Allyson Johnson

Pieces of my Mind

Archive for the category “Elderly travellers”

31 Jul 2017

Freeway-Free in France: Saturday on the Seine

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WB and I took the bus to the Pont Neuf today and walked down to Notre Dame.  Since we had Museum Passes we spend about an hour down in the Crypt, which harbors a number of relics of Gallic, Roman, and medieval times which were exhumed when they built an underground garage under the Pavee in front of the cathedral. Very interesting but fearsomely educational with all sorts of cool interactive 3D computer representations of the Ile de Cite at various stages, the cathedral in various states of construction, etc. We would have spent even more time but it began to feel a little claustrophobic. 

We then strolled across the pavee to the cathedral, where an impressive mass was being held.  We were able to walk quietly around the edges of the church, admiring the wonderful carvings around the sacristy and the gorgeous windows.  

P1030324webThen we went to the memorial to the 200K Frenchmen who were taken away by the Nazis and never returned, which is hidden below ground level at the end of the garden behind the cathedral.  After that, a cup of restorative tea and a couple of scoops of glacé at Berthillon’s seemed in order.  P1030325web

 

 By the time we finished our break, it seemed a strike of bus drivers had broken out, (what is a visit to Paris without a manifestation of some kind?)and we were forced underground to the Metro, which involved a lot more steps and stairs for poor WB’s knee.

 Happily, the Galleries Lafayette has a direct entrance from the Metro at their stop, so we executed some efficient shopping and then went to ooh and aah at the Art Deco atrium and stained glass dome which they acquired when they merged with La Samaritaine a few years ago. 20160924_054841web Next up to the rooftop terrace to admire the view of everywhere we had been and wave at the folks up on the Eiffel Tower.

 By the time we got down, the manifestation seemed to be over, so we caught a bus which nearly took us to where we wanted to be.  Winifred chugged off to the Musee d’Orsay, while I decided to skip the Louvre this trip and check out the Monet water lilies and the Picassos and Renoirs at l’Orangerie.  Lots of lilies.20160924_075112doc

I didn’t feel like going back to the Metro station and there were a whole lot of policemen around, so I walked slowly back to the hotel, stopping here and there to check out some menus for possible dinner tonight, and a little browsing of the clearance rack in the dress shop on the corner.  

 A bit later WB arrived – the buses were stopped again so she had to walk from the Musee d’Orsay.  She is taking an exhausted rest’. We will decide about dinner in an hour.  No word from Dianne, who was planning to spend at least part of the day circling the city on the Route 69 bus – hope she didn’t get marooned somewhere.

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Posted in bus travel, Elderly travellers, Freeway Free, hidden treasures, Memoir, Travel, World Heritage sites and tagged , , , | Leave a comment
09 Jun 2014

Arizona Highways: Sedona Sucks You In

Sedona outcroppingSedona started as a Mormon mission; then came the miners, whose main remnant is the picturesque semi-ghost town of Jerome dangling from a bluff across the valley. Then came the New Agers, with their crystals, their ethnic garb, their peculiar dietary restrictions, and their talk of mystical vortexes of energy to be found among the red rocks. With the skyrocketing prices of precious metals, there is a current threat that old mines will be opened and subjected to new tech hydraulic mining, starting the cycle over again. But meanwhile, visitors continue to be magnetically attracted to Sedona, whether it is vertical energy or simply the stunning scenery and space.

Jeff, the ex-lawyerI am part of a group of nineteen who have signed up for five days of hiking in the Sedona back country. Our hike leader is a former lawyer who was involved in environmental cases and must have asked himself the Big Questions: WHY am I doing this legal work which I don’t t enjoy? WHAT IF I quit and went to work for Roads Scholar? HOW can I make it work? He found a niche as a faculty member at Northern Arizona State University solely employed in facilitating hikes, conventions, bonding sessions, and so on for the U. Is this a cool job or what?

The three guides also include one immigrant, from the Caucasus. He had emigrated from Russia to Latvia at age 16. His mother saw him off at the railway station. She asked, “Will you be coming back?” He answered, as the train pulled out, “No.” After a second life in Latvia, he joined the merchant marine and traveled the world, living on ship. “Wherever we docked, the purser would give us a passport that would let us ashore without trouble.” I missed the story of how he came to Sedona. I did hear him say “Sedona is my 4th life.” He is a firm believer in the positive energy of the vortexes. “They changed my life.”

A second guide is also a strong believer in the power of vortexes. We stood in the center of a natural amphitheater in the rocks, purportedly a vortex site, and he told us of meeting a Native American at this site where he was meditating. The Indian pulled out a conch shell from his pack and, after asking permission blew a deep note. The sound traveled in a circle around them as it echoed from one wall to another, a truly mystical moment.

We tried to believe, but we could not reproduce any mysterious effects of the vortexes. We ate delicious food in a vegan restaurant, and felt just as stuffed and no healthier than if we had over-indulged at McDonald’s. However, the drama of the soaring rocks, the rippling streams, and the blue sky soaring to forever was enough to energize me without benefit of crystals or magnetic fields. Just being with beauty makes you more aware of what being means.Sedona view from the trail

 

Posted in Arizona, Elderly travellers, Memoir, Travel and tagged , , , | Leave a comment
21 Apr 2014
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Excavating a Life (Los Altos TOWN CRIER April 2014)

Pix of Dimi

 

My husband’s mother, known to friends and family as “Dimi”, died at 102, and I went with my husband to help arrange funeral services and reacquaint ourselves with family. We stayed in my husband’s boyhood bedroom in his mother’s abandoned house.

The house had been rented out for a few months to a family connection who had used mostly the first floor. Almost all Dimi’s belongings had been moved to the second floor. They included a couple of bedrooms’ worth of furniture, plus boxes and baskets of documents, oddments, gewgaws, and bric-a-brac.

As a relative by marriage only, I enjoyed going through the boxes, bins, and dresser drawers which had been jumbled together, and the closer relatives seemed relieved to have an unemotional eye sorting through the accumulation. It was exciting to explore, as if I were doing an archaeological dig through the strata of a life.

I found a newspaper clipping with a picture of Dimi at about 18, as she starred in a college play. At her 90th birthday she had listed as one of her regrets that “I never acted on Broadway.” We had thought she was joking. Was it a real dream at one time?

In a drawer of a bureau upstairs I found a wedding photo. We had thought that my husband’s parents had not been able to afford a fully costumed and documented wedding in 1933, the beginning of the Depression. Yet here they were, he looking dapper and debonair in a suit, vest, and watch chain, she glamorous in a swooping hat, full length white lace gown, and sporting an enormous bouquet.

I found a letter from a soldier dated April, 1945, thanking Dimi for a newsletter she had sent as a class correspondent. He said it was like a breath of spring to hear from her, and asked to be remembered to the college professors he had admired. Did C.E. “Dutch” Eby, Lieutenant on the USS Barron, survive the last few months of the war?

I found a note from a young woman who had been a childhood friend of Dimi’s daughter, saying that she had always thought of Dimi as a ideal parent, and she had tried to model her own parenting after Dimi.

I found notes from people whom Dimi had met on her travels, from Guam, and Australia, and Hawaii, and Norway, with whom she had kept in touch and in friendship for decades after their chance meetings.

I found notes written between Dimi and her husband of 40 years, including the last heartbreaking one when he was in the grip of his last illness, knowing he was near his end, just before his death.

I found lists of Christmas presents which Dimi had given year by year. In later years, many of these presents were ludicrously inappropriate, mis-sized, or obviously pre-owned. We laughed with other family members about the too-small shirts, the ladies’ sweaters given to grandsons, the tarnished necklaces with missing stones. Yet these lists showed how much thought and care she had taken so that no child or grandchild or even great-grandchild would go unremembered as her family grew.

On my return home I looked at my cluttered closets and crammed desk drawers with a different eye. I knew Dimi so much better since I had delved into the strata of her life. Maybe one day my children will learn to know me better also thanks to the clutter I leave behind.

 

Posted in Elderly travellers, Memoir, TOWN CRIER and tagged
17 Sep 2013

Freeway Free in Spain: Madrid and its Museums – El Prado

El Prado 3D galleryEl Prado

At El Prado you can thrill your fill on the Big 3 of Spanish painting: Goya, El Greco, Velasquez.  Wow!  I warmed up with a roomful of Hieronymous Bosch (inspiration for every sci fi paperback anthology cover ever printed).  The Garden of Earthly Delights is enough to give one nightmares for a week.  On the wall catty corner is Breughel’s Triumph of Death  with Death leading an army of skeletons against the doomed remainder of mankind – the original zombie apocalypse.Bosch - Earthly Delights and Torments After

Unfortunately, a guard informed me that photos are not allowed soon after I left Bosch and Breughel, so I will have to link you to websites for you to get your tastes of G, V, and el G.

I was headed for Goya but got side-tracked by Velasquez.  Three hundred years before the Impressionists, this man knew exactly how to make light shine out of a picture.  I could have looked at his portrait of the Infanta Maria  and her handmaidens and dwarves for hours speculating on what was happening in each person’s mind, but the traffic of Japanese, German, French, and Spanish tour groups impeded reflection.

So I proceeded on my search for Goya but went the wrong way and got caught by El Greco  – even earlier than Velasquez, and combining use of light and of exaggeration to portray emotion and character in a way that prefigures Toulouse-Lautrec by 400 years.

W and I had split up after Bosch and Breughel.  When we reunited for lunch I was ready to babble about El Greco while she had found and been immersed in Goya, especially the “black Goyas” from his late period.  We exchanged enthusiasms, and then went out to explore again.

This time I found the Goyas and worked backward from the black period all the way to when he was hired to do “cartoons” of designs of frolicking gypsies and children,  to be used as patterns for tapestries at the local royal weavers workshop.  Amazing.  Age and war do alter one’s  point of view, and to go backwards in his career, from the murals of massacre and the blindness of fate to these sunny comic scenes, was especially poignant.

So which was the greatest painter of the Big Three?  Impossible to choose.

 

 

Posted in Elderly travellers, Spain, Travel and tagged , , , | Leave a comment
10 Sep 2013
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Freeway-free in Spain: Madrid and its Museums: Reina Sophia

Line for Dali

Madrid is a big city, the largest we have visited in Spain. Unlike the other largish cities we have visited, it does not seem to have a historic center; the Plaza Mayor is a nice place in daylight, but in the evening it is a haven for the homeless who are sheltering in cardboard boxes left over from the day’s sales of tidbits and trinkets for tourists. The main gathering place for events is the Puerta del Sol, site of the city hall and of Madrid’s civic mascot, the statue of a bear reaching for fruit on a strawberry tree (obviously not the kind of strawberries we grow for shortcake in the US).  Unlike other European capitals, it does not have an iconic identifying landmark, like the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben  or the Brandenburg Gate or St. Paul’s Cathedral.  What Madrid has is Art, in three world-class museums, and in Madrid we looked at Art, with an occasional eyeball-break in the lovely Parque del Buen Retiro.

Here are our experiences with the Big Three (spreading over a couple of posts):

Museo de la Reina Sophia
Reina Sophia focuses on  Spanish modern art with the jewel of the collection being
PIcasso’s  Guernica Pablo-Picassos-Guernica-001.  The museum was having a special exhibit of Dali
which had started two days before our arrival and despite the drizzle the line to get in there was across the plaza  when we arrived at 4:30.  We decided to do the rest of the museum and come  back later for Dali.  We worked our way up in the general admission line, and  discovered gleefully that as seniors we qualified for free admission to  everything but Dali.  W had done her prep and started us on the second floor, but even  then we wore out our feet and our brains before we got to Guernica.  

Two days later we came back to the Reina Sophia for a second go-around.  This time we let ourselves drown in the overwhelming torrents of Dali and Picasso. These had never been my favorite painters, but after learning of the background against which they lived and painted I am more favorably inclined.

I did not know that Guernica had been painted on commission by the republican government of Spain to show at the Spanish pavilion at the 1936 World’s Fair in Paris.  I did not know it  was part of an attempt to win world sympathy for the republicans in the Civil War against Franco. (They got a lot of sympathy, but Franco still won). And I did not know that during World War II Dali had to flee Spain for France, then for the USA. There he became the first performance artist/career celebrity, perfectly reading the needs of the host country, anticipating Paris Hilton and Madonna by a half-century.

After drinking from the fire hydrant of history and art at Reina Sophia, the park was a chance to stretch our legs and our eyes over some longer distances.  There is something very refreshingly basic about a vista that includes a little girl and a pigeon.

Park and Pigeon

Posted in Elderly travellers, Spain, Travel and tagged , ,
24 Nov 2012

From Russia with Love – Day 6 – St. Petersberg finale

[Note: I was reviewing my notes, and discovered I had skipped our last day in St. Petersburg – sorry for time warp!]

Today started early : Alarm at 7:30 AM for bus departure at 9 to take us for our Hermitage tour.

Mom agreed  to use a  wheelchair reluctantly but very glad of it by the time the two hour tour was over .  We had access to the elevators instead of the stairs, got preferential deference from the 30-odd Japanese tourists who were grouped on our bus – they were charmed by my Shibuya jacket and   my three sentences of Japanese.  They beckoned us to the front of the crowd for each of the picture stops, insisted we get ahead in the loo for access to the handicapped stall – It is good to be a dowager.  I got all the privileges as the designated pusher.

I didn’t have my camera at the Hermitage, but Duke Zoran – entertainer on the cruise ship – took many pix, including the Return of the Prodigal Son, which was one of my favorites also (parental love, sibling rivaly).  Other faves: Raphael’s amazing ceiling frescoes of God creating the Heavens and the Earth (so sweeping and dynamic – conveys a real sense of the Power that created all we know), Titian’s “Danae” (an orgasm in progress – makes Rembrandt’s painting of the same subject a few rooms later look positively prudish) – and a bunch of Pisarro’s and Picasso’s that we had to zoom by as our time was running out.

The Monet’s and Degas’s were B level, the Gauguins were more interesting to me than those at the Louvre.  It was all a bit overwhelming – especially in the context of the incredibly ornate, marble-columned, gilt chandeliered, parquetry-floored Winter Palace and Hermitage rooms.  Oh yeah, there were some da Vinci’s and Fra Lippo Lippi – just more than you could stop to take in.

Back at the boat, we had our first served lunch rather than the buffet – delicious salad, beautifully served – irresistible desserts. Back in our spacious suite, Mom napped while  I struggled to send a simple email – it seems Hotmail is technically challenged in exotic locales.

So I vented my frustration with a brisk walk along the English Embankment.  Oh, how good it felt to walk at rated speed after several days of accommodating Mom’s tentative pace!  I stormed along, found my tension easing, and was able to come up with some alternative communication strategies (Facebook!  Mom’s gmail account!).

The Engllish Embankment where we were docked was easy distance from St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the big civic park which also houses the iconic statue of Peter the Great commissioned by Catherine.  I saw children somersaulting in the park, saw an intrepid 5-year-old scaling the Thunderstone and then sliding down as if it were playground equipment. (It does have potential as a slide – see photo from rear above.) There were brides and grooms canoodling in the grass for photographers and relatives; I used my odd rubles in the W.C.; I struck up some conversations… a fine liberation!

5:00: Lifeboat drill.  An example of “First  tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them”.  We lined up in our orange life vests at our muster stations and received our safety instructions (if you see someone fall overboard, throw a life preserver and holler “Man overboard!”  If you see a fire, push the red fire alarm button nearest you and holler “Fire!”)

6PM – we launch from the dock. Slowly, slowly, we edge away from the pier, turn end for end, sail out past the mothballed submarine, the tall ship used for training Russian naval cadets, the container port.  We can see rain sweeping up over St. Petersburg behind us, but we are just ahead of it.  West to Finland!

Dinner at “Il Terrazo” – the Terrace café reconfigured as a semi-luxe Italian restaurant.  there were some glitches with the menu, but what we ended up with was just what Mom wanted (spaghetti with meat sauce- most basic and authenic) ; we both enjoyed the eggplant wrapped around fresh tomato and cheese;  my “osso bucco” was really veal shank, not ox tail, but it was ok. And that will end our “gourmet” dinners for the cruise – the really swank restaurant was booked to overflow the afternoon of the first day, so we don’t have to deal with it.

We are skimming along the Bay of Finland under clearing skies at 9:20 PM – seems like 6PM at home.  Mom is wrapped in a terry robe under a comforter and about to be gone;  I am enjoying my journal but not thinking about stretching to anything more serious – I guess this is vacation.

Posted in Baltic cruise, Elderly travellers, Russia, St. Peterburg, Travel and tagged , , | Leave a comment
20 Nov 2012

From Russia With Mom – Day 11 – Rostock Harbor/ Warnemunde

We arrive at port about 6AM with a tremendous grinding and bustle of engines.  From Rostock it is possible to train to Berlin, wander that city, then return by train – 6 hours round trip to wander for three.  Mom and I opt for the local bus tour of Warnemunde instead, as we have both visited Berlin, albeit decades ago.  It is a beautiful day, about 70 F. out, I can see the tram passing, see people wandering along the promenade, but  Mom doesn’t want to go out until the scheduled outing to make sure her feeling of chill and digestive unease is past – not un-anticipated, but a bit frustrating.  I resolve to go for a long bike ride when I get home.

Finally the bus ride/ walking tour – we are in the bus with the South American Contingent – only one other couple speaks English as a first language.  The guide, Irene, a sweet young thing with  wispy voice , has a hard time keeping control.

Fun: a fountain with a bunch of naked figures, in which a number of equally naked young children dance.

A Lutheran church which coopted a Catholic church in full ornate mode – somehow they adjusted, by not insisting on restoring the historic stained glass windows which were destroyed in the war.

It is stunning to realize that we are in EAST Germany – the gray side of the Berlin Wall when I last toured as a student.  Instead of the Stalinist blocks which I had seen before, we see sunny plazas, brightly-dressed people, frolicking children,  flowers – and McDonald’s and TJ Maxx.  Some Stalinist statuary remains, but mostly on a sunny day that past does not show.

After the tour, which ended up covering quite a bit of cobble-stoned pavement, Mom decided to recuperate, and I bolted for the gangplank to do a little unguided exploring.  Of course there was a souvenir mart close to the cruise ship docks, and evidently there had been some sort of civic sand sculpture competition quite recently. The theme seemed to require some reference to Warnemunde’s history;  the themes ranged from serious to sensuous. (see below).

Warnemunde city fathers

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06 Nov 2012
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Tips on travel with the Oldest Old – Part IV– Trains and buses

Maybe you get seasick in swimming pools.  Maybe you get claustrophobia if there is no escape route from a boat.  A second alternative available in some areas is old-fashioned luxury rail travel.  I’m not talking about AmTrak with its erratic schedules and limited meal service.  There are excellent tours by rail if you search diligently – and are willing to pay.

For example, Canada’s Rocky Mountaineer luxury train starts in either Jasper or Banff and winds its way through the Canadian rockies past glaciers,, wildlife, and snowcapped peaks.  You can choose to travel with three different levels of luxe– a car with picture windows with a box lunch brought to your seat,  a dome car with hot breakfast and lunch served at your seat, or a dome car with an open bar and a dining service below offering a choice of excellent gourmet meals with white tablecloths, crystal glassware, and attentive service.   The train travels only in daylight so as not to miss a scenic moment, and you disembark in the evening to stay in 4-5 star historic hotels  along the route.

Other luxury train travel opportunities are available in the UK, Europe, Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa.

Caveats:

You are likely to have different stopping points each night – lots of unpacking and re-packing

Use of the premium service requires that you must be able to negotiate the  narrow spiral staircase between the sightseeing and dining levels of the rail car.

Options are pricey, pricier, and priciest

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A third alternative – luxury bus travel

Advantages:

Bus tours cost depends on the tour company, but are generally  more affordable than either cruise or rail travel

There is a wider variety of destinations available by bus than by boat or train. A top-end bus tour company will put its travelers into the same hotels as the luxury train might offer, and has more flexibility in offering excursions to restaurants and other attractions outside the hotel.

Caveats:

Bus travel, no matter how well sprung the bus and how insulated the engine, is more tiring than cruise or train travel, with more on-and-offs for trick knees and hips to endure.

Compared to cruise or train travel, there is more “dead time” on the bus between destinations, and less ability to move about.  If you get carsick trying to read on a bus, you have few entertainment alternatives, no matter how many sing-alongs and Draw-the-Moose competitions your tour guide instigates.  And if sing-alongs and Draw-the-Moose competitions are not your thing – so much the worse!

Like train travel,  bus travel is likely to  involve multiple overnight locations.  If you don’t want to pack and repack every day, check   itineraries for tours that have a central hub for overnights with tours branching out to different destinations each day.

Posted in bus travel, Canada, Elderly travellers, Rocky Mountaineer, Train travel, Travel and tagged , , , ,
03 Nov 2012
1 Comment

From Russia with Mom – Day 10 – Ronne Harbor, Bornholm

Danish beer and kippers in Bornholm

Years ago my husband spent his summers as a bus tour guide, sometimes heading up an expedition of seniors going from New York to San Francisco.  His problem was – what do you talk about after Chicago until you get to the Rockies?  He emcee’d a number of trivia contests, draw-the-buffalo contests, sing-a-longs – anything to make the hours pass as they cruised through the open blank spaces of South Dakota and Iowa and Nebraska.

The challenge for our Baltic cruise planner was similar – on one end you have St. Petersburg – the Paris of the Baltic, glittering with history, palaces, and art.  On the other end is Copenhagen – home of the Tivoli Gardens , the historic inspiration for Disneyland.  But in between?  Once you have spent a day in Helsinki and a day in Stockholm, then what?

Our cruise planners did the best they could.  Ronne (Denmark’s laid-back resort island)  provides at least an excuse for parking the boat for awhile, and at best a real sense of what life might be like out of the urban tourist centers.  On Ronne  it would be possible to rent a bicycle and see the land from an inhabitant’s perspective.  From a bus, the experience was like flipping through postcards – stop here at the unusual round church…

Unusual round church

American expat glassblower’s studio

….stop there are the American expatriate glass-blower’s studio,

….have lunch at the Danish deli for kippers, open-face sandwiches and Danish beer (see above)……  Other than these brief emergences, we were in the tourist bubble at all times.

Still, I must not under-value the emergences.  I saw wild-flowers blooming against the seawall, smelled grass drying in the sun, ate a kipper, felt the sun’s heat radiating from the cobbles on a warm day – these will stay with me.

Wildflowers in the sun at Ronne

Posted in Baltic cruise, Elderly travellers, Memoir, Travel and tagged , ,
31 Oct 2012
1 Comment

From Russia with Mom – Musing on Cruising

After only three days on the boat we are learning about the culture of cruising.  Life is divided between the Boat and the Bus –  cruising from port to port, followed by  at least one bus tour at each stop.  As a companion/escort for the oldest person on the boat, my goal is :Don’t be last to board the bus.  This is not easy.

In Stockholm we kept no-one waiting as we left the boat, nor after the Vasa Museum.

But we were the last on the bus after visiting the Stockholm City hall where they hold the Nobel Prize banquet each December 10.  Here is what the guide (a charming Swedish Carol Channing type)  said in her Swedish accent:  “When you exit the souvenir shop go through the arch on the left there will be your bus waiting.”

We were not the only ones who heard: “When you exit the souvenir shop, go through the arch.  On the left there will be your bus waiting.”

She meant :” When you exit the souvenir shop, go through the arch on the left.  There will be your bus waiting.”

The issue – there were two arches – one IN FRONT of the exit, as well as a much less prominent arch in the dark on the left when you exit.   So we got lost (along with Christine and Mark from Pennsylvania, bless their hearts) and were retrieved twenty minutes later by the assistant guide who was supposed to be bearing up the rear to make sure all laggards were accounted for, but somehow lost track of us. Bah!

Doing the bus tour each day feels like being part of a canned travelogue in a bubble, but I can’t leave Mom on her own, so I have abandoned the bike tours which were going to be my  variety.  The lap of luxury is still a lap – we are used to being a bit more active.

Back on the boat, at a cocktail party for first-timers we met two other sets of mother/daughter voyagers.  The 89 year old said to Mom –” so sorry to hear you have beaten me by two years – I’m not the oldest on the boat!”

Mom rapped back instantly “I’m sorry too!”  General laughter.

Mom at lunch: “There’s a statue over there – it’s a copy of something that is very familiar;  I think it’s Rodin;, can you name it?”  I look, see no statue.  “I don’t recognize a statue,” I say to her.  She gets up, goes closer to see.  The waiter mimes anxiously, as she wanders toward the deserted corner, “Is she all right?”  I mime “It’s ok.”  Mom looks about in the corner, returns .  “It was a pile of dirty napkins.  That’s AWFUL!”

There are a lot of groups, but we are not part of any.  Even the mothers-and-daughters have other family members they are with, and no invitations to join them are forthcoming  So we are spending a lot of time together.  I have much more understanding of the handicaps Mom is living with – and more admiration for the way she gallantly overlooks and surmounts them.

It is what it is.  Her eyesight and hearing seem to go in and out – she can spot a sign out of the corner of her eye “Did that say ‘teleferique’?” No, it was “telegraf” – pretty close;  and then mistake a pile of napkins for a statue by Rodin.  She can rap right back in conversation, and then not be able to hear me across the table. Meanwhile, I am learning to go at a slower pace, to listen, to think ahead, to appreciate the small comforts of a cozy robe, a sunny balcony, a reclining chair.

Posted in Baltic cruise, Elderly travellers, Memoir, Travel and tagged , , , ,

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