Alexandersmap

    Category: Travel

    • Poetry in Plumbing

      Where does poetry live?

      In the eye that says, “Wow wee,”
      In the overpowering felt splendor
      Every sane mind knows
      When it realizes—our life dance
      Is only for a few magic
      Seconds,

      From the heart saying,
      Shouting,
      “I am so damn
      Alive.”
      – Hafiz, “Wow“

      This morning I assessed the third different shower I’ll use this week. This one was different from the others. Upgraded to a suite for the sole reason that I stay in hotels too much, I walked into a massive room. I’ve written about this experience before, I’ll never use the space and don’t welcome it when I see it. But the shower… the shower I welcomed. It was built like a water park ride that you walk into in a labyrinth of walls and tile. Once inside you’re greeted by a network of plumbing protruding from the walls: huge rain shower head, massage jets on the right and left sides, and a variety of levers to control the whole thing. This was no ordinary shower, and the volume of water used in a shower negated all the towel re-using of the rest of the hotel combined. And it was amazing. I laughed to myself as I was blasted on three sides by pressurized water. What a way to start the day!

      Life is in the moments of wonder and the everyday.  Live every moment in awe of the dance we’re all blessed to participate in, or complain about the things that aren’t perfect in our lives.  Tonight I’ll move into another hotel with (no doubt) a lesser shower. It’ll be back to reality, but for this morning, I was king of the travel world.  So damn alive!  I should’ve booked two nights.  Wow wee…

    • Scattered Thoughts

      Today I’ve driven all over the state of Connecticut, and I’ll be honest, I look at the woods and see the ghosts of the Pequot who conceded this land to English settlers.  I also think of Benedict Arnold, a native son of Connecticut, betraying his own neighbors in battle after he defected.  These woods could talk, if given the chance.  Instead I rely on the whispers of those who came before, and it’s really hard to hear them over the hum of highway traffic and bulldozers clearing more land for commercial development.  There’s a lot I love about Connecticut, but the ever-expanding development isn’t one of those things.  Knowing the history of a place makes you angry when you see that place abused, and too much development feels abusive to me.  Does that make me a preservationist?  Probably.  Venus and the moon are dancing this evening, and the wind is howling in Connecticut, as if voicing it’s displeasure at being left out of the tango in the sky.  I stared at the two for a few minutes and left them to finish their dance as I checked into my hotel for the night.  It’s not lost on me that I complain about development while staying in hotels and driving on highways and visiting customers in office buildings. I don’t have a problem with development when it’s done well, it just seems to be mostly down and dirty profit-maximization development in most cases, and where’s the magic in that?  I love the quiet corners of Connecticut, and wish that there were more of them preserved for the future.

      “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” – Anais Nin

      The beauty of writing every day is in the magic you relive in the moments you’ve lived, and in pulling magic out of the air that you weren’t even aware of until you start typing.  I’m not sure why I waited so long to begin writing, but I know I can’t go back to not doing it.  Writing is transformative for the writer, as reading is for the reader.  I’m currently being transformed by reading Josh Waitzkin, Leo Tolstoy, Ryan Holiday, Jack Gilbert, Mary Oliver and Nathaniel Philbrick.  I’m in a routine where I’ll read a few pages of Waitzin, Tolstoy and Holiday in succession and a poem or two from Gilbert and Oliver early in the morning.  I read Philbrick in the evening in a traditional book because I appreciate the tactile experience of reading a book more in the evenings and don’t want to start my day wearing reading glasses, thank you.

      All this highway driving around Connecticut reminded me of an unpleasant moment five years ago as I was driving up I-95 through Connecticut.  A man had committed suicide by jumping in front of an 18-wheeler that had no chance of swerving out of his way.  I was close enough to the situation that they hadn’t covered up the body yet, and I still see the face of the man staring blankly in my direction as his broken body lay unnaturally twisted like a bag of laundry broke on the pavement.  I’ve never been to war, but I imagine my experience with this man shortly after his demise was close to what a soldier might experience.  One moment you’re talking to a person, the next they’re a corpse.  We’re all just bags of flesh and blood and bones.  What makes us alive is our spirit and an energy force of electrical and intangible energy.  That man on the highway chose to give back his energy to the universe, and his body became nothing more than broken matter on the pavement.  Aren’t we so much more than that?

      That intangible energy carries on long after we’re gone through the people we’ve touched in our lives, but what of future generations who never knew us?  Well, I never met Mark Twain or Henry David Thoreau or Mary Oliver, but I feel their intangible energy in the words that they write.  I never met Katherine Hepburn but I feel her energy when I drive through Old Saybrook, Connecticut.  And I never met Coleman Hawkins but I’m stopped in my tracks whenever I hear him preach through his saxophone playing Mood Indigo.  We’re more than a bag of bones and blood.  Our humanity comes from that intangible energy.  When we interact with others face-to-face or through their words on the page it creates sparks, changing us.  Don’t we owe it to the world to pay this energy forward?  To weave our own version of magic?

      So that’s the mission, isn’t it?  Make it your life goal to take that intangible energy, that life force, and transcend the flesh and blood we live in.  Offering more to the world requires learning more, seeking to understand more, observing more, and becoming more.  And in return we reverberate beyond the now.  That seems a better path to me.  Focus on the contribution, and don’t worry about stupid things like WordPress changing you to Block Editor all the time.  There’s so much more to do with the time you have.  Get to it already.

       

    • The New Hampshire Primary

      It’s that time again, when the crazy world of American politics focuses intensely on New Hampshire.  Pollsters and volunteers walk the streets with clipboards and pamphlets, earnestly hoping to sway your opinion.  New Hampshire has held the first Primary in the nation for 100 years.  Back then the Primary was held on March 9th, now it’s February 11th.  New Hampshire moves the date up largely to hold other states at bay.  We’re stubborn that way.  It seems not everyone wants this tiny, mostly white and rural state to have the kind of influence it has.  And frankly I understand that sentiment, but on the other hand, there’s something to be said for tradition.  One bonus of New Hampshire having the first Primary is the relative smallness of the state makes it easy for candidates to bounce from one speaking engagement to another with relative ease.

      As with many New Hampshire residents, I’m an Independent, meaning I choose not to affiliate with either the Democrats or the Republicans.  In New Hampshire this gives me the choice to vote in either the Democratic or Republican Primary simply by declaring which ballot I wish to get on election day.  And I’ve voted in both many times over the 25 years I’ve lived in New Hampshire, usually in the race that is most impactful.  This year there’s no point in voting for the incumbent, as he’s guaranteed the nomination.  So why throw away my vote choosing someone who’s guaranteed?  I have strong opinions about the guy in office, but I’m trying to be a gentleman in this blog and won’t say what I think of him.

      As an Independent, I’ll walk into the Community Center in my town where they hold the election, get in line to check in based on the alphabet, and tell them my name when it’s my turn.  They confirm it’s me, take a ruler and highlight the line with my name and home address indicating that I’ve checked in (so I can’t vote multiple times), and hand me the ballot.  The ballot is similar to taking a standardized test, where you fill in a circle next to your choice with a marker, staying carefully within the boundaries.  I take this process very seriously and take my time.  I then carry my ballot over to a machine that sucks it in and reads it, and a town official hands me a small sticker that says “I Voted!” and my civic duty is done for another election.

      I know who I’m voting for in the Primary.  I made up my mind over the last week, and it’s a shift from the person I originally considered.  As an Independent I have no patience for politicians who stand too far to the left or right.  It’s one thing to have conservative or liberal views, it’s another to blindly parrot the party leadership.  This isn’t a cult, it’s a democracy!  Give me someone who can reach across the aisle and find compromise.  That’s how the real world works, so why shouldn’t it be that way in politics?  Because some zealot screams at you to fall in line?  No, thanks.

      Can you guess who I’m voting for?  You can easily guess who I’m NOT voting for – anyone trying to drag us further apart.  And that’s enough information.  The beauty of our electoral process is that my vote is none of your business.  And your vote is none of mine.  But both count just the same.  What matters is that you get out and vote and support democracy.  We’re in an ugly time in American politics, but that doesn’t mean that things can’t get better, it just means that we have to work harder to get it there.  Just as our ancestors did during the darkest days in our country’s history.  I have faith in Americans to roll up our collective sleeves and fix what’s wrong with our country.  And it begins with a vote in the New Hampshire Primary tomorrow morning.

    • In The Here

      “Stress is caused by being “here” but wanting to be “there,” or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It’s a split that tears you apart inside.” – Eckhart Tolle

      If there’s a cause for frustration, resentment and dissatisfaction in life, it’s this battle between here and there. The have’s versus the have-nots. There’s a lot to be said for aspiring for more. After all, if we don’t have a vision of where we want to go, how do we find the most efficient path to get there? But when you focus too much on “there” it just makes you miserable inside. And who wants to be a miserable snot?

      No, the better approach is to practice gratitude for what you have now, in the here. Several people I follow advocate for writing down what you’re grateful for every day, to reinforce that spirit of gratitude and appreciation for what you have. And most of us have a lot. We’re truly wealthy, yet focus on what we don’t have. What a waste. Give me gratitude, and a focus on what I have today, even as I steer a course for tomorrow.

    • People Watching at the Airport

      Arriving early at the airport for my flight home, I knocked off a few thousand steps walking around the terminal. I’m stuck by the commitment to drinking at 7 AM as I passed bar after bar of people nursing adult beverages. I’m no prude, and you never know what time zone someone in an airport is from, but still, it was noteworthy. Then again, I’m on business travel, others are starting vacations, going to the Super Bowl, or calming pre-flight jitters. I don’t get jitters, I’m not going to the Super Bowl, and work beckons. But first those steps.

      I have emails dropping in my in-box and a business plan to write. I have follow-up to do after a week on the road. There’s no time for people-watching, but my eyes are drawn upward to the steady stream of people walking by on their long walk to faraway gates. Well, most are walking, while a few are sprinting at full speed, rolling luggage precariously skimming along beside them. Others are taking the courtesy carts, which hum on by, beeping warnings to drowsy zig-zaggers.

      I check email, draft a few bullet points for the business plan, stretch and look around again. More people streaming by. And more masks than normal as coronavirus makes the news-readers voices pitch upward in alarm and people who take precautions. The world isn’t a healthy place at the moment, with people and the planet exhibiting symptoms of larger problems. I have an equally-low tolerance for climate deniers and conspiracy theorists and party-first politicians alike. I know I don’t know everything, but I’ll be the first to admit that. Zealots who announce they have it all figured out if you’ll just trust their what they say (but not what they do) have no place in my world, thank you. But as you watch the stream of people walking by, you see that we’re all just people making our way from here to there. We’re all on the same journey, even the charlatans.

      I used to think I didn’t like Kobe Bryant or Alex Rodrigues, not because they’re bad people, but because they weren’t on the teams I was rooting for. Bryant passing away highlighted what a great person he was: by all accounts a great dad who was using his money and influence to make the world a better place. I noticed a change in myself about these characters you build up in your mind, opinions formed about someone based on a uniform or a political affiliation. I’m getting better at not passing judgement on people, and travel helps with that. We’re all pretty much the same, with a few outliers muddying up the waters. As I watch people walk by I’m not thinking about MAGA hat-wearers or liberal “woke” activists or which team someone cheers for in the Super Bowl. Maybe I need to stop judging zealots and charlatans too? You don’t have to follow someone just because they’re going in a direction you aren’t going in.

      If Kobe Bryant’s sudden death did anything, it was unite very different people in celebration of a life and mourning for it ending too soon. We’re all just marching down the terminal of life, expecting a certain destination we aren’t guaranteed. Given the tenuous nature of our time here, doesn’t it make sense to support each other on the journey? I think so anyway. And now you’ll have to excuse me, I have a plane to catch.

    • It’s Only Rock & Roll (But I Like It)

      The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is located in Cleveland, Ohio. As a music fan I’ve wanted to check this out for years, but I was rarely in Cleveland and when I was the HOF was inconveniently closed. It seems the HOF keeps banker’s hours, which is ironic given the lifestyles of the inductees. But there was hope: Wednesday’s they stay open until 9 PM, making it possible to visit for people who have day jobs!

      I stayed in a hotel downtown and walked down to the HOF. Cold wind off the lake reminded me of where I was and I zipped the last inch of collar up. As you walk closer rock music is playing on stacks of speakers that serve as sculpture while doubling as a magnet for something more. As you get closer the glass pyramid of the HOF rises up before you out of a sea of concrete. Big, bold red letters beg, Long Live Rock and I know I’ve arrived.

      Inside, you’re met by greeters who direct you down to the lowest level, the base of the pyramid, to purchase a ticket and dive right in. And suddenly you’re in it. The base is the foundation, and you see the blues and country artists who built rock & roll, but also the cities that played such a huge part in its spread and growth. Motown, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Liverpool… and yes, Cleveland. The museum is immersive, and you can spend a lot of time in each section or breeze through it. The experience is there for you if you want it.

      If you’ve been to a Hard Rock Café you’ve experienced a bit of the HOF’s vibe. Music plays as you look at a guitar that John Lennon played, or Eric Clapton played… or Jimi Hendrix played. There are plenty of musical instruments on display and I found them interesting, but the magic was in the outfits they wore, and the videos of the artists explaining how they created a song or rif while you’re looking at the instrument they created it on right in front of you. If most artists were smaller than you’d expect, Jimi Hendrix was a big dude. His outfits indicate his size, and you know he must have been even more powerful live onstage than the old videos show.

      As you climb the pyramid there are places to play instruments, places to reflect on the names of the inductees, and hidden surprises as you work your way up the pyramid. So what’s at the top? More rock & roll, more instruments and a surprising amount of elbow room. Sure, it was a Wednesday night in January, not a time you’d expect throngs of Rock & roll fans to pour into the Hall of Fame, but a lot more room to wander than I expected.

      One thing that didn’t surprise me; the exit leads you right through the gift shop. But what a gift shop! It was sprawling, featuring the usual assortment of clothing, collectibles and shot glasses, and something more, an actual record store where you could buy vinyl records or compact disks. And that’s where it all began for me back as a kid, sifting through records, looking at the covers and wondering what magic was inside. That’s the rock and roll experience that started it for me, and the experience that capped off my visit to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

    • Flight Path

      The roar starts around 5:30 and continues on for as long as the wind direction dictates.  There’s no mistaking when you’re staying in the flight path of a major airport, as the roar continues every couple of minutes until the rush of morning flights slows.  This is the world we live in; connected to all corners by dotted rhumb lines 30,000 feet in the air.  That connectedness is most apparent when your hotel is directly under the flight path of planes taking off.

      My room preferences follow me around the world.  Whenever I stay in a Hilton or Marriott property, there’s a note in the system reminding the person checking me in to stick this guy in a room at the end of the hall, away from the ice machine and elevators.  In most ways I’m not particularly fussy, but when it comes to sleep I’m not a fan of the late night hallway conversations and beer cooler fill-ups.  You do you, I’ll do me, we’ll both find a way to coexist.  As long as I don’t have to listen to you at 2 AM anyway.

      So with this kind of preference for quiet, why would I book a hotel in the flight path of a major airport?  Convenience, that’s why.  I’m an early riser and don’t care about the roar at 5:30 AM the way I’d care about it at midnight.  If I’m working on a laptop I probably have noise cancelling headphones on anyway, listening to music that they don’t perform on the Grammy’s anymore.  Funny how old you feel when the music industry passes you by…  but then again I’ve never been at the epicenter of pop music anyway.

      Today I pack up my bags and leave the flight path for the highway – Another source of the background roar of life on this planet.  Stand near a major highway and listen to the constant roar of cars and trucks flying by.  It’s not the same volume of roar as jets taking off but it’s more relentless.  I take full advantage of the infrastructure of rapid travel and convenience, but I don’t embrace it.  Like the hotel room, I prefer the quiet corners of the world, away from the very noise that I’m adding to in my business travel.  The irony isn’t lost on me, but as long as I’m participating in the world economy I need to dance with the roar.  Until I can cancel it out again anyway.

    • Dining at the Complimentary Buffet

      One of the curiosities of travel is the complimentary buffet at the hotel.  If I have a travel rule, it’s to stay in places that offer at minimum a decent breakfast.  This is becoming increasingly common in most mid-priced hotel chains, probably because people like me turn our nose up at continental breakfasts of toast and mini muffins in favor of hot breakfast options.  Lump the $5 you lay out to feed me into my hotel bill, but don’t expect me to dance in the lobby for white bread and grape jelly. Microwave eggs? That’s not hot breakfast where I come from.

      But I can look the other way on a few things with breakfast. Robust coffee cures a lot of affronts to the senses. Dinner is a different animal.  Candidly I try to go out for dinner whenever I travel, but sometimes you’re stuck at the hotel making the most of what they offer you.  A full kitchen in these circumstances is highly desirable, but for value there’s something to be said for the complimentary dinner buffet too.  Some days it’s not bad at all, with Italian or Szechuan food that seems anything but “free”, it’s actually “good”! But for every delightful international spin at the buffet table, you’re subjected to the uninspired cheapest option they can serve you that they can get away with. Like last night’s lukewarm ham and bean soup and wilted salad. After experiencing that combo I promptly walked down the street for a fast food chain’s chicken sandwich. It takes a lot for me to make that kind of leap.

      I found myself in this fine dining hotel for two nights in a row, and tonight featured two kinds of pasta and a salad bar. It wasn’t all that bad, with the Alfredo option full of fresh (to me) vegetables and a light cheese sauce that didn’t overpower the dish. Two nights, same kitchen, two very different experiences. Hit or miss, to be sure, but what do you want for nothing? I don’t make a habit of grazing at the complimentary buffet, but now and then you hit it just right.

    • Seeing the World for the First (?) Time

      “Our awareness has been stretched wider than ever in history, but often at the cost of taking away a lifetime of experiences.” – Seth Godin

      “We were the first humans who would never see something for the first time.” – Gillian Flynn

      Both of these appeared in my feed within minutes of each other this morning, in turn each pointing out the world we live in being smaller than ever before, and casting a neon glow on a topic I should explore before the muse carries it on to the next writer. Candidly I’m itching to return to writing more local history, but it’ll have to wait a bit longer. I’d be a fool to turn a cold shoulder on the muse, wouldn’t I?

      Godin laments the cost of awareness in our world of YouTube, Instagram, streaming media and, yes, travel blogging. We tend to know about things just by casually dipping our ladle into the stream of information flying past us in all directions. But sipping from the ladle isn’t immersive exploration of new places and ideas. It’s the Cliff Notes, not War and Peace. As Godin writes, there’s no excuse for being uninformed, but there’s also no good reason for being inexperienced.

      Flynn laments that media often offers a better picture of the world than going there and seeing it does. I’d say she’s partially right in that we cheat ourselves of the wonder of the new having seen it before we get there. But I disagree that the experience is better through media or that we don’t experience something substantively better being there versus seeing it on a screen. I can look out the window and see snow, or I can walk outside and understand snow.

      The crew of Fayaway are in Saba at the moment. It was nothing for me to pull up a video of people hiking up the mountain they hiked up, see the massive leaves they saw and the same view out to St. Kitts that they sent me in a text message. But a YouTube video is a very small sample of the experience they had of talking to locals, feeling the heat, getting out of breath climbing to the summit, and the exhilaration of reaching the summit and catching a first glimpse of the panoramic vista. That is their experience of a lifetime, while I’m simply aware of what it generally looked like for them after watching a YouTube video.

      The world is smaller than ever, and we’re blessed to experience the wonders of it without the cost of earning it in money, risk, sweat equity and sacrifice. But experience on a screen isn’t experiencing life, it just eliminates the surprise of knowing what’s around the corner when you can Google street view so much of this world. Surprise can be good, and surprise can be very bad. Maybe the answer is to use all this technology to mitigate the impact of the bad while minimizing the reduction of the other.

      Maybe VR will bring us closer than we’d ever imagine in the next few years. There’s enormous value in practicing on the flight simulator to get it right before you fly the Boeing 777 overseas, but you still need to get experience on the real thing after that before they load passengers on with you. Likewise, seeing what the Google street view was prior to pulling out of Edinburgh in a rental car made me more comfortable when I did it. It didn’t simulate the tactile oddness of the left hand shift instead of the right or the adrenaline rush of the first roundabout going the opposite way, but it eliminated sensory overload having seen a bit of it already.

      Humans are meant to move, and to interact and react to the world around them. Media is getting exponentially better at recreating this experience, but that doesn’t make it experience. The answer is to get out and be a part of the world, not just watch it through someone else’s lens.

    • Walking the Line

      Walking this morning on Cape Cod I saw turkey tracks in the snow. The funny thing about turkey tracks is they look like arrows, pointing this way and that, as if to tell you to Go here! No, go there! Turkey walk in circles looking for food, and their tracks point you, if you tried to follow the “arrows”, towards the same madness. It’s a wonder of confusion and I smiled at the sight of it.

      I’m glad I walked early, because overnight snow didn’t stand a chance on the edge of Buzzards Bay, where the ocean moderates temperatures as easily as it moderates moods. Looking at the temperatures in New Hampshire, there was a 21 degree difference between the hills up north and Cape Cod. 100 miles and 200 feet of elevation make a big difference between order and chaos when you’re talking snow.

      If turkey tracks are scattered madness, the surf line offers a measure of predictability, for even on its own erratic path it still runs roughly parallel. The surf line finds its own path, curving and cutting this way and that based on the push of the swell, the contour of the sand and the strength of the breeze. The funny thing about the surf line is that it looks similar whether you’re up close on a quiet pre-dawn beach on Buzzards Bay or flying 1000 feet above the New Hampshire coast in a Piper Cub. Up close very different. Add the right distance and the mind tricks you.

      We’re incredibly lucky now, with these great leaps across time and space. Anything is possible, really, in our timelines in this time. Yesterday I woke up in Ithaca, New York, watched a college basketball game in Rhode Island, and went to sleep on Cape Cod. This morning I walked on the beach and this afternoon I was shoveling snow back in the hills of New Hampshire. I could easily be in London or California or some other place for breakfast tomorrow morning if time, money and responsibilities allowed. Quick leaps between here and there are possible, which makes the world a magical place.

      I run into a lot of people who march along a pretty straight line in their lives, not straying far from home, going to the same job every day, taking the same vacation to the same place for a week or two every year. I’ve tried that line, and it’s not me. Granted, you don’t want to be a turkey moving about in circles with no rhyme or reason to where you’re going. But what’s the fun in traveling a straight path from here to there? Don’t be a turkey, play along the surf line! Follow your own path as it meanders along, but with an eye towards the destination. You’ll still get from here to there, but the path will be a lot more interesting.