The valiant yellow rose on my daily walk. September 2025.
My daily walks haven’t been very “daily” since we returned from our Rhine River cruise. Today a familiar friend caught my eye. For the several years now when I’ve been walking regularly, a forlorn yellow rose has bloomed where it’s been planted next to a mailbox. Every year it shows little foliage, yet it always has one beautiful yellow blossom. I don’t recall ever seeing more than one at a time. I don’t know if someone strips the leaves purposefully, if deer or something else eat the leaves, or if this just represents the nature of this variety of rose. I do know, however, that it seems almost defiant to me to bloom that lustily when surrounded by bare, thorny stalks.
Even though we may be mostly thorns and difficult to handle, remember to blossom at least once today.
Our first night on the Viking Hlin, we went through a series of locks en route to Breisach, Germany. Having started with beer prior to our shuttle ride to the Hlin before 3 p.m., by nighttime I could properly be called “loaded.” I had, after all, discovered what selections would be available on board, sampling most. By the time we were going through the locks, I snapped a few photos and collapsed happily into bed. (Our stateroom more than met our standards: a decent-sized bathroom and plenty of storage; very surprising.)
And you know that you’re over the hill When your mind makes a promise that your body can’t fill.
“Old Folks Boogie” by Little Feat
I’m sure someone got excited when they received this offer in the mail from AARP. September 2025.
The American Association of Retired Persons (which only wants to go by AARP now for fairly obvious reasons) sent a fundraising request to me yesterday. If I send their foundation a paltry $12, I can get that nifty clock/calculator thingy pictured above! Oh, however will I resist? I don’t know what would be handier than to tell someone on the phone, “Just a minute, young man, I’m going to get my calculator to see if that Nigerian property is a good deal! Hold on, I just have to put this phone down. The cord doesn’t reach that far,” and off I’ll shuffle. (We shuffle because of course all old people shuffle.) It will be a long trip because the clock will reside on my nightstand at the other end of the house. Then of course I’ll have to shuffle back, make all those scruffly noises as I fumble the phone up to my ear, drop the receiver again, and while muttering “oh my…” make all those noises again. Presuming the nice young man is still on the phone, we’ll have to start punching the numbers. Oh, I do hope I can hear him okay! It’s such a bother when we have to start all over because I didn’t hear right, or when I accidentally press the Clear button on the calculator.
If only someone would invent something that just had a phone, a clock, and a calculator in it! And while they’re at it, maybe it could be, …oh, I dunno, ….cordless?
[Full disclosure: I’m 71 years old as I write this. How old does someone have to be to think, “wow, that’s a pretty slick lookin’ little calculator-clock!”?]
I’m fascinated by doors, windows, and any other portal between Inside and Outside. Part of it’s architectural, but over years I’ve learned I have a near obsession with any door or window which says “different” or “sturdy” or which carry an emotion perhaps symbolic of the wall it pierces. And if our eyes are windows to our soul, what then are a house’s windows?
Our first full day in Basel began with the sumptuous breakfast buffet I’ve come to expect from upscale European hotels. Afterwards we embarked on a walking tour of the historic part of Basel, reached via a short trolley ride from in front of the hotel. Several hours later I had collected six or seven dozen photos. On our second day, we wandered a little park across the street from our hotel, and trolleyed into Basel again where we visited a small but good botanical garden. So many strange doors and windows! (including these…)
Residence, Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.Converted carriage door to residence entry. Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.Clashing architecture. Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.Upscale residence (backs onto the Rhine River). Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.Overlooking the market square, Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.Entrance to a cylindrical chapel in a little park across from our hotel. Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.
If I understood our guide correctly, all of the fully-green-shuttered buildings are a high school. Although she claimed Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Jung attended it, Nietzsche appears to have been schooled in Germany (Prussia). Jung may not have attended here either, but he at least spent some of his youth in Basel. Basel, Switzerland, August 2025.
I’ve visited Europe only twice, and I’ve already learned to dislike the flights over and back. Flying to Basel started off with annoyance before we even left home: whether because our United flights were actually mostly on Lufthansa or because they were booked through the Viking Cruise company, I couldn’t print the boarding passes. Instead I encountered a endless loop where I was shunted from United’s website to Lufthansa’s and then back to begin the process again. Thus, we arrived at the Raleigh airport far too early to accommodate my fear it would take a lot of time to sort out after waiting in a long line. Neither supposition proved true. Our Raleigh-Washington, D.C.-Frankfurt-Basel tickets in hand we whiled away the first hour by walking the full length of the terminal twice which allowed me a moment of irritation when I saw this sign:
When quicker isn’t the way you’re going. August 2025.
Our flight to Dulles departed at 3:10. Obviously this flight would get into Frankfurt prior to ours which would leave Dulles at 6:10 p.m. for the same city. Why Viking wouldn’t book this escapes me. And as it turned out, our plane from Dulles left the gate 60 minutes late, then spent 30 minutes on the tarmac for reasons I no longer remember. We therefore landed in Frankfurt at about the same time our connecting flight took off for Basel. Our worries were minimal because we knew this would be Viking’s problem, not ours, and indeed, a Viking rep handed us new tickets as soon as we cleared the gate upon landing. Our new flight would be on Air Dolomiti, an Italian airline. The least pleasant of all our flights over and back.
Despite the comfort of our seats (premium economy with no seats in front of us, only an emergency exit and about 15 glorious feet of space), we slept fitfully and as I suspected arrived fairly tired to Basel. My first impression: “Wow, we’re landing in France!” I had not noticed Basel sits at the juncture of France, Germany, and Switzerland. Suburbs from the city lie in the other two countries—our guide lived in Germany “so I can have A/C which I can’t get in Switzerland.” Exiting the controlled area, one follows large arrows to either France or Switzerland. A stop by the Viking desk in the airport, a short wait for two other parties (who didn’t arrive), and we were shuttled the 15 minutes to our hotel close to the Rhine River, but in a newer part of the city.
I then educated my wife on my coping strategy for the six-hour time jump: drop off your luggage, find the bar, quickly enjoy some of the best beer you’ll never see in the United States, and follow it with a full, preferably heavy meal. Guaranteed to put you to sleep quickly and jump start your rhythms to the new time zone. Accordingly….
The three beers of most interest entering the bar. We started with the Schweizer Helles on the right. Hyperion Hotel, Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.An old friend from 2019, Grimbergen. This is the amber or “double amber” as it was called on our cruise. Hyperion Hotel, Basel, Switzerland, August 2025.
Perhaps now we should warn the teetotalers: there will be many references to beer in this series. It’s Europe, the cruise docked on the German side of the river, and we ended our vacation in Antwerp, Belgium, one of the most beer-obsessed countries on the planet.
Suitably sated, we toddled off to our room, marveled again at a completely computer-driven elevator system, and acquainted ourselves with a few vagaries in European plumbing (such as the toilet being on the opposite end of the room as the sinks and the shower).
A better barstool. The Golden Angel pub in Antwerp, Belgium. August 2025.
What a simple moment of ‘doh!’ when I saw these. Why aren’t there easy to use foot rests on every barstool? Sure, a bar rail is handy when it’s available, but many a shorter-legged person can’t reach it from a barstool. Here in Antwerp I saw several variations on this theme. C’mon, America! Get with the program.
Vacationing has meant several things over the years. As a child it meant adventure. Dad would plan a two-week sojourn through the beauty of the American West, plotting the journey for months, and utilizing guidebooks (well, the AAA one) to find both motels and sights to see along the way. By the time I reached “summer job” stage and such vacations no longer were possible, we had seen most of the national parks from the Rockies westward, plus the Grand Canyon, and the tourist hot spots of Southern California (Disneyland, the San Diego Zoo, Knott’s Berry Farm, etc.). We visited San Francisco in 1968 where I saw my great-grandmother on her deathbed and hippies in The Haight. And we always tried to loop through either Seattle or Woodburn, OR, to visit one set of grandparents. Back then, vacationing meant lots of hours in a car reading or imagining things as the countryside went by. It meant rolling with the punches when the road Dad wanted to drive was under construction or the motel he wanted looked better suited to hookers than small children. It mostly meant seeing state after state, park after park, city after city which I had never seen before, and which in my short life presented amazing memories and lessons.
I couldn’t capture that as a younger adult. Vacations at first mostly entailed going home to visit my parents and my friends. I tried a brief camping trip along the Snake and Salmon rivers, but the spectacular views couldn’t make up for my inability to build a fire and thereby have any food to eat. (Or perhaps one could say, the views couldn’t make up for my ineptness as a camper.) A bit later as a newly wedded teacher, summers were for further training, loafing at my in-law’s lake cabin a couple times, and once or twice attempting to emulate my father’s grand tours of the West. I thereby got to see parts of Arizona south of the Grand Canyon for the first time and see some lesser known but equally impressive sights. I explored my own state, Washington, better. The 10 to 11-week length of our summer breaks diluted the compressed wonder of a two-week vacation.
Life changes and a relocation to greater Philadelphia put the kibosh on traditional vacations. Just living there was a new experience. After two years there I discovered a new type of vacation which brings a different kind of satisfaction: the introductory tour. I had met a new love (who married me the next year), and I had entered corporate America where two weeks is the only significant time off you get. I took this woman on a whirlwind nine-day tour of Washington and meet-the-folks. My bride-to-be loved the state and my parents loved her. I repeated the tour in 2017 for a dear couple of friends from North Carolina.
[Disclaimer time: despite the fact I’ve lived in Washington for only four years since I left it back in 1992, I still consider it one of the best places on Earth. My values have to do with variety. In my mind only California comes close to the diversity of climactic zones and has the varied population densities ranging from the Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia wash of people to areas where it’s difficult to find the next house from the one you’re standing beside. Want desert? Check. Alpine? Check. Rainforest? Check. Scablands, Arctic, Temperate forest? Check, check, and check.]
Less than a year after our marriage in 1995, we vacationed to New Mexico for two weeks. We wandered from Albuquerque north, were unimpressed with Santa Fe and hightailed to Taos. In ’95 it had started to build up, but only a little. We stayed at an honest-to-God auto court, and breakfasted at a old West-style cafe on the square. (Revisiting in 2022 saddened me when I saw all of that charm washed away by touristy stuff.) That second week of the vacations, all my tensions dropped away as we shot into southwestern Colorado for two nights before striking to southern NM and the Carlsbad Caverns. Until a couple weeks ago, I held this up as our standard of Best Vacation Ever.
Then we cruised down the Rhine River for eight days on the Viking Hlin, and visited Basel, Switzerland, and Antwerp, Belgium, at the beginning and end of the voyage, respectively. Viking is known for catering to old folks like us (no one under 18 is allowed) and for its all-inclusive approach. We could have been very happy just eating the food, drinking the beer and wine with lunch and dinner, and taking the included tours, but it made sense for us to add two optional tours, take care of gratuities in one tidy little package, and buy the Silver Sipper beverage package so that we could drink beer, wine, and cocktails just about any time we wanted. Given the slant toward the retired and soon-to-be-retired, I must say my initial introduction to the ship gave me a jolt:
“Welcome aboard” kinda takes on a whole new meaning with a tag like that! August 2025.
I’ve nothing against people living the love lives they desire, but still I was thankful there occurred no hot gay sex (that I know of ) on the Hlin. It reinforced my initial reaction after two nights in Basel before boarding, that European cities seem to take a more blasé view about tagging. There seems to be an unwritten rule that it isn’t done on cathedrals and other historical buildings, but other than that…sure, indulge yourself.
As with my Hawaii series [tag: Hawaii] and my Virtual Vacation series [tag: Virtual Vacation] about Michigan and Ohio, this will be a lengthy series of posts recounting how two neophytes who never traveled abroad for pleasure decided to do so in retirement. For now, I’ll end with two photos about our first few hours onboard.
The appearance of swans became commonplace by the end of the cruise. They paddled up for treats just as ducks do in cities throughout the United States. Rhine River just downstream from Basel, SW. August 2025.
On the first night I met one of my new friends: Köstritzer schwarzbier. If you think you don’t like dark beers, give schwarzbier a try. Light-bodied, crisp, but it has a nice roasted taste lacking in traditional lagers. One of the handful of beers offered on board. I wish there had been more! And yes, Europeans are civilized: each beer has its dedicated glass. Viking Hlin , August 2025.
Benny began in July to prepare for August. Perhaps, given our weather in July, he just thought the calendar had turned already? Regardless, the “dog days of August” do not interest this cat. Instead he will withdraw until the temps cool down.
Benny in his basket. July 2025.
Charlie defies the heat, regards it as Finns do the sauna. He spends hours ‘on the boards’ relaxing with the moist heat penetrating his bones. His version of a cold plunge? Walking indoors for a food break and a quick nap in the A/C-cooled house before resuming the therapeutic 100+ heat indices.
Charlie soaking up the moist heat. Yes, that’s a worry-patch on his right foreleg. July 2025.
Take a Sears-Roebuck catalog, cross it with the hippie ethos, and add a large dose of product recommendations. WEC blazed a new trail. Photo, July 2025. Catalogs, Summer 1972 and sometime in 1994.
When I headed off to college in 1972 my curiosity led me to enroll in an experimental education program funded by the Ford Foundation. I hope to write of that someday, but today we consider two peculiar residents of my library: two editions of The Whole Earth Catalog. Being 18 in 1972, I didn’t exactly participate in “The Sixties” which meant I hadn’t heard of The Whole Earth Catalog until it appeared on the textbook list for that experimental program I’d enrolled in. What is it and why am I making a big deal about it? Is this just some oldster nostalgia trip? Maybe, but I think it’s much more than that.
The WEC basically laid the groundwork for what today is Wirecutter and everything like it, except…what if Wirecutter had a hefty dose of social awareness ethos baked in? And what if there were no suspicions that Wirecutter and websites like it make decisions partially based on monetary reward? Before The WEC, I’m unaware how one could have gone to a single source for information, evaluations, and recommendations on a number of topics. Everything one needed know about consuming involved a physical trip to interface with salespeople. In certain cases one could consult a dedicated publication for audio equipment, say, or fashion, but sooner or later one needed to go to a store to buy something. If I wanted information about high quality stereo equipment, I went to Huppin’s Hi-Fi downtown where all the audiophiles (a.k.a., stereo gearheads) gathered and had all the information. When one wanted furniture, one headed to a furniture store or several and bought the best of whatever you saw. The same with clothes, garden tools, hardware, books, cars, pretty much anything. Who knew if it was good? Who knew if the price here was as good as there? If you ordered something, like a car with all the options in your favorite color, you started at a dealership. Everything filtered through the salespeople.
But the WEC gathered its recommendations for just about everything which interested the Peace Generation (or whatever you want to call us), told you why it represented the best you could buy, and gave information about how to get it. Or as the Function statement on the very first page of The Last WEC said , “The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting.” This “last” edition didn’t have a table of contents. After page two told you how to get the stuff, and other tips, the third page launched right into “Whole Systems” and starting with the subsection Buckminster Fuller (anything dealing with Buckminster Fuller, a near-god of social planning). Other sections dealt with land use, industry, craft, community, nomadics, communication, and learning. These were loosely defined: subsections in Learning include “Thinking,” “Serendipity,” “Psychology,” and “Free Schools”. Additionally, the lower right corner of all right-hand pages from Page 9 onward contained the story “Divine Right’s Trip” where the main character, Divine Right, experiences many adventures of the time until he lands on the Whole Earth Catalog at the very end, a sort of gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow thing.
I could write pages and pages about the WEC to little effect on anyone who hasn’t seen it. In its way it picked up the tradition of the old Sears-Roebuck catalogs which allowed people living in the backwaters of America to buy through the mail most of the things they could ever want for their farms, their businesses, their personal health, and to clothe their bodies. (“Through the mail” • prep phrase describing movement of written communication and goods prior to delivery services such as UPS and FedEx) The S-R catalog fell onto hard times when everyone started to get electricity and cars made it easier to get to the merchants.
After navigating the remainder of the 1970’s and all of the 1980’s, issuing a few Supplements—the informal publications which came out between editions of The WEC—founder Stewart Brand and crew decided a new edition needed to be published. Those 20 years saw the introduction and rise of the personal computer, for one thing, and the starry-eyed, inchoate idealism of The Sixties had given way to a gritty, in-the-trenches attitude by the early 90’s. Most of the casual members of the Peace Generation had left the ranks, lured by money, security, and mere existence. The title page of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog quoted Brand from 1969: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” before explaining that good things performed by governments and other large bodies were being obscured by “gross defects”; a rising personal power needed a guide to the new tools making this possible.
Two random samples from The WEC shall suffice, one from each.
Opening The Last Whole Earth Catalog to pages 36-37, I find myself in the middle of a five-page description of something called Liferaft Earth. I’ve no personal knowledge of this, and I’m not reading all five pages of very tiny print (looks like 6-8pt type; it varies because consistency was not a strong point for The WEC). It appears to be about making sure everyone on the planet has enough to eat. Here’s a snippet from the top of the second column of page 35…
The following five pages chronicles a week-long event sponsored and organized by the CATALOG in October 1969.
Richard Brautigan saw the end of it. The beginning of it was three days I spent alone on a train with excellent hash and Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb. Ehrlich had been a teacher of mine, back in his butterfly and my tarantula days, so I knew to believe him.
—SB
“SB” was Stewart Brand who created and led the WEC publication team. Incidentally, in looking for a formal description of his title/role, I discovered the entire Last WEC was composed using an IBM Selectric typewriter. I didn’t find his role.
I left a bookmark in the Millennium edition long ago. Opening to this page brought me to the Communications section/Writing subsection. An article preceding the tools for and about writing begins, “We are swimming in a great polluted sea of language, and we wonder why we can’t write.” How much more so now! It continues:
We wonder why we don’t want to read. Even worse, we cease to wonder; we just don’t do it. It’s as though it didn’t matter anymore.
As though hammers didn’t matter; as though air didn’t matter; as though horses and balloons had disappeared.
It’s not a hardware problem; it’s not a brain-wire problem. It’s a writing problem. It’s software, it’s soft words, it’s swampish bureaucratic slide-down of mush-mouthed ass-covering prose that promotes long term despair in humans.
—Jon Carroll
This appears on page 242 of 384 pages in a book measuring 11×14.5 inches in fonts rarely bigger than 8pt. You can see how one would get lost in there, and how part of him would never come back out. Which is why more than fifty years later they remain on my bookshelves despite the hundreds (thousands?) which have not withstood the journey.
Lap number…I dunno…I lost count. Fawn feeling frolicky, Raleigh, NC. July 2025.
I almost feel embarrassed to post this photo of such poor quality. In my defense, the fawn zipped by so quickly, this represents my best. Much like a swimmer in a lap pool, the fawn ran back and forth, taking about 100 yards for each lap. The crashing of the brush is what grabbed my attention. It had rained for hours the previous night, which caused me to attribute the crashing sound to a falling branch at first. I tried to pan with the fawn, but you can see how difficult that was. Additionally, I shot the photo through the screen of my screened-in porch. Meanwhile, mama calmly moved from yard to yard sampling the greenery.
all the voices in my head 