I carry a small point and shoot with me all the time and most of my pictures end up being taken with this camera — the Canon PowerShot S100 — rather than my larger, more complicated and expensive system camera. I guess it’s ironic. My little Canon cost less than a single lens in the larger system. It weighs almost nothing and takes up no more room than a cell phone.
We lived in Roxbury for more than a decade, only leaving when the construction of The Big Dig made living there untenable. I still think of it as home, along with the entire city of Boston. Between Roxbury, Beacon Hill, and Charles River Park, we lived in Boston neighborhoods for a very long time and I always enjoy going back again whenever we have an excuse. These were all taken a few weeks ago when we returned to the old neighborhood for a memorial event for an old friend who recently passed away. The neighborhood is looking better than it did when we lived there. It’s one of those neighborhoods that is improving. I would stop short of calling it gentrifying. I don’t think the folks who live there want it gentrified. They don’t consider themselves gentry and neither do we.
This is a bit of Roxbury. It was, once upon a time, a city in its own right, but years ago it was absorbed and became a neighborhood within greater Boston. It is almost entirely Black and when I lived there, I was often the only white face in the crowd. Despite that, it was by far the friendliest neighborhood in which I’ve ever lived. We had great neighbors, wonderful block parties, and a sense of community we have never had anywhere else. People in general don’t understand how wonderful these ethnic neighborhoods can be, how warm and supportive the community is when they consider you one of their own. I still miss it, though I love the country. Each place has its own charms, but Roxbury was a wonderful — and eye-opening — experience.
I do not shoot with my cell phone. I cannot afford the data package that it would make it practical to use mobile apps for anything other than emergencies and our cell phones are for emergency use. Life is not always a matter of preference. More often than not, you don’t get to decide how you will live. Life hands itself to you and it’s your job to figure out how to make it work.
He lives in a field on the farm, not far from where cattle graze. Once upon a time, he was the farmer’s best friend, a workhorse that wouldn’t quit. When finally, just couldn’t go any further, rather than junk him his owner put him out to pasture as is so commonly done here in the country. He’s near the road, so he can watch the world go by, see the birds and the cows lolling about in the shade near the creek. He’s an old pal, now retired, but he’s still smiling.
I could not go very far. To be exact, I could go as far as the snowblower had gone before and could take pictures only until my fingers froze. I had wanted to go back towards the woods, but the snow is just about up to my waist, so that’s a non starter, which is why all of the pictures I took today were shot from the bottom of our driveway.
My plan to explore was short-circuited by a wall of snow. It is a lot of snow.
We were fresh from the city when we bought the house. Neither of us noticed it had a driveway that could easily double as the bunny slope for skiers. I suppose we would have bought it anyhow, but it’s a lot of driveway, especially when it’s buried under 3 feet (more or less) of snow.
This was basically a good day. Really. Gar and I went to a real party and saw people we almost never see. We didn’t stay long because both of us have trouble with loud parties, but it was a lovely home, good company. Pleasant and full of happy noises.
We got home with only one missed turn off and managed to correct it, even though our GPS, “Richard,” seemed to feel we could make a u-turn on the Southeast Expressway, also known as Route 93 … an elevated limited access high-speed road with perhaps the heaviest traffic in the region. At rush hour, no less. So instead of our GPS, we were forced to rely on a blind luck to find a route that would let us reverse our direction and get back onto the Expressway in the opposite (correct) direction.
If we hadn’t been just outside of Quincy, it would have been easier … probably. Massachusetts was one of the earliest settled parts of the U.S. and our roads are a mess. If you look on a map, they look like a bowl of spaghetti.
We have wrong way concurrence of road, incredibly complicated intersections, signs that don’t make any sense … and no signs where you desperately need them. For you foreigners (anyone not from around here), the town is actually pronounced Quinzy, leaving me with the eternally unanswered question: Was our sixth president called John Quincy Adams, or John Quinzy Adams.
The roads in and around Quincy are totally illogical. To go south, you have to first go north, but not necessarily vice versa. The signs, although better than they used to be, can’t entirely clarify. Getting on and off of route 295 heading south on route 146 requires keeping right, then left, then right in rapid succession, and when coming back the other way, a high-speed dash across 5 lanes of rapidly moving traffic and the signage doesn’t begin to explain that you have to gun it and keep going, no matter how many cars and trucks are heading at you. If you are driving in a vehicle that doesn’t accelerate quickly, prayer is recommended.
And that is approximately where we missed a turn off. With our GPS shouting at us to turn around, then losing track of us completely. At one point, we were apparently in the middle of the bay, at least according to Richard. It’s wasn’t as bad as downtown Boston — few things are — but it’s bad.
We eventually managed to circle around, though we had to go a few miles.
We got home and discovered that Nan, our innocent, sweet lamb of a Norwich Terrier had chewed a very neat but sizable hole in the previously unopened 20 pound bag of dog food. It’s hard to tell how much she ate, but for a dog that is about 11 inches at the shoulder, she is astonishingly food-driven. Her need for food is hard explain unless you’ve seen it because she is such a little sweetheart … and willing to battle a mastiff to get to the food dish first.
After dealing with the dog food, I decided to take care of what I assumed would be a simple task: getting a new cell phone for my husband. His phone has gotten old. It’s just a couple of years old, but in cell phone years, that’s practically ancient. I can barely hear on it and I have normal hearing, so he probably can’t hear anything. It’s just old.
But AT&T says that Garry is entitled to an upgrade and they have the new version of his Blackberry Curve at the upgrade price of $29.99. So I logged myself in … it took three tries, even though it was unquestionably the correct password … and when I went to do the upgrade, I discovered they were going to charge me $36 dollars for “upgrade services” plus $18.69 sales tax. The phone is $29.99 … which would make the tax significantly more than 50% of the price of the phone. The “upgrade service fee” is more than the phone.
Both of us already have Blackberries. We are adding no new services. We are changing nothing. So the “services” consist of mailing us the phone, whereupon we insert the chip, the battery, charge it, configure it and all that jazz.
I have stuck with AT&T for years, not because they have the best signal — not even close — or the best prices, but because they’ve always had great service. I was seriously pissed off. Eventually, I talked to a supervisor who agreed that perhaps the $36.00 fee was a bit much, but the sales tax is based on the full retail list price of the phone … a price nobody ever pays. And oh, the systems at AT&T are down, so they couldn’t take care of it right now. By then, I’d been dumped out of my account and in trying to get back, was informed that I’d tried to get into the account too many times and was now locked out. Not that it made much of a difference anyhow since the system had stopped recognizing my password yesterday and only intermittently recognized the new one.
They said they’d call me tomorrow. I said I was going to be at the hospital all day tomorrow seeing the neurologist who I hope can do something about my back, or at least make some of the pain go away. I’d happily settle for less pain.
Of the 450 minutes we pay for (and they no longer offer that plan … you have to buy at least 500), last month we used, between the two of us, 17 minutes. Of my 200 MB data, I used 9 MB. Of his 200, Garry used 12. We don’t need more features. What we need are telephones with decent sound that can be used to make telephone calls. We aren’t going to play with apps. We just need telephones for emergencies. There doesn’t seem to be a plan for people like us.
I started to wonder if we really need Blackberries at all, but there are practically no phones you can get that aren’t smart phones that have even passable sound quality. We both have laptops and desktops on which we get email. I also have a netbook and Kindle … both of which get email. How many ways do we need to get email? We take everything with us everywhere we go out-of-town. If there was a decent telephone that isn’t a smart phone available, we could save $60 a month. But any phone with good sound quality is a smart phone and requires a data plan which we don’t need or want. Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Again.
Finally, I settled down, baked a frozen pizza and watched some television. I’m mentally preparing to find out if my spine is salvageable. I have a feeling that sleep is not going to come easily tonight.
I think I need to chill. Between dealing with my new HMO (that’s a whole other story) and AT&T, and the dreaded cable company … how did I ever find time to work a full-time job? I’m way too busy to work.
It’s lovely out today. The sun is shining. We are having one of the warm weeks we sometimes get in November. These end abruptly when the jet stream drops down from the arctic. Until then, it’s delightful, springlike with a few puffy white clouds in a bright blue sky. I can look out my window and see trees and the few leaves that still cling to them.
Despite Conservative insistence that less government is better, living without enough government is no blessing.
What it really means is that we don’t have quite enough schools or anything else. It’s difficult keeping taxes low so people won’t lose their homes while supporting schools, a few police and firefighters and some part-time clerks at town hall. It’s a bare-bones budget and no-frills government, with a very fine line between no frills and just plain inadequate.
Making ends meet means we have no public transportation. Our roads get sort of repaired. The bridges are always a bit in danger of washing away if the river floods. There’s no city water or sewers. Trash collection is private. Unless you live in the middle of town, there are no sidewalks or streetlights. We have no town planning because there’s only so much planning you can do with no money. Kind of like us, but on a larger scale.
Being on your own makes great rhetoric, but it loses it’s charm when you realize your community has no resources to deal with its own future. With all the complicated explanations I’ve read about why small American towns are not thriving, it isn’t complicated. Our towns are not doing well because we have poor government and no money. I don’t know if these two things are causally related, but they seem to go hand in hand.
Small towns don’t have lots of qualified people who can or will serve. Even with the best of intentions, there’s only so much you can do when you have nothing much to work with. Rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, it’s a thankless job. The romanticization of small towns in movies and television might have been true of small towns 60 years ago, but Andy Griffith would have a rough time today.
Meanwhile, whatever else we lack, we sure do have a lot of cars.
Lack of public transportation guarantees lots of cars. Everyone has a car and the roads get more crowded every day. Everyone over 17 drives. Most of us don’t worry about traffic because we don’t have too much yet. A traffic jam is a tractor and two cars at an intersection. But that’s changing. The parking lot at the grocery store used to be mostly empty; now it’s usually full. We have our own version of rush hour. It’s not an hour, barely half an hour … but a year ago we didn’t any rush hour at all.
Local road … also an interstate route, so it is in better repair than many similar roads that don’t cross a state line.
There are many more cars than there were even though the population is slightly lower. Lacking public transportation, you need wheels. If the populations starts to rise, what will we do with the cars? it doesn’t take much to produce gridlock. An accident, a slow driver, road work … anything can bring it all to a complete stop. No one has any idea what to do about it … and that’s just traffic.
When people say we should have less government, they don’t really understand what it means. When you live in a well-populated area, you get infrastructure and services. You don’t think about them: you expect them. If you live in a sleepy town that has no plans to wake up anytime soon, nothing comes with the territory.
Our town is managed, more or less, via Town Hall meetings. We have a town council made up of the friends, relatives and descendents of the families who have always run the town. They are slow to implement change, even when change is urgently needed, typical of all small towns here and everywhere.
What’s going to happen when we are hit by rapid population growth unaccompanied by additional revenue? When the economy comes back, towns like this become an endangered species, ripe for exploitation by anyone who waves money at us.
To say our officials are not forward-thinking is a massive understatement. By the time town councils in towns and villages acknowledge a crisis, it’s too late to do much about it. Things that suburban areas take for granted are unavailable. From road repair to trash disposal, from schools to sewers, to trained personnel … we don’t have it.
Maybe we can start by figuring out how to deal with the cars. As it stands, we have enough traffic so that almost anything can turn it into a rural version of gridlock. It doesn’t take much: a very slow driver, a minor accident, a road crew … and everything stops. We don’t have another route, so if one is blocked, you can’t get there from here.
Grabbing a piece of the metro pie is tempting. Job opportunities, more and better services — it sounds pretty good until you realize the cost. It will likely bankrupt the towns, make taxes skyrocket and ruin of a lot of beautiful places. What sounds like a boon — the rapid infusion of upwardly mobile young families with school age children — has devastating economic ramifications on a fragile local economy. Newcomers arrive with expectations of services comparable to those they have known in other places. They expect modern schools, roads, and shops. They assume amenities like trash collection, sewers, water from reservoirs. They don’t realize the attractively low taxes that drew them to the area can’t support the services they expect.
Small town life in the 21st century is a precarious balancing act, life on a fiscal tightrope. There are no big treasuries to raid, no heavy industry to offset costs. All you have to work with are small businesses, many of which are struggling, and property taxes that a lot of people are already finding hard to pay.
So far, the best solution the towns have come up with is to build condos, preferably senior housing. If you bring in lots of seniors, you don’t get lots of kids, You get taxes, but not a hugely increased demand for services. Condos don’t take up as much space as sub-divisions, but pay the same taxes as private homes. McMansions eat land and don’t pay their way. Unfortunately, most of our towns are run by people who have trouble saying no to a developer waving money. Even when they know it’s not a great idea, the need for an infusion of cash can make people ignore the obvious.
Which brings me back where I began. You can say all you want about how more government is bad, but we need government. More to the point, we need good government, smart government. We need people who have vision and can see past a wad of cash to long-term effects. We need planners, not pirates.
Good government protects us in myriad ways. Without the protection of government, small towns are easy prey. We do fine if things don’t change much, or change is incremental, gradual. I suspect the long years of the leisurely change are ending.
Everything is changing. Can America’s small towns survive without surrendering their identity? I guess I’m going to find out soon enough.
Most of us don’t think about traffic. We just deal with it as best we can. It’s part of modern life. Whether it’s trying to find a decent parking space or patiently sitting in endless bumper-to-bumper traffic on a holiday weekend, traffic is everywhere.
I don’t usually think about traffic because we don’t have much of it here. This is the country. A traffic jam is a tractor and two cars waiting at an intersection, or road repairs that slow everything down as we take turns using one open lane.
Main Street, downtown Uxbridge in front of City Hall.
Sometimes, a bridge washes out and we realize how hard it is to get from one town to another without the bridges. In a river valley, it’s impossible to go far without crossing over water, so the loss of a bridge can force you miles out of your way.
A walk downtown.
Until we moved here, though, traffic was on of the top two or three biggest issues in our lives. It controlled when we got up in the morning because we had to leave enough time to get to work, taking traffic into account. Road work in Boston could and did make it actually impossible to get from one side of the city to another. Gridlock before and during holidays could close the whole city. I once tried to pick Garry up from work. It was less than a mile away. Normally, he walked, but he had things to carry and so asked me to come get him.
I left the parking lot, drove a block, and had to stop. Nothing was moving. An hour later, I was in the same place. I finally made a u-turn and went home to the apartment. This was before cell phones, so I had to call the guard at the front desk at Channel 7 and ask him to go outside and tell Garry that I couldn’t get there. The next day it was in the papers and on TV: the entire city of Boston had been gridlocked. It was the Friday before Christmas; everyone had decided to go shopping at the same time, so no one went anywhere.
A year later, we moved from Government Center to Roxbury, about 4 miles outside the center of Boston. It was much less congested than the area around Charles River Park. There were trees, and empty lots.
You could park for free on the street, of course remaining ever mindful of alternate side of the street parking regulations. It was a much more convenient location for getting onto the Mass Pike without having to navigate through the permanent traffic jams downtown.
Then came the Big Dig.
The Central Artery-Tunnel Project, which everyone called the Big Dig, was a monstrous project involving rerouting and redesigning virtually every road in, out, around, and through the city of Boston. There were no areas unaffected by it either directly or indirectly, though it was worse some places than others. It turned the main artery (Route 93) — an exceptionally ugly stretch of permanently clogged elevated highway — into a permanently clogged, very long tunnel.
It didn’t solve the traffic problems, but it made the traffic invisible, leaving everyone to sit in their overheating cars trying to breathe carbon monoxide and hoping they will live to see the other side of the city. This was apparently sufficiently important to warrant a breathtaking price tag, not to mention massive inconvenience to absolutely everyone who worked, lived, or tried to visit the city.
Garth Brooks was scheduled to give a concert at the Boston Garden during the height of the Dig. He never made it. He couldn’t get there with all the detours, roadblocks, closed exits, and such. He wrote a letter that was published in newspapers and quoted on television to the effect that he’d come back to Boston if and when we finished building it.
It was like this for more than a decade. It also filled the air with dirt.
The project straightened out some of the worst intersections and made getting to and from the airport easier. It certainly made Boston look nicer. It was an artistic success, but it sure did cost a lot of money.
The Big Dig was the most expensive highway project in history. To absolutely no one’s surprise, it was plagued by cost overruns, scheduling disasters, water leakage, collapses of ceilings and other parts of roads and tunnels, impressive design flaws, blatantly poor workmanship, nepotism, corruption, payoffs, the use of substandard materials, criminal arrests for a some of the aforementioned offenses (but not nearly enough), and four deaths.
The project was scheduled for completion in 1998 and was supposed to cost $2.8 billion. I am certain that not one single person in Boston actually expected it to cost that or be finished on schedule and we were right. It took an additional nine years and was finally finished in December 2007 It cost more than $14.6 billion. The Boston Globe estimates that when all is said and done, including interest and fines, lawsuits and so on, the project will total more than $22 billion and won’t be paid off until sometime around 2038. Maybe not even then. I might add that things are still falling apart so not all the bills are in yet. I’m just glad I don’t live in the middle of it anymore.
The Big Dig drove us out of Boston.
One day, I had to go grocery shopping. The supermarket was a mile away. It took me two hours to get there and another hour and a half to get home.
“Garry,” I said that evening, “Let’s get the Hell out of here!” And we did.
We did not leave Boston. We fled. The traffic had taken control of our lives. We couldn’t go to a restaurant or a movie. We couldn’t shop, park, or get to or from work. People trying to visit us couldn’t find our condo because the exit to our neighborhood kept moving and was often closed, leaving motorists to find their way through the city using poorly or completely unmarked detours. Out-of-town visitors roamed helplessly through the streets of Dorchester looking in vain for a street sign or marker to give them a clue where to go. Although most of them eventually found their way to us, they never came back. We could hardly blame them.
Big Dig Bye Bye (Photo credit: Steve Garfield)
Sometimes we couldn’t find our way home either. It was unnerving.
As a commuter, I probably spent the equivalent of years of my life sitting in traffic. Late in my career, audiobooks turned commuting into reading and took some of the sting out of it, but still … when you added the time actually spent in the office (usually 9 or 10 hours) and then included commuting time (2 to 4 more hours), my life was consumed by driving and traffic.
There was no time remaining in which to have a life. That’s probably why, though we are retired and poor as dirt, it’s still better than those last years of commuting. It turns out that poverty trumps traffic. Who’d have guessed?
If this sounds petty, it isn’t really. The stress of traffic, not to mention the expense and physical problems that directly result from hours locked in a car, unable to stretch or change position, are incalculable. By the time we slouch exhausted and beaten to the finish line called retirement, we are wrecks .. and now, we are poor, too. It’s still better than all that driving.
Looking southbound on Main Street. Much better. And the air is clean, too.
Do I have a solution to this? Nope. I’m just saying. Sometimes we seriously underestimate the wear and tear caused by the perfectly ordinary things we do because we have no choice. It adds up and takes a serious toll on our minds and bodies.
Traffic (Photo credit: freefotouk)
Eventually, we wear out, not because we are lazy or defeatist. One day, something just snaps and we know that no amount of pushing is going to keep us going. We can’t do it anymore.
Traffic has a lot more to do with it than you think.
If reading were illegal, I’d spend my life in prison. As a kid, I literally read myself cross-eyed, but today, I have been redeemed by audiobooks. Praise the Lord and don’t make me give up my subscriptions to Audible.com.
Sometime during the 1990s, I discovered audiobooks.
I was a “wrong way” commuter, which meant my commute started in Boston and took me out to the suburbs. This was supposed to make the drive easier than going the other way.
Reality was a different. Traffic was heavy in every direction, whether you started in Boston or came in the from the suburbs. The east-west commute was nominally less awful than the north-south commutes, though coming from the north shore down to Boston was and is probably among the worst commutes anywhere.
When we lived in Boston up the 17th floor of Charles River Park, we could look out the window any time of the day or night and it was always bumper to bumper as far as the eye could see. It was like that every day of the week and any time of day.
Charles River Park. We lived on the top floor of the building on the right on the river.
Garry had a 5 minute walk to work. I drove. You’d think that at least once during the 20+ years Garry and I have been together, that I’d find one job that was near home. Funny how that never happened.
There’s no point in measuring a commute by distance because distance is irrelevant. It’s how long it takes that counts. It it takes you 2 hours to go six miles, but you can travel 15 miles in half an hour, obviously 15 miles is the shorter commute.
My commute was never short. Wherever my work took me, it was never anyplace convenient, except for those wonderful periods when I worked at home and had to go to the “office” only occasionally.
The 1990s were serious commuting years. Boston to Amesbury, Boston to Burlington, Boston to Waltham.
It got worse. By 2000, we had moved to Uxbridge and it is never easier to get from Uxbridge to anywhere, except one of the other Valley towns … and I didn’t work in any of them.
The house in late afternoon light. It’s a big breadbox of a house, but comfortable to live in.
As jobs got more and more scarce and I got older and less employable, I found myself commuting even longer distances. FirstProvidence, Rhode Island, which wasn’t so bad, but after that, I had to go to Groton, Connecticut a few times a week. That was 140 miles each way, a good deal of it on unlit, unmarked local roads. It was a killer commute and unsurprisingly, I was an early GPS adopter.
Even though I didn’t have to do it every day, Groton did me in. Hudson was almost as bad, and Amesbury was no piece of cake either. The distance from Uxbridge to Newton was not far as the crow flies, but since I was not a crow, it was a nightmare.
On any Friday afternoon, it took more than three hours to go twenty some odd miles. On Friday afternoons in the summer when everyone was taking off on for the weekend, I found myself battling not merely regular commuter traffic, but crazed vacationers, desperate to get out of Dodge.
The job market had become unstable, and it seemed every time I turned around, I was working in a different part of the Commonwealth or in another state entirely. If it weren’t for audiobooks, I’d probably have needed a rubber room.
First, I discovered Books On Tape. Originally intended as audiobooks for the blind, me and a million other commuters discovered them during the mid 1990s. They were a godsend. Instead of listening to the news, talk radio, or some inane jabbering DJ, I could drift off into whatever world of literature I could pop into my car’s cassette player.
I bought a lot of audio books and as cassettes began to disappear and everything was on CD, Books On Tape ceased renting books to the consumer market. Fortunately, audiobooks had become downright popular and were available at book stores like Barnes and Noble. Everybody was listening and most of us couldn’t imagine how we’d survived before audiobooks.
In 2002, along came Audible. At first, it was a bit of a problem, figuring out how to transport ones audible books into ones vehicle, but technology came up with MP3 players and widgets that let you plug your player, whatever it is, into your car’s sound system.
Good I didn’t have to get to the office.
Audible started off modestly, but grew and grew and having recently been acquired by Amazon (a company that, like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Verizon, is plotting to take over the world and succeeding pretty well), is getting bigger by the minute. For once, I don’t mind a bit. The company was well run before Amazon, and Amazon had the good sense to not mess with success. It is still easy to work with them, literally a pleasure doing business.
Five years ago, I became too sick to work anymore. Would that mean giving up audiobooks? Not on your life. When I was nearly dead, I listened to books and they distracted me from pain and fear, kept me company when I was alone and wondering if I’d live to see morning. Sometimes, they made me laugh in the midst of what can only be described as a place where humor is at a premium.
Today, I listen as I do everything except write. I can listen to books as I play mindless games on Facebook, edit photographs, pay bills or make a seven letter Scrabble play. I admit I cannot listen and write at the same time. That seems to be the point where multi-tasking ends. Actually, I can’t do anything while I write except write.
I get a lot of reading done while accomplishing the computerized tasks of life, not to mention turning hours of mindless messing around into valuable reading time. I am, in effect always reading.
Reading in Bed: My Guilty Pleasure
I read at night on my Kindle because reading in bed has always been one of my guilty pleasures. Oh how I love snuggling into bed with a book, electronic or paper, I don’t care. A book is a book by whatever format.
I remember reading in my bedroom under the covers using a flashlight, or worse, trying to read from a sliver of light from the hallway nightlight, or, if everything else failed, by the light of a bright moon.
“You’ll ruin your eyes” cried my mother who probably had snuck books into her bed and read by candlelight.
To this day, I don’t know why she didn’t just let me turn a light on. She had to know I was going to read anyhow. She was always reading too! In fact, if books were my addiction, she was my dealer.
Even in today politically-correct world, giving your kid too many books to read is not yet considered child abuse. Aren’t we glad!
So my love affair with books continues. My tastes change, favorite authors move up or down the list. I go through phases: all history, nothing but fantasy, a run of thrillers, a series of biographies.
Getting older has few advantages but there is one huge gift and that is time. I have time to read. I can get so involved in my book that I look up and realize that oops, the sun is coming up and I’ve lost another night’s sleep.
It doesn’t matter. Because I don’t have to commute anywhere anymore. I don’t have to leap out of bed with 10 minutes to shower, dress, make up, and get out.
I can stay up too late reading, or writing, or watching movies and for the rest of my life, no one can make me stop. And that, friends, is really, truly, my fondest dream come true.
With camera in hand, exploring European lands, cultures, food, and drink...mostly with a plan, but sometimes enjoying the adventure of just getting lost.
