Month: June 2016

(Tuesday, June 7th, 2016)

Tomorrow I get on a plane that starts my trip home.

This’ll probably be my last post directly related to the freighter trip. I could change my mind, but I am not likely to try to make some big statement. That’s just not me.

So… I have had a nice week in Genoa! It’s a very good city for walking around, and I did so. Sometimes in sun, sometimes in the rain. I had run low on energy. Leaving the ship after so long a time left me a bit disconnected. I decided not to try for too much, not to see “everything possible” before getting on a plane, but to just relax and enjoy.

Each day I picked a couple things I wanted to see or do, and set out with those simple goals. I allowed myself to get diverted, which was easy. I walked, sat and wrote in my journal, ate a bit, had one of several thousand cups of coffee of differing styles, and walked some more.

I took many pictures, and looking back at them, I realize how many of them are in “portrait” mode vs. “landscape”. When you walk in the center of Genoa, you are almost always in an urban canyon of some sort. It is so unusual to a Floridian turned Phoenician, and even San Francisco doesn’t have that sense. The walking spaces in the old town are only wide enough for walking, and the buildings are several stories high, so narrow canyons are the norm. There are intersections and all that, and it is easy to get lost. But not really. Walking for just a little more in any direction either gets you to the harbor, or to a plaza, from which you can find your bearings.

I also realize that I have a ways to go as a photographer, and that my normal cameras (my point and shoot camera, and my phone camera, which is what I used in Genoa) try a little too hard at making everything just so, bright like a sunny day. And so the slight darkness in the canyons doesn’t come out well. I might try adjusting some photos so that they “feel right”.

I have a point of pride, totally accidental: A woman asked me for directions in Italian, and when I spoke she answered in English saying that I looked Italian. Ha! In the end, though, I was happy that I actually could help her with directions! It turns out that she accidentally asked me for the location of a particular plaza that I had been using as my personal reference, because I knew how to get home from there. Just lucky. So I helped an Italian tourist in Italy. Cool.

I will caption some photos for the “Cooked” section, but I am not going to try to name each building or discuss its significance. I only sort of care about that stuff. There are directions to a place claimed to be Christopher Columbus’ birthplace. Like Mao’s tomb, I am not really interested.

Something that was impressive to me was how much a city like Genoa was thriving, as long ago as the 1500s. Many of the largest mansions, an “embassy row”, some huge cathedrals, castles and forts defending the port, already existed then. I can imagine the elite in their carriages, now 500 years ago (think about that for a minute), leaving the opera, coming home to their in-town estates, then going to church the next day. I know that Rome, “just down the shoreline”, scoffs at mere half-millenia, but I am still impressed by Genoa. When Columbus left, he left from a thriving city, not a startup.

I took one excursion out of town, on a tip from Duane and Kathy, Italianaires Supremo (<– fake Italian). I took the train to Monterosso and then hiked to Vernazza. That’s a part of a longer hike connecting five small towns nestled beneath the steep hills on the coast. “Scenic” doesn’t do it justice. The hike was as beautiful as those along the California coast, and with these little old towns along the way.

I only did one part. I guess the writeups say that this part is a difficult section, but it wasn’t really that bad. Except that, instead of walking back to Monterosso, my knees, once they saw the train depot and learned about the easy intercity train, went all Italian on me and went on strike. I could have forced the issue, but it would have been an ugly scene. I decided to give in to their demands.

Okay, that is it. I will be updating the “Cooked” section with some photos for Genoa and Monterosso/Vernazza, and I will continue to work on “chapters” of the blog book. If/when I get the blog book to a good state, I will put it on the blog site, so you don’t need a Dropbox link to see it.

This trip is done. I am now mostly focused on getting on the airplane first thing tomorrow morning. The Rickmers Antwerp, as we speak, has already visited a couple more ports. They are, after all, at work!

Thanks again! Ta ta for now.

(June 1st, 2016)

Well well well I have disembarked, with all my luggage and memories. I have become used to being on a ship, and being at a port, and having some identity there. This time I am not going back on board. I am, once again, a civilian. A tourist, in Europe for a few days, headed home.

On board, we had communications systems failures over the last few days, so the first things I must do in Genoa are still trip-related. Find hotel rooms, get trains and planes organized, that sort of thing. I am headed to the US East Coast to see Terry and Emma, but I am not flying out as soon as possible. Our timing is such that I can be a little lazy in returning.

I am not sure of my schedule or WiFi availability, so I cannot promise a blog update until I get back to Phoenix, sometime in the middle of June. I might do better than that, and I want to wrap it up before it goes stale.

I have been trying to put pieces of the blog into a more printable form. My mom says that she prefers to read things and look at things that way. She’s not so comfortable with devices. She’s likely not the only one. So if you look at “Blog Book” in the “Cooked” section of “Raw Photos”, you’ll see a growing collection of hopefully printable .pdfs whose file names force a kind of chapter-by-chapter sort. I’ll keep adding to them. Eventually I hope to make a printable book of them. Mostly it will be a picture book.

I have had a good time. It was longer than optimum, but I did get a good sense of the time it takes to travel over our world using the oceans. I also got a beginner’s sense of the freighter industry. I met many people, I saw a lot, I learned a lot. I won’t do it again, it was too long for that, but I feel fortunate to have done it.

In “The Innocents Abroad”, about 150 years ago, Mark Twain wrote: “Travel is fatal to prejudice.” We could all help the world a little bit by widening, rather than narrowing, our sense of community.

Thanks, readers, for hanging in there with me! For many of you, I will see you soon!