Thursday, February 28, 2008

Informational update

2-28, 11:01pm. I am in Pamplona and hope to make it to Puente La Reina tomorrow St. James willing.

Tell your friends to read my blog. I need to develop a following!

Love ya´ll.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Day 1 or Lessons Learned

Notes on day 1, February 25, St. Jean Pied de Port to Huntto (written on Feb. 26)



"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." - Lao Tzu

Today I learned that French chickens think absolutely everyone should be awake at 4:38am. Yesterday I learned that you should never plan to hike 8 kilometers up a steep-ass mountain without making 150% sure that the auberge you plan on staying at is open for the winter. I was 100% sure it was open before I left, but not 150%. Before heading out from St. Jean Pied de Port, I showed my map to Jean-Pierre, my earnest host, and he told me that the route I had planned to take to Roncesvalles, the Route de Napoleon over the Pyrenees, was covered in snow up to the neck (really? It was so warm out I wasn´t wearing a jacket), and that the Auberge d'Orisson halfway up the climb was closed for the winter.

Well that sucked donkey cajones. This was a disappointment because the other route to Roncesvalles followed the main highway and was, by all accounts, less beautiful, less breathtaking, and less solitary. But I decided to be philosophical about the change in plans: better to be sucking car exhaust than frozen in a block of ice on a mountain top and discovered in the spring.

But then I met Jeanine, an enthusiastically French Frenchwoman at the pilgrim office, who told me (in French) that Jean-Pierre (whom she seemed to know) was an idiot and didn´t know what he was talking about. The Route de Napoleon was open, there was no snow (I know! I´m not even wearing a jacket!), and the Auberge d'Orisson was open. Plus, she told me, the other route was ugly.

Well, that settles that. And my guide book even confirmed the Orisson auberge was open all year. Wohoo! My plan for crossing the French Pyrenees a la Napoleon Bonaparte was saved! And hearing the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark in my head, I set off from St. Jean.



Let me just say that the mountains are stunning. Whenever I wasn´t panting like an overweight Schnauzer from the climb, I was in sublime solitary hiker mode. I greeted everyone I met on the slopes: "Bonjour Monsieur Cow! Bonjour Madame Sheep! Au Revoir Madamoiselle Chicken!". I picnicked on fabulous stinky French cheese and tangy French clementines and buttery French chocolate overlooking a pastureland of grazing French sheep. I marveled at every blade of French grass and French leaf. I was in the zone.



But at 3:30pm when I reached the 8km mark that signaled my arrival at the auberge, I found out it was, after all, closed. I am proud to say that I worked hard to contain my freak-out and solve the problem. After all, this was serious business. I could hike the 8km all the way back down the friggin French mountain to St. Jean and start over again tomorrow, or I could continue on to Roncesvalles that night (still another 16.8km away and summiting the Pyrenees at 1450m above sea level). "Fuck it. I can do that. I can make it, damnit! I am woman, hear me roar... 'n' stuff."

But then I remembered I didn´t have much food and there was no water left (I had timed my drinking all savvy-like for my arrival at the auberge). It was when I started to think, "well, I can always eat snow for water," that I came to my limited senses and realized I was in fact not SurvivorMan, and I had only ever watched that show once and that time he was in Mongolia or something and the one tip on edible Mongolian snakes I picked up was not likely to help me here. Better to go back down the mountain to St. Jean then end up frozen in a block of ice on the mountain top and discovered in spring.



I began the decent, grumbling the entire way, of course, when after about 3km I spotted a little old limping Frenchwoman in her yard. I hailed her (in French!) and told her my plight (in French!). She answered me (in French!) that her neighbor runs the little auberge at Huntto, which happened to be right where we were standing!

I was saved! And soon enough I was happily ensconced in my little Auberge Ithurburia, soaking in a scalding hot bath, washing my socks and undies in my tub, and reveling in the unbelievable view of countryside and farmland and mountains from the balcony outside my very French bedroom. And after that I was invited to share an intimate home cooked Basque dinner with my hostess and her brother (I was the only pilgrim staying with them that night).

The dinner by the way, consisted of Port wine for aperitif, bread, the most hearty and simultaneously delicate vegetable soup I have ever tasted, Saussison en Pipperade (sausage in a tomato, pepper and egg gravy - a Basque specialty I am told), a cheese course, Spanish wine and blackberry ice cream for dessert. Hence all my certain weight loss from the day´s hiking evaporated in a haze of blissful gluttony.

And in the morning, after being awakened by my punctual French roosters, my hostess´s brother drove me right back up the mountain in his little French Peugeot to the spot where the night before I began my descent in a huff.

So in the end, nothing was lost, and everything was gained.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

T Minus .01 or Attack of the Savvy Traveler

I can't really call today day one because I am not on the trail yet, but greetings y'all from the savvy traveler! The flight to Gatwick was tolerable. My travel buddy (q.k.q. person reqrettably foisted upon me by seqting computer) was the type of guy who insists you converse with him, no matter how big of a displqy you mqke of removing your heqdphones qnd putting them bqck on qgqin. (Brief pause while I say AAARRRGGGHHH becquse none of the keys on q French keyboqrd qre in the right spot: Q is where A should be if you hqvent figured thqt out qnd it is bloody hqrd to type on this thing. Y'all qre just going to hqve to mqke like you're Orphqn Qnnie secret decoder rings.)

But I got off the plqne qt Gqtwick qnd felt so comfortqble, so cqlm, so zen. I knew I wqs where I wqs supposed to be. It felt so qmqzing to be bqck in this plqce. I hqd some time to kill before my flight to Biqrritz, so I hoofed it to Westminster Qbbey, Pqrliqment, the Eye. Qll "been there, done thqts," but comforting in their fqmiliqrity. The sprightly green grqss in Englqnd is so insistently verdant, the cheddqr so refreshingly tart, the trqffic so quaintly reverse. I wqs in the sqvvy trqveler zone I tell yq. I even saved two poor lost middle eqstern men from getting on the wrong eqstbound Circle Line on the underground. Score 1 for the sqvvy trqveler! It wqs only qfter the doors closed on the two strqnded men thqt I reqlized they needed to be on thqt line to get where they ultimqtely needed to trqnsfer. oh. Three point deduction from the sqvvy trqveler for a strqight up travel foul.

Bus to Stqnsted Qirport, plqne to Biqrritz (which is like south Floridq meets Switzerland - tropical flora meets Swiss chqlets with Spqnish tile roofs - go figure), wqlk to breezy oceqnside centre ville (point sqvvy trqveler!), lose 150 Euros (mqjor point deduction), cab ride conversqtion with Basque cabbie conducted entirely in French (sqvvy point ca-ching!), view of the Qtlqntic Oceqn (ca-ching), feet qlreqy hurt, pqcked too much gear, underweqr so stiff it cqn cqrry my pqck by itself, hqvent brushed teeth in 18 hours (trqvel red cqrds), sitting in internet cqfe in Bqyonne sipping kir qnd blogging on fucked up keyboqrd (score!!!!!! savvy trqveler).

ok, got to go pqy for my qlcohol qnd get to trqin stqtion for trip to St. Jeqn. Stqy tuned peeps.

Monday, February 11, 2008

T Minus 1 or A Toast to Ma Gurlz

There is nothing like doing absolutely everything at the last possible minute before you leave the country for an extended period of time, I say. Really though, why go about getting all your ducks in a row in a timely, efficient, relaxed manner when you can flap around like headless poultry and generally make an even bigger hot mess of your affairs in the preceding 24 hours before your departure? I've never been a fan of preparedness. I think it is entirely overrated and boring. (Insert subtext: I really admire organized and prepared people, and wish I were more like them, but as I am decidedly not I must belittle them to make myself feel better.)

But truly, I'm such a colossal schmoe. I have not packed. I still have a ton of stuff to do, bills to pay, granite surfaces to clean, laundry to wash, garbage to take out. I didn't train as much as I should have (barely a lick if the truth be told), and I ate like a horse with a Guiness Book of Records sized tape worm these last few days. Why is my picture perpetually in the DSM for Mental Disorders under "pathological procrastination?" (My ex would argue it is in there under some other disorders as well, but that's for another blog).

But household drama aside. I am ready. Oh am I ready. Bring on the red wine and olive oil and seafood and spiritual renewal. But before I go, there is one thing I definitely do not want to leave without doing.

Tonight my two best gurlz, Angela and Rachel, and I are going to dinner for a farewell inebriation celebration before I disappear into "a Spanish backwater" as Rachel calls it. I am going to miss them. They are some of the rocks that helped sustain me over the past year and a half, and part of me wishes I could pack them in one of the many handy zipper pockets on my ridiculously expensive backpack and take them along, although I doubt they would find that particularly comfortable.

Rachel (who is light years younger than me age-wise and light years older than me maturity-wise) straight up is Grace Kelly in Rear Window. She can order you dinner at home from '21' while you convalesce from your broken leg, entertain with waaaayyy more panache than Martha Stewart, help solve a murder and do it all wearing 2 inch pumps and exactly the right vintage dress. Angela is the St. Bernard of friends. She once went with me while I had a cosmetic procedure (which I am sure she thought was just plain inexplicably unnecessary on my part - my vanity did get the better of me that time, what can I say), and she drove me home when I was a percocet infused hot mess hallucinating that there was a fruit basket in the front seat with us (I actually picked up a non-existent blood orange and marvelled at it's sphericalness). Oh sure I get made fun of for it, but with lots of love.

Together these two unsung heros have been making the world a better place by taking my classless ass under their wings and with their careful tutelage and guidance I am slowly being weened from my preference for cutesy, fruity vodka cocktails and am being exposed the many possibilities contained in a bottle of gin. It's like Two Auntie Mames meet Cro-Magnon woman. Of the three of us, I am the one that supplies the fart jokes.

Sadly, I will be without their company and humor on this trip, and I am sure you can derive from my descriptions above just how useful both of them would be on this trek in the wilds of northern Spain. In the event of a sudden downpour, Rachel would build an impromptu shelter from matches and dental floss and have us sipping Spanish wine from the countryside vineyard we just passed and noshing on fresh olives from an obliging grove while we wait for the storm to pass. In the event of a sprained ankle or gastro-intestinal emergency, Angela would carry me, piggy-back style, to the nearest medico or excusado as the need may be and wait with me to make sure all was well (during the percocet incident I had to pee but I forgot how. Angela was there to help with the water faucet. That, people, is a friend).

But I know their little grasshopper will not be entirely without them on this trip. I am sure I will encounter many WWRD and WWAD moments as I trek my way across the vast landscape of Iberia and my own mind and heart. And they will be in there too when it gets tough, beckoning me onward and homeward with a gleaming gin gimlet and a warm fire waiting.

Here's to you, ladies.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

T Minus 7

So as part of my preparations for Spain I went to have a deep tissue massage at Fabu Spa in Decatur on Friday. Rightly you are now questioning how a deep tissue massage helps me to prepare for Spain. I am not sure it does, but give me time and I'll think of a sound line of reasoning. Understand, I don't regularly indulge in luxury pampering, (that's not to say that I couldn't get used to it), but there is a very good reason for splurging this time: my masseuse straight up yelled at me.

See, two weeks ago while driving, my right shoulder seized up and decided to have a full on muscle fiber freak-out and practically screamed at me to "get a fucking massage you asshole! Can't ya see I'm in pain here?". I have admittedly been carrying a lot of stress in my body since the divorce, and who was I to argue with my seemingly fuming deltoid, plus I really am trying to do that whole "listening to your body" thing.

So I called up Tina with the Mr. Miyagi hands and got a half-hour Swedish, at the end of which blissful indulgence she sat directly across from me (who is still lying nekked and trapped on the massage table) and with the gravitas of an undertaker said, "Kristin, we need to talk." Talk? Huh? Ok. You know it's bad when your masseuse says, "we need to talk." "How bad is it?" I asked, not at all prepared for her definitive condemnation of the shape of my muscular system. "Guuurl, you need a full on, full body overhaul. You've got speed bumps all up and down your back, (speed bumps?) I can feel the tension everywhere. Here (she got up and moved to my calves), here (she patted my thighs), here (my shoulders). I'm talkin' a full body, hour long, deep tissue." Thus she laid the direness of my dilapidation on me. Um. Ok. I meekly acquiesced under her stern command and that is how I ended up with face down in the little padded ring and buck nekked on a massage table for a second time in less than two weeks.

The thing about deep tissue massage is, it fucking hurts. I am not sure what the philosophy is here: you must inflict pain to relieve pain? you can only achieve a state of true relaxation after your thigh fat has been painfully kneaded and beat back down like a good sourdough?

But let me tell you, I needed it. After this last year my body really does look and feel like something the cat dragged in after she ate it and then regurgitated it, like Michael Vick's dog fighting ring used it for dog bait, like it was sent through the car wash without the car. It eeks, it creaks, it hurts in the morning when I get up and later on for no apparent reason. I feel old enough to have known Cleopatra personally and been dismissed from her court for being displeasing to the eye. I can pretty truthfully point to one ass cheek and say, "here's Ben," and point to the other and say, "and here's Jerry." Yes people, I gained 63, count 'em, 63 lbs in eight months. (There are times while writing this blog that I am tempted to wail about just how hard this past year and a half was for me, even though I am trying to move beyond that. But I think 63 lbs in eight months says all I need to say about how straight up bad it was). For about 18 months now I have been walking around with some kind of chronic cough with accompanying brightly colored phlegm, and my complexion decided to stage a game of battleship on my face: "E-5. I'll put another zit on your nose, effectively sinking your aircraft carrier. Ha!"

Yes, my body has been alternating between rebellion and shut-down, and I feel it. But the pilgrimage is about physical renewal as much as spiritual (let's be honest, I hope to knock out at least some of that 63 while I'm hiking like a mad woman). And the massage fits into the whole physical renewal program too. I just hope, I really truly hope, it all works. Cuz folks, I really do want to get my fabulous back.

T Minus 13

Last Friday I celebrated Chinese New Year with some dear friends. This is an annual ritual for us. Each year we patronize a restaurant on Chamblee Tucker Road, a part of town known a bit racistly as "Chambodia." (I am sure you can draw your own conclusion as to why). Anyway, this restaurant, like many restaurants in Chamblee, is the kind of place that like, real Chinese people go. So every year we wander in a bit timid and conspicuous (cuz, um one of us is Ecuadoran and another half Persian and three of us are towering white girls of hardy Kraut stock). In fact, it would not be a stretch to say that we are usually the only people of the Caucasian persuasion in the joint on Chinese New Year, which is bedecked with all manner of red dragons and red carpet and red lanterns and gi-normous kitchy glass bead and plated gold chandeliers. I think the natives can smell our fear because they generally do look at us with one eyebrow collectively arched as if to say, "Um, you can't get General Tso's Chicken up in here."

No kidding. The minute you walk in you are greeted with a wall o' aquarium tanks filled with frogs, weird looking fish A, weird looking fish B, lobsters, crabs, weird looking fish C and some other crustaceo-amphibi-Pleistocene era looking beasts. There is no chicken coop here. And folks, to our pasty-white-ass credit, we play along. We order the "special dinner." A five course extravaganza of all manner of fish-on-a-plate-with-head-still-attached and seaweed-and-pig-snout-vegetable soup and cross-sectioned-mammal-bone in spicy mammal-bone sauce and boiled carcass of crustacean with jellied ginger coating. It is curious and scary and sometimes ravishingly delicious and sometimes stomach turning. But it shakes you up and rips you from your comfort zone and drops you in the middle of some other amazing culture for a few moments in the blah January/February of your otherwise ho-hum pasty suburban Atlanta life.

But we didn't go to that restaurant this year. Actually it was my idea/fault. I guess I figured I'd been out of my comfort zone enough in this last year and a half of exploring the nethermost regions of my fractured marriage, my own troubled psyche, and Georgia divorce law, so I convinced everyone to go to Bamboo Luau's Chinatown on Cheshire Bridge Rd. A place where you can get General Tso's Chicken goddammit and Mu Shu everything and Beef with Broccoli and all the wonderful "Chinese" comfort foods that we Americans like to think of as Chinese. Plus, they have the "Luau Bowl."

For those who don't know, which is probably all of you, the Luau Bowl is a large ceramic bowl painted with bucolic Polynesian scenes (for all it looks like the owner's four year old painted them at one of those cutesy paint-your-own-pottery places with a cutesy name like "Fire in the Hole!" or something). But the bowl has a "volcano" in the middle, and they put Sterno or something equally flammable in the cone, and then fill the moat with enough pineapple juice and booze for everyone at the table and then set the fucker on fire. Then they bring it to your table with enough two and a half foot long straws so that everyone can suck up the nectar of the flaming font until they fall out. And all I really wanted this Chinese New Year was to plunk my weary mug in a vat of flaming hooch and lap. We ordered six of them. There were five of us.

So Bamboo Luau and the Luau Bowl it was. And despite the considerable annoyance of being forced to listen to Delilah on the radio in a Chinese restaurant for godsakes, the food was good, the liquor better, and the company better still. But you know, I kind of found myself missing our blinged-out, Asian mafia hide-out looking restaurant with our dinner of mystery fish and mystery vegetable and mystery stomach illness afterward. I was ultimately kind of sad that we didn't go there. And it reminded me that sometimes, after a long, hard road what we need is not always the familiar, the comfortable, the blissfully alcoholic, but rather the stimulating, the different, the new, the uncomfortable.

So even though I am nervous about my trip to Spain (a country whose language I don't speak a syllable of and whose culture I don't know anything really helpful about), to do a sport (hiking) that I have never undertaken for more than a couple hours at a time, I am excited to be launching into the unexpected, impossible to completely plan for, predictably unpredictable and comfortably uncomfortable journey I am about to take.

Perhaps I need to be shocked into life again after the divorce like a cardiac patient who just flat-lined. And I do feel like my heart has not quite started beating again. Perhaps all this counting down of days until Spain and preparing is just the EMT yelling "clear!!!" so that the shock that restarts the heart beating can be delivered promptly and powerfully the minute I step off the plane in Biarritz.

Sounds a little painful, but sounds invigorating more than anything else.

Monday, February 4, 2008

T Minus 18

Yes dear readers (all one of you), it's official: I am in training. Actually, there is nothing really official about it, it just sounds official to say you are "in training" for something. I walked 1:40 today in my new hiking boots in an effort to break them in, as I have been warned ominously from several quarters to do so before I go to Spain. So far so good, but I am shocked to learn just how heavy hiking boots are. I feel like I have two cinder blocks tied to my legs. In fact, I wonder that the mob even messes around with pouring concrete shoes when hiking boots will do the job just fine.

I confess I am having a bit of a freak-out over the training thing. Three days ago I went to REI, the mecca superstore for all things outdoorsy and rugged. First I spent some time in the shoe department with a rather imposing and hardy looking female store clerk who helped me find just the right boots (actually there were only two pair in my colossal shoe size to choose from). But still, she did the store clerk dance and told me what I needed to look for and feel for in a hiking boot and socks. She hooked me up with some very crunchy-granola looking wool socks and some kind of intelli-fiber, super hi-tech, sweat wicking, blister sensing, tax preparing liner socks too. All the while I chatted merrily about my trip and my plans for spiritual renewal and at-one-with-nature-ness and how I felt hiking was just such a cathartic and introspective sport to undertake. Then I asked her where she goes hiking. "Who me?" she said. "Ohhhh, are you kidding me? I don't hike."

So then I wandered over to the backpack area and stood lamely in front of the massive wall o' backpacks until a clerk freed up to help me. Good lord the backpack area was busy. Is everyone in Georgia going to be on the Appalachian Trail this spring? So finally a gangly clerk comes over and I lay it on him about my trip and I timidly confess my total ignorance when it comes to backpack characteristics and functionality with the air of a scared kindergartner on her first day of school. "Please, please help me mister," my wide eyes pleaded. So he did, and this is where the freak-out comes in. I tried on a few packs here and there, but then he started to load one with twenty-five pounds of bean bags. Now I had been watching the other customers sling their bean-laden packs on their backs with the grace of Fred Astaire on the Matterhorn - one guy even did this fancy little over-the-head flippy-do thing and the pack landed neatly on his back and practically buckled itself. Not me though. I geared up for the hoist, lifted, and promptly put the thing right back down. HOLY CRAP TWENTY FIVE POUNDS IS HEAVY.

I did manage to get the thing on, and I did manage to get all 1,096 buckles (most of which I have no idea what they are for) buckled. And then I proceeded to test it out by teetering around the store, leaning precariously forward and with the slightly panicked look of a middle schooler who just missed the bus to school. What am I going to do now? This is going to be way harder than I thought. Hiking 22km a day carrying this much weight in must-have gear? And that's even leaving my cocktail shaker and bottle of Bombay Sapphire at home?

Well, there's nothing for it. I simply have to get my shoes broken in and start training with the loaded backpack ASAP. I have been reading the warnings in my guidebooks of inadequately trained pilgrims having to give up the trail in the first week because they couldn't deal. Good lord that would suck to have to bail on the whole operation just as the spiritual renewal juju was getting underway. It's like not climaxing during sex (something I have too much experience with). I don't want to go all that way and have nothing to show for it.

Sunday, February 3, 2008

T Minus 19

I am beginning to think I am slightly crazy. No, not in the way my newly ex-husband thinks I'm crazy (that would be bat-shit for real crazy). But crazy in the way that only a new divorcee, eager to shed the hurt and anger of the past, eager to begin her life anew, and eager to take on the universe, can be crazy -- her eyes glazed over with the grandiose thought of every impossible adventure abroad and at home, every far-out, pie-in-the-sky scheme for career contentment and artistic fulfillment. I am going in 10 directions at once now that my life is my own again, pulled like a doting auntie with 10 loving nieces and nephews grabbing at her arms and clinging to her legs saying, "Will you play with me?" "No, play with me!" "But I want her to play with me!"

You want to play with them all, you want to love them all and nurture them all. (In reality I only have two nieces, but I already know the angst over deciding to which one I am going to give my undivided attention. Do I hold and cuddle the angelic, cooing, giggling infant (a.k.a. The Bean, Beanie, or SuperBean), or do I dissolve into the world of make-believe space travel with the loquacious but brilliant four-year-old (to whom my brother has given the decidedly unsubtle nickname: "Mouth").

So do I take the walking trip across England? the one across Spain? the one to the Cinque Terre? Do I look for a teaching job for next fall (I'd better if I intend to have something to live on), or do I try to start a program to teach film making to young teens in the hopes that it translates into a permanent teaching position? Do I restart my theater company and produce a reading? a full production? or both in the hopes that it grows into a regionally renowned and respected venue for new and experimental work? Do I work on my film making and focus on my family history inspired documentary on post WWII ethnic cleansing of Germans in Eastern Europe (which naturally necessitates a trip to Serbia, Croatia, Hungary and the Czech Republic -- naturally)? or do I develop the racy documentary idea on women who fake orgasms and why? or do I get the pilot for my travel TV show going? or the documentary I am already filming on taboo topics in English classrooms with my ex-grad school professor?

Which of these ideas, dreams (or schemes) do I focus on and nurture first? I love them all, I want them all, and the fact that I spent the last 14 years mired in a marriage that left no room for me to pursue any of these loves with all but the meagerest of commitments, I feel like I simply MUST accomplish all this living and achieving THIS year before I go back to work like normal productive folk in the fall. Plus I'm 33 and the grey hairs are sprouting. It is a meat grinder of self imposed pressure I must alleviate.

So I have chosen that the first step must be one of self purging, catharsis and healing after the year and a half drama of my catastrophic divorce. An Eat, Pray, Love experience, if you will, that finds me on a quest for physical, emotional and spiritual rebirth just like my new hero: Liz Gilbert. (Folks, if you have not yet read Eat, Pray, Love you simply must, or the there's no point continuing on in life. It's that simple).

So Spain it is. The Camino de Santiago to be precise. The Way of St. James. A 35 day walking/hiking trek from the Pyrenees in southern France through the vineyards and fields of northern Spain to the ancient medieval church of Santiago de Compostela. And this folks, is why I think I'm a bit yooo-hooo. Why don't I seem to need to contemplate my spiritual higher self and emotional well-being on say, a beach in Tahiti? Why not drinking Mai-Tais in a tiki hut in Bali like Liz, or resting languidly on a massage table overlooking the blue Caribbean while some large-handed Adonis of a masseuse plys his trade on my melting body? Why hiking 22km a day carrying a 25lb backpack with nothing but a change of clothes, blister medication and my restless brain for company? and in winter no less? And I hate (as anyone who knows me can testify) being cold. Why muscle aches and tendinitis and bathroom emergencies with no toilet for three miles?

Somebody at sometime made the god-awful idea of salvation through suffering popular. Oh yeah. I think it was Christ. So for some crazy reason, this is the method I am going to choose as my first step. But I sure hope the large-handed Adonis will enter the picture at some point.

I leave in 19 days. Let the cringing begin.

Patrol Night 2 or I Have Turtle Blood on My Hands

June 22, 2010 Tonight I am on the beach writing by the gibbous moonlight. The Atlantic is beating a persistent time, the stars sparkle, the ...