The other day I found my passport from the late ’80s and early ’90s, with all of the stamps from Western and Eastern Europe in it, and thought it might be a good subject for my first video.
In 1986 alone, I traveled to Finland, the Soviet Union, Ukraine, East Germany, and most of the countries of Western Europe, including Spain and Portugal, which were new members of the European Union.
In 1989, I started leading annual tours to Greece and Turkey, and in 1993, just four years after the Berlin Wall fell, I led my first tour into Eastern Europe: Austria, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. My little tour company, Halcyon Tours, was one of the first to take Americans into what had only recently been Soviet-dominated countries.
I’ll post more about those old tour days in the coming weeks, as we move toward the January 28, 2025, launch of my novel, The Last Grand Tour. (For a synopsis of the book and pre-ordering information, click on the title.)
For now, here’s my first video. I’d love it if you’d let me know what you think of it.
When I was a kid, you could send in bubblegum wrappers and get prizes. I found this envelope that held one of them in an old box yesterday. (Notice the cost for mailing a package then: six cents.)
It may have held the tiny transistor radio I took to my grade school to listen to the baseball playoffs while in class. My teacher never noticed the wire going up to my ear.
That had to be about this time of year. The team I was cheering for was the Cincinnati Reds, one of whose stars, Pete Rose, died a couple of days ago. The other stars were Joe Morgan and Johnny Bench.
The Reds lost the World Series to the Oakland A’s in seven games that year.
The other day, Sylvia brought out photo albums from our tour guiding days in the 1990s. The shots here are from one of the trips I led through Greece and Turkey when I had my own company, Halcyon Tours.
My tours were focused on small groups, learning about the local culture, and staying in local-style places where my clients could get to know the people of an area. Of course, there were plenty of opportunities for wine-drinking on rooftops in places like Oia on Santorini too!
Back then, Oia was still somewhat unvisited. Many of the buildings hadn’t been rebuilt after the massive (7.5 magnitude) earthquake that hit the island in 1956.
In high season now, as many as 17,000 cruise ship tourists disembark on the island EACH DAY, with most of them crowding into the small town of Oia at sunset time.
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To be immersed in the kind of adventure it was possible to have in Europe before the awful crush of cruise-ship mass tourism, check out my forthcoming novel, The Last Grand Tour, available for pre-order now. (It will be published on January 28, 2025.)
Here’s a synopsis:
American tour guide Joe Newhouse wants nothing more than to reach Venice. Since moving to Munich after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he’s watched his business fail, his wife leave him, and his love for Europe diminish. Now he faces one last ten-day tour with a surly group that doesn’t want to be there. As he leads them through the mythic lands of Europe’s Romantic past, he grows increasingly disturbed by their stories of earlier lives, puzzled by their desire to be with a man who doesn’t arrive, and entangled in an illicit affair that promises to either save him or plunge his tour-and his life-into madness.
Soaked in the Romantic atmosphere and dark deeds of old Europe-as well as the freedoms and hopes of a new era-The Last Grand Tour takes us on a perilous journey through Hitler’s Berchtesgaden, Mozart’s Salzburg, and Mad King Ludwig’s Bavarian fantasyland before reaching its stunning climax in the murky waters of Venice. Along the way, it explores the often-shifting lines between fidelity and freedom, illusion and reality, regret and desire.
Note: I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, where your purchases support local bookstores. If you buy a book through a click on this website, I’ll earn a small commission that helps defray the costs of maintaining this website.
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Note: I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, where your purchases support local bookstores. If you buy a book through a click on this website, I’ll earn a small commission that helps defray the costs of maintainingthis website.
The Advance Reader Copies of THE LAST GRAND TOUR arrived over the weekend, giving me a chance to hold the fruits of my labor in my hands for the first time.
What an immense joy.
You can pre-order it on Amazon now. It should be available on other sites soon!
I’ll be appearing at Powell’s Books at 7 p.m. tonight, in conversation with historian Amanda Bellows, talking about her new book, The Explorers.
The Explorers is a retelling of America’s exploratory history with women, people of color, and immigrants foregrounded. Among the figures focused on are: Sacagawea, Black mountain man James Beckwourth, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Black polar explorer Matthew Henson, early pilot Amelia Earhart, and astronaut Sally Ride. The book is a great read and a welcome update to history as most of us have been taught it.
One of the things I like most about the book is how refreshing it is to see history through the eyes of someone other than white men. For example, in the chapter on Sacagawea, Bellows tells us she longed to see the Pacific Ocean but Lewis and Clark didn’t include her in the first group that went there from Fort Clatsop. She had to insist on going with a later group. This tells us more about her as an individual and helps to bring her more vividly to life.
It should be a stimulating discussion. I hope to see you there.
The inaugural Cascadia Writers-in-Conversation evening took place last night, with the delightful and eminently charming Sharma Shields as our first featured author. In a beautiful museum setting, with Z. Vanessa Helder’s magnificent watercolors of Eastern Washington on the walls, 60+ people had the great fortune to listen to a terrifically talented writer talk in depth about her life and her work.
Among the topics Sharma discussed were: how she became a writer, how fairy tales can help us find a different path to a deeper reality, the source of her ability to write funny, a writer’s relationship to the serious issues of our times, and the importance in her life of the stories of Hans Christian Anderson (the subject of her next novel).
Sharma listens and smiles with Z. Vanessa Helder’s watercolors behind her.
She also talked at length about the development and “weirdness” of her three books–Favorite Monster, The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac, and The Cassandra. One of the evening’s many treats was Sharma’s reading of three short stories about witches that showcased her humor and love for tales as well as the unique blend of edginess and tenderness that characterizes much of her work.
The audience waits for the conversation to begin, surrounded by Helder’s watercolors.
Writers-in-Conversation events take place at 6 p.m. on the second Thursday of each month at the Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds, WA, and are sponsored by the Edmonds Bookshop and the Holman Company.
Kicking things off with thank yous and the story of how the Writers-in-Conversation series came to be.
Photos by Gene Openshaw and Rod Ralston.
Note: I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, where your purchases support local bookstores. If you buy a book through a click on this website, I’ll earn a small commission that helps defray the costs of maintainingthis website.
This fledgling eagle turned up at the top of our bank last Sunday. It gave out a pitiful cry every few seconds and we worried that it was injured. When it moved, it seemed to have a hurt foot, and it didn’t fly.
For the first three days, it stayed mostly in the same place, but a couple of times it hopped up onto the woodpile just 20 feet from where I was writing. Its cry was usually intermittent, but sometimes it became continuous. We worried it would starve to death.
It took a couple of days for a wildlife rescue person to come out. When she did, she told us adult eagles might be feeding the fledgling when we weren’t looking. In any case, she couldn’t capture it (using a sheet and gloves) as long as it was so close to the edge. So we waited, that sad cry becoming the backdrop to our lives.
Two days ago, while I was watching it through the window, it flew several feet down the bank. Then it relocated to a stump at the top of a steep cliff above the water. While it was there, I saw an adult eagle perch nearby and lean down, seeming to talk to it. Other eagles flew by the next morning.
This morning (Thursday), I can still hear its cry, but it’s far down the bank, out of sight. When I walked over to see if I could locate it, I found it in “conversation” with this adult eagle perched high in a tree above it.
It is beyond our ability to monitor it now. And I feel fairly sure it will be okay. All that’s left of where it was near our place is this bit of down and this feather. But I think I’ll remember that sad cry for a long time.
Update: After two days of not seeing (but still hearing) the fledgling eagle, we located it 40 feet up this tree. So a) it can fly, at least a bit, and b) it can perch. Adult eagles have come by regularly. It’s going to be fine.
