The organizers of Sacred Heart High School’s 50th Class Reunion had cleverly provided, in place of name tags, yearbook photos. As one remarked, it was a 60s version of the aging app. I will not comment on the relative kindness of time delivered upon those yearbook faces I observed that night, but I will say with certainty that the promise, hope, determination and fortitude shown in those class photos had not been dimmed by time. At least not over the course of this evening.

   You can’t beat getting yourself acclimated to the potential of the fall rainsweep of England, Scotland and Wales than by settling in to an old fashioned New England nor’easter. Since Carol took charge of the accommodations for this trip, we were confirmed in an upscale Atlantic beach inn outside Boston, complete with gas fireplace and a picture window view of the ocean delivering the three day blow.

  Although I have a colonoscopy every, er, ten years as recommended (in case my doctor may be reading this) the sense of dread that decennial event conjures is a most familiar one. It matches exactly, for instance, the same dread I feel about going to a museum. In fact, the prep for a colonoscopy may actually be somewhat less dreadful, in that there is considerably more sitting done than you get to do at a typical museum.

Next Saturday, Carol and I will be attending her 50th high school reunion in Yonkers, N.Y. My role will be her dutiful arm ornament. As jewelry, I’m closer to the kind left unclaimed in a pawn shop, rather than glittering off the wrist of a NY socialite. Plus Carol was the head cheerleader for her high school (Carol insists she was never the head cheerleader, but she’s not telling this story, I am). Which means expectations could be high for someone like a Johnny Depp or a Michael Douglas to be draped around her. I can do Randy Quaid, or with dim-lighting, maybe a Paul Giamatti in a stretch of credulity, but my guess is some form of “looks were never important to me,” will find its way into introductory conversations.

Top 6 Napa Valley Wine Tour

Are you searching for an incredible way to treat your wine lover friend in Napa Valley?  Do you personally enjoy visiting the wineries?  If so, it is going to be very hard to choose from the numerous wineries from Napa Valley. While most of the wineries at Napa Valley close at 5 pm, some are open even after 5 pm. When almost all the wineries need prior appointments, some are open for tasting without a booking. There are even wineries that specialize in red wines only and some others have white wines as well.

Just to make it easier for you, here are our picks of the Napa Valley wine tour.

   I like wine. I like to drink it; I don’t need to understand why I like to drink it, but I’ve learned in the past few years that a lot of livelihoods depend on me wanting to know why. So when I travel to California’s wine country, which has become an annual event to visit friends, I include a winery tour, not so much for the sake of those livelihoods,  but for the same reason people who travel to New York and Paris visit MOMA and the Louvre: to advance their knowledge of art and culture sufficient to become annoying at parties.

   The giant Sequoia known as General Sherman that stands in California’s Sequoia National Park is more than 2000 years old. It is 1000 years younger than the oldest known Sequoia. Interestingly, these forest giants require wildfires in order to germinate their seeds and grow new trees. In other words, these living trees have been around for at least 3000 years, and have survived through the life giving natural occurrence of forest fires. Today, thanks to the human encroachment of creeping suburbia, forest fires are suddenly  now a scourge that have to be dealt with – to read between the lines of the lumber industry  – by clearcutting, of course.

   I was reading a travel narrative, and the writer used a word that struck me in an epiphanal way. Theroux was describing his coastal tour of Britain (The Kingdom by the Sea) as “long coastal stretches of decrepitude.”

   That I wanted Carol and I to see what he was writing about on our own upcoming trip (“…what had been villages well served by railway lines had become curiously anorexic-looking and tumble down, somehow deserving the epitaph from ‘Ozymandias.'”) struck me as very odd: I wanted to sightsee. As I read on (“defunct viaducts, abandoned cuttings, former railway stations, ruined railway bridges) it occurred to me Theroux was describing what 1500 years from now would be the ancient ruins of a then former world empire. The funny thing is the current existing sites of 1500 year-old ruins hold no interest for me. In fact little is more boring than a well-preserved and properly docented or audiophoned historic pile of slave-constructed rocks, except for maybe the section of medieval religious paintings in a typical European art museum.

Anyone reading between the lines of this travel blog has to surmise that the way Carol and I eat and drink in Europe is not sustainable year round. Even when we spent all that time in Germany, we still found ways to turn the food pyramid on its head (thanks to some wonderful Italian restaurants there). Inevitably though, we wound up enjoying our last meal in Europe the way diners on death row enjoyed theirs. “When we get home, we’re going on a diet,” Carol would intone solemnly. I would receive those words with the same death row chill an inmate would experience in learning there’d be no intervention from the Governor.

  Moses might probably understand, but that’s about the only one. And even he would note I wasn’t looking for any Promised Land.

   In June 1971, I left the United States, and spent the next nearly three years traveling abroad. Always with very little money, I amounted to little more than a vagrant for a good portion of that time. On the positive side, I was genuinely looking for some place and station in life where I belonged. It had never occurred to me in that time of my life that in order to find what you’re looking for, you need some idea of what that is.