You Can't Get Lost

 Every year, I write a Christmas letter with text on one side and photos on the other.  Here is this year's letter.                Christmas 2023 Dear Friends and Family,                                                                                                                      Greetings to all of you this Christmas season.   This has been a year of great joy and remembrance.   Joy, in that my families have been able to get together several times, and remembrance, of my dear Sally.   That is life, and it is good. I have been able to travel a lot and that has been a great joy.   My first big camper trip of the year was to the Mountain West Basketball Tournament in Las Vegas in March.   After nine days there, I visited the Grand Canyon, Navaho National Monument, and Monument Valley on the way back to Laramie, returning in time for a class I still teach.   In May, Erik and Liz both flew in to meet up with the Wojahns and me in Fort Collins. We celebrated a baby showe

 Blogger is so difficult to move around in, this is a link to Sept 2. YCGL - Sept 2, 2023 - Laramie, for a while

When I was in the fourth grade, I had a wonderful teacher named Carmelita Celia.  Her family was from Barcelona but she grew up in Brownsville, TX, just inside the border.  She taught us Spanish (with a bit of a Catalan accent, b’s for v’s, etc), but more importantly, she taught us poetry, as in memorize and recite for a grade. Some were fun, like Casey at the Bat, and others significant, like On Flanders Fields, which I still recite a lot for any war rememberance.  (ASCE Bridge Building competition in Auburn, GA.  Driving back, we ended up in Vicksburg, MS on Memorial Day. As we drove through the battlefield, the gravestones had flags on them.  We stopped on a hillside overlooking one of the cemeteries and I recited that. It made quite an impact, and one of the guys told me at a WES meeting a couple of years ago that that was the thing that impacted him the most on that trip. ) One of the poems we learned was “America for Me”.  I often think of it whenever I come home, whether from a

I made it!  It was pretty straightforward , but an adventure all the same. I’m four minutes from where The tour bus will pick me up at 8:05 for the 8:30 tour.  I’m Here!!!

Simple, Love It!!!  Frankly, my Dear, I wish I was headed directly home.  I’ll remember that next time I’m here.   I’m apparently not the only person that thinks that!  The population of the island in 2011 was 10,134. My tour operator said the most recent was 27,000.  And that increase is not due to natural population growth.  The rich are buying  up the island I left the ship a day early.  When we did that in Bergen, we went through a good half hour interview with Norwegian customs.  Here, they told me “don’t knock anyone over when you walk off the ship.”  Princess was the biggest pain.  They checked three times that my outstanding bill had been covered.   (No, I’m escaping into the Mykonos hills so I don’t have to pay for that last drink I had last night.  Which was automatically covered by my drink pass that allowed me up to 15 beverages per Day!  If I started at 6:00 in the morning, I’d never be able to drink 15 alcoholic beverages on a day.  Heck, I’d be back to sleep by 7:00am. (

 Why can't I just write: Today, we landed in Istanbul 30 minutes late because the wind and the currents in the Dardanelles slowed our progress. Minutes after we docked, I joined a grout to see the "Best of Istanbul."  Our guide has been a Istanbul tour guide for 35 years with a degree in Turkish History.  He was very good.  We went to the Hagia Sophia, the Topkapi Palace, had a delicious four course lunch and then spent an hour and a half at the covered Grand Bazaar.  We made it backto the ship in time for the 6:00 sailing and are on our way to Mykonos, where I'm disembarking.   I could show three pictures and call it good.  Information is passed and You know I'm alive....kinda.   But I can't!!!!  You got to know the story, or else it isn't worth telling.   So, I'm hung up telling you about Knossos because the site is so complicated, that I haven't told you next was Ephesus, which I enjoyed because I had a personal guide, 1 on 1.   And then the 12t

  The Throne Room The alabaster throne on the right hand wall was used as the model for the chair of the chief justice at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Joe Lord: "A train wreck is interesting."  No, Joe, a train wreck is a disaster, both human and ecological.  A day like today is interesting.  There is so much here, all squished into a small area, of a culture of which I know very little, and of a crowd of people so large it makes this guy from Wyoming very uncomfortable, it was interesting.  Overwhelming, but interesting.   Heraklion, Crete, and specifically Knossos, was the center of the Minoan empire.  The Palace of Minos had two lives, the "old" palace, from 1900BC to 1700BC and the "new" palace, from 1700BC to 1450BC.  The old palace corresponds to the Old and Middle Kingdom in Egypt and the new palace to the earlier portion of the New Kingdom.  There is evidence of trade taking place between the two during the Middle Kingdom.  Ther

 Simple:  Two Lectures on Heraklion, Crete and Kusadaci, Turkey.  And laundry.  View out my front door.       First day boarding the ship The ship, population 5000, 3500 guest, 1500 staff.

Since the 6th grade, I've wanted to see Pompeii.  Mrs. H...h was my 6th grade English Block teacher.  My guess in her mid-forties.  Red hair, kind of short and pudgy.  Divorced and had a Yemanese man living with her who was an importer of African goods.  To this day, I can smell her perspiration as she would walk between us in class.  But, there was something about her that made me want to learn from her.  Come on, how many 6th grade boys remember their block studies and their teacher.  But Mrs. H...h taught Egypt, Greece  and Rome.   I've always been an Egyptologist, I took a senior level Egyptian Hieroglyphics as an elective my senior year at Boulder, jumped at the chance to work in Egypt one summer while I was in grad school, have a two foot wide section of Egypt books on my shelf, gave a lecture on ancient and modern Egypt to Mrs. Castor's English class (and got a very good bottle of wine for it, thanks Bob!).  Even now, I have a course on hieroglyphics on the Great Cou

Yesterday, Thursday, I had a good/great tour in Milan.  We saw Castle Sforza (the Sforza’s were the Milanese contemporaries with Florence’s Medici’s in power, almost wealth and fully in intrigue), the  Santa Maria delle Grazie church and Di Vinci’s Last Supper and a drop off and walk on your own in downtown Milan to look at the Duomo, the famed Galleria and I walked off to see La Scala. Which is like a beautiful music history book with a plain cover, it doesn’t look like much, but you know it’s richly beautiful on the inside.   Castle sforza Santa Maria della Grazi Our guide here was truly exceptional. She is a Di Vinci-phile.  She was quoting information published two months ago.  She had to leave us here to lead a tour at La Scala.  The Duomo La Scala But, I started coughing on the way back to the bus.  And by the time I got to the ship, I knew it was a cold.  So today, I got to watch Florence and Pisa on ship’s TV. And same tomorrow for Rome.  The only time I was out of the cabin to