We began this week by meeting our friends who are also visiting Italy from New York City, along with our bike tour leader, at the castle in Verona. Our ride was fabulous, a great way to see some of the city sights and meet other interesting travelers. Then, we had a delightful lunch with our friends, sitting at a table beside the Adige river, with short walks beforehand and afterwards. We wished them a fun cycling trip further on to Salzburg, Austria this coming week, then we returned to Lake Garda where our friends from Germany had spent part of their day going souvenir shopping in Malcesine – said mal-chez-ehn-ay.
Loren and I had the rest of the first half of our week to enjoy spending time with our friends from Germany. We went on more walks and drives around the lake together, saw spectacular evening storms with fulmine e tuono – lightning and thunder, and, enjoyed a couple of delicious dinners out. One big highlight was a boat ride straight across the lake to the town of Limone – said lee-mohn-ay, whose lights our eyes are drawn to from our deck when it turns dark at night. We then bade farewell to our friends before they drove back to their home, near Munich. Loren not only lost his swim buddy with them leaving, he was also struck by how fast the time has passed since he first met this friend, who he has now known for forty years.
When we were at Lake Como it seemed to have been most active with motor boats, some helicopters and a few sea planes. At Lake Garda it seems to be more active with water sports activities – kite surfing, wind surfing, and sailboating. It has been interesting to see clusters of kite surfers, clusters of wind surfers, and clusters of small white triangular sailed boats, which I have decided must be for lessons to learn these sports.
Loren and I then settled in to do more of our travel planning for the fall. That was Tuesday. On Wednesday we awoke to the news of a fourth major terrorist event in Turkey, after the ones we already knew of from January, March and May. We had completed all our planning for the nearly three weeks in Turkey that we were to begin in exactly one week. How do I describe our anguish and turmoil? We had one choice, between doing what we desired – that being the easy thing and keeping things as we had planned – versus making major last minute changes to our plans. After considering, reconsidering and seriously reconsidering, and with input from friends’ and family members’ emails, which varied from questioning, to encouraging, to warning, to voicing grave concern, by the end of day we had sadly decided to change our plans. So much for reading Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium on the plane to Istanbul in the near future. Ok, when life brings lemons, you learn how to make… what else? As in Limone, art!
The rest of the week has been spent on rearranging, canceling, and making new reservations. There is still much to do but we now know that on Wednesday we will fly to Marrakech for a 15 day tour of Morocco. The interesting thing is of the meager decorations in our AirBnB apartment, one on the wall was a souvenir from Morocco.
To finish this post on an upbeat notion, we had a most uncanny coincidence this week in that we met – by accident through electronic technologic challenge and connection – a delightful person who shares our names, Loren and Claire, and, who has in-laws with the surname Wright. If only all the world could be as friendly and helpful to each other as our namesake friend was to us, it would perhaps bring more of the Luce, Amore e Pace – Light, Love and Peace, that our world so desperately needs, and, which we found in our three months in Italy – well, actually on our entire journey thus far.
PLEASE NOTE: WE MAY NOT HAVE VIABLE INTERNET SERVICE IN MOROCCO OR OTHER COUNTRIES WHERE WE WILL BE TRAVELING OVER THE NEXT THREE MONTHS. So, please check back, I will share my weekly post here as often as I can.
Journey Toward Wholeness 