order came with a roasted jalapeno the size of a sausage. I can handle a fair amount of spicy, but I knew that this would be a Pepper Too Far, and said so.

"I'll take it!" Bethany said, and took a big bite.

It was like watching a cartoon. A flush crawled up her face and she lost the power to speak. Then the hiccups came. I swear steam whistled from her ears. She slugged down water and margarita in equal portions.

Paul couldn't quite believe the hype. He snatched up the pepper and gave it test chomp. Flush, mute, hiccups. Mom and I were laughing so hard, the tears salted our margarita glasses.

I also impressed everyone with my gaydar by spotting two gay guys among the wait staff.

The next day was more touching up the house, but in the afternoon we went exploring. Paul, who loves trail riding on a motorcycle, really wanted to try some mountain riding. He rented a motorcycle, found a trail that looked interesting, and persuaded us to follow him in Bethany's mega-truck so we could all have a look around. This we did.

We weren't technically in the Rocky Mountains, but in some foothills that form a state park. The trail started off as a fairly decent dirt road that climbed and curved steadily upward. The scenery was wonderful. Colorado's ranches and woods and meadows spread out far below us. House-sized boulders and chunks of granite stuck up like giant's bones.

Paul zoomed ahead of us, then came back to find us, then zoomed ahead again. Bethany gamely followed in the truck. The road devolved into a rutted trail, and we were moving up and down like a drunken ship. We came across truly rustic campsites and signs warning us about bears. The scenery continued to amaze, and we stopped every so often to get out and admire it. I came around a mega-boulder and discovered a cliff. Yeek! Several times, the family remarked that Darwin, who is acrophobic, wouldn't handle this trip well, but we found it lovely.

Eventually, the trail degraded too much for the truck to continue. Paul decided to keep going and see where the trail came out and we agreed to meet up in a nearby town. Bethany careful turned the truck around and we began the descent, with another pit stop at the parkapotty. (Seriously, go Team Parks Department.) Going down, I was, of course, sitting on the other side, so I got to see stuff I missed on the way up.

We made it safely to the bottom and headed into the town, where we stumbled across a brew pub and decided to eat there. It turned out to be a great choice. I'm not sure what it was, but I really liked the place. The food was good, and so were the drinks. A live duo played guitar and sang, and it was just . . . perfect. Paul found us, and reported a breathtaking ride down the other side of the foothills.

That evening, I ran on Bethany's treadmill and did my plank work. I totally impressed myself--I did the full workout and didn't have breathing trouble. Go me! Then I drove into Denver to see what the gay district was like. (Yes, Denver has a gay district.) I wandered through a couple bars and struck up a conversation with a nice gay couple that fell just short of, "The next time you're out here, you can stay with us." It's always fun to see what the LGBT scene is in another town.

Somewhere in here, I also made . . The Pavlova.

I had come across the recipe for pavlova only recently and was dying to try it, but it's a HUGE dessert, and I didn't want to waste it on just Darwin and me. I decided it would be fun to try it out at Bethany's. To make a pavlova, you whip egg whites, sugar, and vinegar into a meringue and bake it flat. Then you make whipped cream and cut up whatever fruit you like. (I used strawberries and peaches.) When the meringue cools, you spread the whipped cream and fruit on top of it, then roll it up and slice it for serving. It turned into a big project, with everyone helping. When it was done, we tried it. Delicious! The meringue was crispy outside, chewy inside. The fruit and whipped cream were both tangy and sweet. A great summer dessert, and fun to make.

I actually kind of became the self-appointed cook during this trip. We ate at restaurants in the evening, but I made breakfast every morning--scrambled eggs one day, pancakes the next. It was fun cooking for a larger group.

The next day, we decided to hit Pikes Peak. Pikes Peak is Colorado's most famous mountain and is 14,115 feet high. It's also a park. To get there, you have to drive through the town of Bust, Colorado, which, legend says, was formed by people who couldn't make it to Pikes Peak and they took the town's name from "Pikes Peak or bust!"

We packed a picnic lunch of thick sandwiches, chips, and pavlova, and headed out.

This time, Paul was driving his rental car. We went past the entry tollbooth, got the rules explained to us by a very nice park ranger ("Stay in low gear. On the way down, use your engine to slow the car instead of the brakes. Stop here for a brake temperature check"), and wound our way upward.

The road up Pikes Peak is well-paved, but narrow and twisty. There are several sets of hairpin turns. You find yourself leaning back in your seat. Your ears pop several times, and you can FEEL the air thin out. Meanwhile, the road beside you drops away. You can see miles and miles. Eventually, you can look over the edge and see far below you the road you just came up. It twists like a snake.

The vegetation thins out the higher you go, and it gets chilly. At the bottom, it was 80s and warm. Up on the Peak, the sun shone ferociously and you could feel its heat, but the air was cold, a strange sensation. Eventually, you get past the tree line, and the bare mountain top looks like Mars, with great piles of red rocks.

We stopped about halfway up at a park rest station and had out picnic lunch (pavlova!). We were careful--it was easy to get winded. Seriously. Walk too fast, and you were out of breath. Bethany was starting to feel nauseated and Paul was feeling anxiety. Both are common symptom of altitude sickness. We talked about turning around, but ultimately decided to keep on going.

At the very top, we found a startlingly-large parking lot, complete with several school buses. (!) How they got them around those hairpin turns I'll never know. Paul wanted to head right back down--the altitude sickness was getting to him--but I persuaded him to stop for just a moment at the top. "It would be a shame to come all this way and not at least get a couple pictures," I said.

The road follows the peak's ridge for quite a ways, and there are lots of places where you can say, "I'm at the top of Pikes Peak!" Paul decided it would be okay to stop for a little bit. I hopped out and picked my way across the martian surface to the edge for some photos. Paul and Bethany and Mom decided to join me, and we found a piece of cardboard with "Pikes Peak 14,115 feet!" written on it in black Sharpie. We posed with it, then tucked it back into the rocks for someone else to find.

Being up there is definitely strange. It's beautiful and literally breathtaking. It's also pointedly hostile to human life. It's cold and difficult to breathe, and one wrong step will send you to a messy, painful death. This makes the Peak both exhilarating and frightening at the same time. But we climbed the Peak!

The drive down was more than a little harrowing. It took all of Paul's concentration to avoid burning up the brakes. Some guy in a yellow car tailgated us for quite a ways, and Paul finally pulled over to let him by. He zipped down the mountain until he caught up with the next car, which wasn't so accommodating. Yellow Car's brake lights were on all the way down the mountain, and we started smelling scorched brake fluid. Not good, dude!

When we got halfway down, we encountered the brake check booth. A park ranger stops you and checks the temperature of your brakes with an electronic thermometer. Our windows were down, and when Yellow Car arrived at the booth, we heard the conversation with the park ranger. The ranger checked the brakes and scolded Yellow Car for riding his brakes down. His car was deemed unsafe for further travel, and he was directed to a special parking lot to wait for at least half an hour for his brakes to cool down. Yellow Car tried to argue, but the ranger was adamant. Finally, Yellow Car wrenched himself over into the parking lot with bad grace. We were laughing at him as we approached the ranger, who gave us a clean bill of health and permission to continue.

We made it to the bottom safely (whoo!) and finally made our way to an Italian restaurant, where we enjoyed yet more good food. We also agreed that the trail ride and Pikes Peak trips were extremely enjoyable experiences that we never wanted to do again.

That night, Mom and Bethany went to bed early, and Paul and I ended up having a long brother-to-brother talk that went on for hours, something we haven't done in a long time.

The next day was a lazier day, and we mostly rested. In the evening, Bethany and Paul and I ended up with cocktails on her deck, looking up at endless stars and talking about nearly everything.

In the morning, we packed up and headed for the airport. The plane ride home was equally dull--yay! And when we landed, we immediately noticed the difference in the air. It was so much easier to breathe!

It was a fine trip to Colorado, and we're looking forward to more of them.

A couple weeks ago, Darwin and I decided enough was enough. We needed to get away. But this is a pandemic. What to do?

Camping!

Of course, Darwin and I don't do tent camping at this point in our lives. Instead, we go to Campit Campground, an LGBT campground near Saugatuck in west Michigan and rent a cabin. The campground is huge, and they accommodate tent camping, RV camping, and rustic cabin camping. And it's all LGBT people.

It was a delightful week. The weather was perfect--never too hot or too cold. No bugs. Darwin ordered firewood from the campground office, and they asked, "How many?" "Six!" he replied brightly, thinking they meant "how many logs?" A while later, the campground's errand-runner came out with a trailer piled high with wood. It was six sections of wood, each one the size of a 1'x1' box. So we had this huge woodpile, and it forced us to have a campfire every night. (We still had wood left over!)

Our cabin was basically a wooden box with a knee-high shelf for a bed, though it had a mattress. It also had a small fridge and a very nice deck. And it was surrounded by gay guys. They may strike some of you as funny, but I have to tell you--it's so very wonderful knowing every single person around you is like you and supports you and won't be a source of homophobia. It's why we go to this place.

Usually when Darwin and I go camping (and I realize I'm using the term loosely, here), I don't cook much. We usually go into town and eat in restaurants. But with the pandemic, we wanted to keep that to a minimum, and we brought food with us, along with my camp stove. Darwin had never seen this stove before. It's old--I got it back when I was in college. It's the size of two shoe boxes and has a chamber for liquid propane. You use a tiny hand pump to pressurize it. I like it better than the stoves that use propane canisters--it's less wasteful. Darwin was both fascinated and appalled. "How can you cook on that thing?" he said.

I demonstrated on the first morning by cooking bacon. Cooking bacon outdoors while camping is cruel for everyone around you. The wonderful, crispy bacon smell permeates the fresh morning air, and they know they aren't getting any! The stove impressed Darwin very much. I cooked nearly all our meals on it all week, and did the usual camping trick of setting water on it to heat while we ate so it would be ready for dish washing afterward. I didn't know that Darwin had never done any campground cooking before, and he was more than a little amazed at how smoothly it went.

We did run into one problem. We stopped at the store on our way to the campground, which meant we arrived with a whole mess of bagged groceries, but the cabin had no cupboards or shelves or anything. We put the food and kitchen equipment under the bed, but it was highly disorganized and difficult to find anything, which makes my teeth ache. The next time we were in town, we stopped at another store and I searched for . . . laundry baskets! Two of them. One for food, and one for kitchen stuff. Everything went into the baskets, and the baskets slid neatly under the bed. Ta da!

We lazed around Saugatuck and South Haven, two of our favorite Michigan towns. Saugatuck is crowded with vacationers, even during a pandemic, and we amazed ourselves by scoring a perfect parking place right at the edge of downtown. We kept our masks on, even outdoors, and so did almost everyone else. Progress!

We also came across The Lake Problem.

The Great Lakes are riding way high this season. No, seriously. They're higher than any time in recorded history. And nowhere was this more evident than in Saugatuck and South Haven. Both of them are lake towns, with docks and piers right on the streets. Usually the water levels are low enough that you have to climb down a short ladder on the dock to get to a boat. Now? Many of the docks are underwater. Water has encroached into the streets, forcing some to close. The Saugatuck Fire Department (which is on the river because it also rescues boats) was flooded. Many houses are inches from water in the living room. Inches. Water pumps were everywhere, gamely gooshing water out of the street and back into the lake, only to have it return a few minutes later. Nature always wins in the end.

We love South Haven so much that we joke about Darwin becoming city manager there one day as a retirement job. While we were out there, he learned by accident that South Haven is currently looking for a new city manager. (!!) He isn't going to apply, but it was a head-shaking moment.

We shopped and ate ice cream (and made sure Darwin used his insulin pump) and worked out bits of local history by studying the architecture of buildings and houses (What? What do YOU do on vacation?).

And we hunted graveyards.

See, Darwin has a number of ancestors who are buried out in that area, and he wanted to find their graves. For a couple a days, we wandered through Niles and Berrien Springs. Here, I was invaluable. Totally true! (Since this blog is All About Me.) One graveyard surrounded a white, clapboard church way out in the country, a church that Darwin's great-grandparents helped found. Their graves were somewhere in the graveyard, and I finally found them. They were only a few yards from the church, and as far as Darwin and I could tell, they must have been among the first people buried there. It was very interesting.

A side note: the church's outhouse was still standing. It was divided into two sections, each with two seats. I said to Darwin, "Your great-grandparents pooped in here." And he nodded sagely.

Back to my invaluable-ness: Later, outside Niles, we were hunting through another cemetery for the grave of another ancestor, though this one didn't have the last name McClary. We looked and looked, but found nothing. Finally, I found something that made my jaw drop. Darwin was in another part of the graveyard, distracted by an odd inscription. I trotted over to him.

"Come over here and look," I said.

"Hold on," he said. "I want to see what--"

"No, no," I interrupted. "You want to see this. Right now."

Sighing at the perfidy of husbands, he trudged over to where I was pointing and at last realization came over him. =His= jaw dropped. In the middle back of the graveyard, occupying a prominent position, was a large stone marker engraved with one word: MCCLARY.

This was a major find. Darwin didn't know that he had a McClary presence in this graveyard. Darwin immediately set about checking the stones. He found a number of relatives buried in that plot, and these were graves he wasn't sure he'd ever see. One was for a great-great uncle who lived on his own farm all his life, never married, and who eventually committed suicide by poison. Darwin suspects that he was gay, and the guilt and pressure from a homophobic society and upbringing finally forced him over the edge. I agree with him.

It must also be said that Darwin had a miracle find of his own. We scoured the little graveyard, which was surrounded by a thick woodland on three sides and on the fourth by a busy road, looking for the non-McClary ancestor Darwin really wanted to find, and came up empty. Finally, we called it a day and got into the car. As I was driving toward the exit, Darwin yelped, "Wait! Wait! Stop!"

I did, and he got out. A gravestone we had both seen before but passed over because it was too hard to read, had become legible after the sun moved and changed the way the shadows fell. Darwin happened to catch sight of it as we were heading out, and it was the very grave he'd come there to find. Win!

As we're wont to do, Darwin and I also spent some time exploring small town downtowns, commenting on the old buildings and whether the place was a decent one or not. Many of the small downtowns we looked at had basically been wrecked by the local highway system. Back when the state started linking up little towns with the then-new highways, the state just incorporated the town's main street into the highway. The towns initially welcomed this--it brought more traffic and people to town. But this was back when "traffic" still involved horses and those new-fangled automobiles that went a shocking thirty miles an hour. As time went on, cars became faster, and semi trucks appeared on the scene, and they all use a highway system designed back in the 1920s.

Now, the nice little downtowns are being wrecked by roaring traffic. You might we strolling down the sidewalk, wondering if there's a cafe for lunch, when two semis and a dump truck bellow past you in a cloud of acrid diesel fumes, followed by a long line of cars that whoosh and rush and drown out both conversation and enjoyment. And none of them are stopping in the downtown to shop or eat or do anything. To them, the town is just a place that slows you down for a minute before you pound back up to 55. It's a terrible shame, but it does give Darwin and me something to complain about. You take your wins where you can.

The weather continued to be a delight--warm during the day, cool at night. Perfect for campfires. It was a fine week!

Darwin went out of town last weekend, and Max was at his mother's, which left me at loose ends. While I like occasionally having the house all to myself, I decided instead to take a trip of my own. I love visiting Chicago, so that's where I went.

It was a weekend of biking down the lake and hitting museums and eating in restaurants Darwin refuses to consider (best sushi in the whole world was at Rollapalooza!). I tried to visit the new bookstore/dessert bar that recently opened, but it was an hour's wait for a table, so I did other things. In fact, it was a weekend of doing all the things I liked doing, without worrying about what anyone else wanted to do.

And through it all, I stayed at the World's Most Inconvenient Apartment.

I rented the place through AirBnB, and right off, I found a whole mess of micro-aggressions that made me want to run screaming. These little annoyances started right when I arrived. The iron gate to the apartment's courtyard was weighted to swing shut on you, but the placement of the knob made it extremely difficult to open and get through with luggage and a bicycle without the gate slamming on you halfway through. And so it began . . .

The main door to the building had been rebuilt badly, and it wouldn't open more than halfway. The turning staircase inside was narrow, and you could hear everything that was going on in the other apartments because each apartment door had a 1/2" crack at the bottom. (I did hear some interesting conversations from the three guys who shared the apartment directly across from mine.) This meant, I knew, that they could hear me, too!

The apartment itself was . . . well, yucky. Every surface had been painted over and over and over, leaving globs and bumps. The kitchen linoleum was cracked, and there was a tiny lip between the main room and the kitchen--just high enough to trip you. There was no actual door to the kitchen, but someone had hung a 50-cent curtain rod and a pair of sheer curtains across the doorway. Getting through was like fighting a spiderweb, and I finally took the whole thing down.

There was no table in the kitchen--or anywhere in the apartment! The closest I got was a half-assed, cheap-ass, chipped-ass coffee table the size of a shoe box and about six inches off the floor. There was no place to eat.

The bathroom was awful, too. Bad paint job, complete with paint smeared across the edges of the windowpanes because someone didn't bother taping first. There was a medicine chest, which I was happy about (a shocking lot of AirBnB place have little or no place in the bathroom to put anything), but like the front gate, it was weighted to swing shut on you. This meant you had to hold it open with one hand and root through your toiletries bag with the other in order to unpack, an awkward business at best. The toilet paper dispenser was mounted behind you at elbow level when you're on the toilet, meaning there was no way to actually reach any paper. I removed the roll from the spindle--and discovered there was no place to put the roll except the sink counter, which is usually wet. I ended up setting it on the floor. The bathroom light switch was loose, and it took three or four tries to get the lights on.

The main room--a combination bedroom and sitting room--was dominated by a king-sized bed, which was nice, but the micro-agressions continued. The sheets were maybe 10 count. Seriously. They were so rough that they caught and held the fabric of my pajamas like Velcro every time I tried to move. There was no nightstand anywhere, though there was space for one on one side.

A fake fireplace of white plastic brick sat against one wall for no reason that I could see. It wasn't gas or electric, and it had no flue, so you couldn't actually have a fire. It existed solely to take up precious floor space.

The clock on the wall ticked properly, and the second hand moved at a brisk pace, but the thing was stuck at 11:59. Seriously. It didn't move past 11:59 the whole time I was there. I was afraid to do anything about it. (The demons cackled, "Mwah ha ha! When a mortal moves the Clock of Doom to midnight . . . " or something, I was sure.)

But the worst of it was the lack of outlets. Really and truly. There were no usable outlets. The one in the bathroom was connected to the light switch, so it rarely worked properly. There were no outlets anywhere near the bed. I mean, none! The bedroom/living room had ONE outlet behind the enormously uncomfortable Ikea futon, and it was filled up with cords to floor lamps and the wifi router. If I wanted to use it, I would have to either sit in the dark, or do without wifi. And the socket was buried deep behind furniture, so even if I decided to sacrifice the wifi and plug something in, I would have had to sit with one butt-cheek on the cushion and one on empty air.

I finally found a single socket in the kitchen, but it was placed in such a way that it wasn't any good for recharging phones or pads or anything else. I did uncover an extension cord and managed to get one end partway into the living room, allowing me to use electric equipment, provided said equipment sat on the bed.

Oh, and the entire place reeked of air freshener. BAD air freshener. It smelled like the bottom of a cheap potpourri bowl over a toilet.

The apartment seemed deliberately designed to be annoying in this small way and that small way and this other small way, until you were ready to hurl a brick through the window. On Sunday I was never so glad to leave an apartment in my life!

On the plus side, I did score a perfect parking spot with SpotHero, so that was something, anyway.

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Steven Harper Piziks

Writer, Teacher, Harper

Entries tagged with travel

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The World's Most Inconvenient Apartment