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Morning: Weather request answered: chill, gray, rain all day it says. Rain clothes today in Copenhagen—that jolly old girl by the sea—and the sea is where we’ll go today I think. Although it’s only 6am so who can tell if our art and history explorations out on the ‘Danish Riveria’ will be this appealing by 9am when we must train out into the countryside. The idea is that we’ll view the work of… Read More
The Day Before. Sounds like a murder mystery, yes? No. I’ve learned to treasure at least 24 hours of time before a Big Trip when all preparations are DONE. Of course there are always final musts—throw out the last of the milk and any veggies hiding in that obscure tray at the bottom of the frig, charge the phone, check for passport and cash card in your billfold—that stuff. The real reason… Read More
“Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime.” – Mark Twain “Join the army, travel the world, meet interesting people and kill them.” —anti-war slogan from Vietnam war era. Those quotes pretty much describe my state of mind today which might best be labeled as confused and melancholy—even though in just one week I’m off for… Read More
How could nice regular guys from Denmark and Togo relate their tales of Arctic adventure without a hint, at the very least, of braggadocio coloring the pictures? They couldn’t. So throw in quite a bit of booze, even more sex, lots of skinning and dismembering and eating of dried seal intestines and frozen blubber. And then there are grueling dog sled journeys; the constant danger of death, dismemberment, and being frozen solid…. Read More
I’ve explored Ultima Thule from top to bottom without even leaving my couch. Books books books. I sometimes think, when I read a lot before a trip, that the actual going there is almost anticlimactic. Last week I wrote about Gretel Ehrlich’s This Cold Heaven and her dreamy imagery and her love for this often brutal mostly-frozen place called Greenland. What was most appealing to me about This Cold Heaven and… Read More
From the preface of This Cold Heaven by Gretel Ehrlich: …I was on hands and knees on a lateral moraine caressing alpine fescue and sniffing dwarf harbells while icebergs, big as warehouses, drifted by. Glistening white, they were the photographic negatives of Greenland’s black mountain fringe. (p. xi) It took me awhile to read This Cold Heaven, mostly because it is too beautiful to read quickly. I sat here at… Read More
It’s four weeks and three days until granddaughter Teresa and I leave Albuquerque for Copenhagen and, three days later, Narsarsuaq, Greenland. There are many painfully mundane (paying) and some moderately-thrilling (trips to REI) tasks to complete—one of which is to record it all for posterity…and this blog. You know from the last post how this idea of going to Greenland came into being. I’m afraid I may not have been completely accurate;… Read More
PART 1: Planted in the Brain A landscape opened up before me. I felt as if I were standing on the top of a mountain, gazing out over a plain, covered by long, meandering rivers. On the horizon, more mountains rose up, between them there were valleys and one of the valleys was covered by an enormous white glacier. Everything gleamed and glittered. It was as if I had been transported to… Read More
Travel out among the glaciers and to the outlines of those original Viking farms, hiking among mountains, sheer walls of ice, not a Starbucks in sight. AND. Out onto to the steppes, ride a camel, spend a night in a ger, walkabout among the mountains and Mongolian ponies and a sheep or thousand. No Starbucks here either. AND. Norway. AND. Lapland. AND. Beijing. AND. South Korea. AND. A stopover in Latvia for… Read More