The Ides of March

Ah, the Ides of March, and here in Charles Town we only had to beware of sunburn.  The temperature hit 85, with warm breezes and very clear skies.  Just a delightful day and we spent much of it doing a bit of organizational gardening.  Yesterday our Charles Town grandkids had the day off so I picked them up at ten with every intention of working their little fingers to the bone in the garden.  Instead we ended up feeding them twice in three hours.  Cindy made them cheesy eggs and toast, with some fresh fruit and milk.  I finally got them to stop eating for a while but had forgotten that I had told Patrick he could try on some of my shirts, shoes and ties. He has parties coming up and wanted to look sharp.  We finally got them outside at about 11:15 and we got a solid hour’s worth of work. They really are hard workers and we cleaned up the back yard in preparation for gardening and landscaping, which we’ll do in a few weeks.

Before lunch we had them set up the new tent we gave them for an early Easter gift.  Colin and Meagan are coming back in early April for a ten-day visit/conference, and the kids are going camping with Colin while Meagan attends her conference.  Cindy and I realized that it has been a very, very long time since we camped.  Anyone who knows me well understands that roughing it to me means a five star hotel without twenty-four hour room service.  I think the last time I camped my tent consisted of a blanket hung over a clothesline that had been strung between two trees.  I remember pounding sticks into the corners of the blanket and thought the tent was just perfect.

Today however, everything is high tech and Cindy and I just stood there in amazement as this little bag of stuff became a three person dome with three windows with screens, an entry mud room and a clever little mesh thing that is used to hold your personal items like wallets, money, cell phones etc.  Patrick and Hannah had absolutely no difficulty setting the thing up in a matter of minutes.  I excused myself and went into the kitchen to finish the chicken vegetable soup; at least I knew how to use things correctly in the kitchen.

Some of you had asked about the merry go round that was in the park in Nice. It was certainly something that really captured my imagination.  The park had been taken over by face painters, mimes, clowns, kid friendly theatre and this magnificent merry go round.  The animals seemed to have been created from driftwood and they were imaginative and sometimes a bit scary.  In order for the thing to go around, parents had to use the see saw which was linked to the gears of the platform. The faster they went up and down the faster the merry go round went. All the time they are powering the thing, the proprietor was dressed in a duster with a cool hat and was playing this lovely piano with music that might have been heard during the screening of a silent movie.  Very cool experience.  Here are some photos, including a couple of our friend Mary with a deflated exercise ball on her head.   As you can see, we had a wild and crazy time.

Best to all, Cindy and Wm

Retirement Thus Far

Charles Town

March 8, 2012

Cindy has been on my case to do a bit of blogging since many of you are concerned about our welfare and, having not heard from us in a while, are a bit worried.  Rest easy, we are well.  I started the blog when we moved to Bahrain and continued it in Moscow because it as all new and exciting to us and we wanted to share our sense of wonder and our daily joys and frustrations.  Having moved back to Charles Town I just didn’t see the need for writing, despite the fact that we still have exciting adventures, albeit, mostly local.  So, I’ll try to summarized what we have been up to and then I’ll periodically send out a message or discuss some finer points of cooking, eating and wine consumption.

We have been having a ball since leaving Moscow. I got Cindy to give me nine months before she did any more work and we have spent almost all of it traveling. We’ve been to Europe a few times and took two long cruises.  The first was a twelve-day; I think I wrote about that, to the holy land.  Then a few weeks later we headed out for fifteen days to transit the Panama Canal.   The Queen Victoria is a magnificent vessel. It is only about six years old and in the grand tradition of Cunard, it is a little slice of England afloat.  The public rooms are what you would expect, filled with gleaming woods and glimmering brass.  The dining room was exquisite, both in appearance and quality of food. Lots of stained glass, etched glass and wood everywhere.  It was large but cleverly divided so as to give the appearance of smaller, more intimate sections.  The have an English Pub that is as authentic as you can imagine and always filled with Brits from opening at 11am to closing at 2am. They have all the traditional furniture, beers and ales and lively entertainment you would expect from Bristol to Birmingham. They even had nightly quizzes that only Brits would enjoy or even understand.

We are convinced that Cunard dumped all the remaining cabins on the bucket shops of England about three weeks before the cruise departed.  Lots and lots of the people we saw could not possibly have paid what we did. We did hear many of them talking about the great bargain which included airfare.  These were plump pink folks who came from quaint places like Bumble on Berry, Clydesdale on Dung and Clueless on Rude.  They were there for the sun, booze and food and boy did they get a lot of all three. Since the food and sun were free, they took every advantage of both and it was fun to watch them turn from pasty white to lobster red over the course of the first week.  Since they could eat from 5am to 2am they did and that doesn’t count the 24hour room service. I was amazed to see folks eating traditional English breakfast, laden with pork products, beans, eggs, toast and jams at 10am and then online again for the luncheon buffet at 11:30. I’ve no idea where they ate between 10:45 and 11:30 but I’m sure they were indulging.  Most of these folks took their tea on the deck since that was where the sun was.  One of them would go and get all the sandwiches and pastries and bring the out to their sunning area, and then the other would go in for the tea so as not to abandon their staked out deck chairs.  Fortunately Cunard does not allow anyone in the dining rooms for the evening feed without formal or semi formal attire so most of the cheap Brits took their meals at the Lido buffet where large loose clothing was allowed.

Some of our stops were wonderful but most were just the pits.  We departed from Ft. Lauderdale so we were able to get to Florida a week before the cruise, which allowed us to go and visit our kids and grandkids in the Sarasota area. That was tons of fun. We then had two days of sailing before hitting Aruba. We have spent lots of time there before so we just got off to get a coffee and use free Wi-Fi. It is more fun to stay on board ships when everyone else is off touring. Lots to do and lots of open spaces. The canal was great, nothing like I thought it would be.  It was more like traveling though a rain forest river, with tons of wild life on both sides of the shoreline.  The first stop after the canal was Puentas Arenas in Costa Rica.  I had always pictured Costa Rica as the Switzerland of Central America.  Perhaps that is the case in the hills but this place was featured in the NYT as the drug capital of Costa Rica. It was dirty and run down, not what I might have expected in Costa Rica.  We walked to a covered market since I always like them, but we got within a block and the smell was so bad we just turned away and headed back to the ship.

Nicaragua was worst. We pulled in and docked at a merchant dock where there was another ship offloading some type of grain with clamshell shaped lifters. All day long the air was filled with the dust and shaft of this grain and the balconies and decks were covered with a thin film of this junk. The city itself was filled with hookers, beggars and smells that one associates more with purification than sea air.  Thankfully we didn’t go on any arranged tours since we hear from those that did that they were disorganized and horribly overpriced.  Instead we enjoyed the quiet of the ship since most everyone when ashore and we had the joint to ourselves.

Guatemala was a bit nicer in that we were at a tourist port and while there was on city or town nearby, there was a large ‘tourist’ area at the end of the pier filled with vendors, shops, bars and restaurants all catering to cruise ships. The two stops in Mexico were not worth discussing. They cancelled the stop in Acapulco for safety reasons, which is one place I really wanted to visit.  Poor Mexico is getting slammed in the tourist department due to the drug cartels efforts to kill as many people as possible.

We did meet some nice folks. We enjoyed the staff of the ship and the captain, a Danish woman, was delightful and ran a tight ship.  If you haven’t done the canal, it is worth it, but it can be done in eight or nine days and you certainly don’t need fifteen.  We mostly go on cruises so that we can dance the night away and that we certainly did.  We danced, and danced and danced and loved every minute of it.

A few weeks ago we went to Nice for Carnival. We rented an apartment in the Old City of Nice and some friends , Roberto and Maria, who teach in Milan came to visit. My oh my, did we have a grand time.  We really didn’t know that it was Carnival time when we made our reservations but it was surely a value added. The place was jumping all day and all night with grand parades and colorful floats.  The theme of the Carnival was Sports in Nice, so all the floats had that as a theme. I’ll see about getting some photos posted to this site. One day we drove to Antibes for the Sunday market and we walked all around the harbor, the largest in the area.  It needs to be large to handle these babies.  There are lots of great places to eat that are affordable and we had our fill of oysters and rosé.  We shall surely go back there again.

So that in a nutshell is what it is like to be retired!   With best wishes,  Cindy and Wm