Isn’t it true that our lives are often too busy to reconnect with neighbors. Aren’t we a society of good intentions? “Let’s get together soon? How about dinner? Let’s meet at the beach!” Yest time passes and those unmet promises linger in the air like empty commitments. Nancy and I have been friends since high school. We live on opposite shores of Cape Cod. There is a 25 minute ride between us yet the most time we spend together is when we reunite in foreign countries. Marcy was my assistant director at the Armed Service YMCA (A life time ago)! So great to see her annually on these trips! Every year we reconnect by traveling to some foreign soil ready to pedal the country side with other adventuresome folk. Our friends come from the Cape, Florida, Ohio, South Carolina and we reunite. The Upper Cape Ski Club hosts these trips and Michael Finegold does a superb job of making all the arrangements. These bike and barge trips have become so popular that the “club” now offers several trips to accommodate all the would be cyclists.
we are missing some of our favorite characters this trip!
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ypu can Wikipedia all you need to know about this medieval site of the Catholic rule so I won’t give a history lesson. Just goggle it! i was fascinated by the technology that has improved education for tourists. This was really cool. We travel a lot. We visit a lot of sites but this is the first time we’ve been handed an iPad and earphones. artificial intelligence ‘ As you passed thru a doorway the story begins. Like magic. Then if you use the iPad to scan the time portal you are jettisoned back to how the Popes and Cardinals would have viewed the room. It’s a very quiet tour because the hundreds of guests are transfixed by their devices and this virtual tour of a time long gone. This place is immense. The history is powerful. The views spectacular. But mostly, it’s humbling.
All right, all right,
I know you’ve been waiting for my blog. I’ve heard you. But fortunately for me I just been too busy to write. There are so many stories to tell. But let’s start here. It’s 530 in the morning on very quiet boat on the Rhône. I am the only one up. If this River could talk. The centuries of life it has hosted and endured would be colorful, brutal and amazing. The changes that have occurred through man made dams and locks to the ecology and flow of this river have been documented. On the bridge of Avignon we learned of how the currents changed as a result of dams causing undo stress on wooden bridge leading to its collapse... we learned how the cardinals used the bridge to get from the abbey to the popes palace but once the Pope moved back to Rome the bridge lost its usefulness and maintenance became too great. Now the bridge to no where is a tourist site. Where people like me go to marvel at the engineering wisdom of the humans from centuries ago. The Rhône is swift. Today we travel down it... I believe there will be whispers of the past as we go... Castle’s, Fortresses, Turrets all monuments to a different time. |
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