Lift Up Your Hearts!

Two weeks ago, after our exhausting off-road biking adventure, we paid a visit to Fort Christmas.  We went there several times when the girls were young, on our own and for Indian Princess outings.  But that was a long time ago.  The girls have grown a lot since then, and so has the fort.

They now have a large collection of old Florida houses, and we enjoyed a trip back in time as we wandered from one to another.  Bear in mind that Florida is a young state, even if it does have our country's oldest city.  Sometimes it seems more like the Wild West than the East Coast.

Here's a somewhat random assortment of pictures.  I love my digital camera.  (Thanks, Janet!)

The fort as we remembered it

Even the 50's count as historical here.  This house is only slightly smaller and actually has one more bedroom than the house where I spent the first nine years of my life.  I didn't think it small then!

Florida's equivalent of tapping maple trees for syrup.

Smokehouse from 1900.  Smoked meat hanging from the roof.  Did you ever wonder where smokescreens come from?

These pictures from the 1900 house are for my friend who works in a living history museum and has her own spinning wheel.

And this one from the 1915 house is for my other friend who is a master quilter—just in case she ever reads my blog....

From the 1870's—mosquito netting a must-have

From the 1927 house.  My mother grew up about 60 miles from here.  Even though her family kept a hotel, not a farm, I couldn't help thinking of her when we toured this one.

When you think cowboys and cattle drives, do you think Wild West?  Florida was the land of the open range until 1949.

If you look closely at this fur animal license from the 1930's, you'll learn a few things.  That the Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Commission, which runs the camp Heather attended when she was nine, has been around a long time.  That nutrition probably wasn't the best for these pioneers and their children.  That this 33-year-old example of these tough, hard-working farmers, ranchers, and cowboys was only 4' 10" tall and weighted 85 pounds!

This ranch house came from what is now the Tosohatchee State Reserve, where we were biking earlier in the day.

Hey, wait a minute!  I grew up with that sink!

The Bush administration said it will fight a ruling allowing meatpackers to test their animals for mad-cow disease. The Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1% of slaughtered cows for the disease. Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all of its cows. A federal judge ruled in March that such tests must be allowed. The Agriculture Department argues that widespread testing could lead to a false positive. Larger meat companies say if Creekstone tests its meat and advertises it as safe, they might be expected to perform the expensive test, too.

Huh?  Even a small-government advocate like me knows that one of the things government does best is enable higher standards than an unfettered free market can bear.

Suppose Company A and Company B both want to reduce their emmissions of pollutants.  If one takes on the added expense but the other doesn't, the second receives a decided market advantage over the first.  Even if they can agree to both reduce their emissions (without getting accused of illegal collusion), they are at risk from Company C which is not party to the agreement.

Enter governmental regulation:  If all companies in the industry are required to take on the expense, costs will rise, but more or less evenly.  (This is a very simplified analysis that doesn't take into account the problems of small businesses and other complicting factors, but you get the idea.)

So in this situaion I would expect to see the Department of Agriculture requiring more extensive testing to assure the safety of our food supply.  Instead, they are fighting a company that is voluntarily doing more for its customers than the USDA requires.  And why?

Because other meat companies might feel pressure to do more testing themselves?  This is a good thing!

Because widespread testing could lead to false positive results?  Well, yes, and I acknowledge that false positives can be a problem.  In any area.  By this logic we should abandon all mass screening from infant hearing checks to AIDS testing.  Somehow I don't think that's going to happen.

Remember the story of the guy who got in trouble for (correctly) using the word "niggardly"?

Porter's boss once called him on the carpet for "using words I don't understand."

Now Missouri legislators are up in arms because their vocabularies failed them.  They passed a bill legalizing lay midwifery because they didn't realize what "tocology" means.

I suppose I ought to have some sympathy for them.  The legislation was attached to a popular health insurance bill, which was no doubt long and complicated, like most legal documents these days.  I fully admit that software companies could slip the most outrageous provisions into the EULA's I regularly "sign" after skimming, rather than closely analyzing, them.  On the other hand, knowing what legislation they are passing is their job, it's why they were elected, so if they don't personally know exactly what's in a bill, they had better have hired some trustworthy staff members to know and to keep them informed.

I happen to approve of the pro-midwifery legislation.  But if I didn't, and if these were my senators, I would not be directing my anger at Senator Loudon, who introduced the legislation and took advantage of his colleagues' ignorance, but at the ones who obviously aren't doing their jobs.

The most fun part of the story, however, is behind the scenes.  In yet another example of how the media routinely mess up the details even when they get the general story correct, use of the word "tocology" is credited to a homeschooled teen with a "college test prep guide."  Almost right, but the source of her knowledge of the word was good old A.Word.A.Day, to which my father, a great lover of words, instroduced many of us.  Here's what the girl herself has to say (from an A.W.A.D mailing):

My name is Sarah Greek, and I'm a homeschooled student in Mountain Grove,
Missouri, who just graduated from high school. I'm a subscriber of AWAD
and just read your latest email and its reference to 'tocological trickery'
with interest.  [see reference]

"If only they were reading AWAD"? We were. That's how this happened!

I live in Missouri, and have been working with Senator Loudon and
others on midwifery legislation all year. You might be interested to
know that I discovered the word 'tocological' as a result of your
daily emails. When we were working on midwifery legislation several
weeks ago, I remembered the word and informed Senator Loudon. We
inserted it into our amendment, resulting in the events that the news
article which you referenced narrates.

The whole situation, especially the word tocology, has been all over the
Missouri news this week. I spent the week in Jefferson City, and can
personally attest to the fact that the word tocology has been in the
mouths of nearly every politician all week. It's become the latest inside
joke in the Missouri Legislature. I've been called 'a tocological pain'.  :) 

Thanks to AWAD, midwifery is well on its way to becoming legal in
Missouri, and the whole state has added a new word to its vocabulary!

The purpose of Memorial Day is to honor those who have given their lives in our country's wars.  The advantage of a blog is that I can do that with a link, so this year I'm doing something different, and give the day a genealogical bent.

According to no less an authority than Wikipedia,

The southeastern United States celebrates Decoration Day as a day to decorate the graves of all family members, and it is not reserved for those who served in the military. The region observes Decoration Day the Sunday before Memorial Day.

Therefore I will metaphorically decorate the graves of all our family members who have gone before,

From my most ancient documented ancestor (so far)

Pepin d'Heristal (abt 635 - 16 Dec 714)
(You can follow the line back further from the link, but despite what I said above, I'm waiting to consult another authority than Wikipedia.)

To our beloved

Isaac Christopher Daley (21 Nov 2002 - 23 Nov 2002)

They say this hurricane season will be a busy one.  But for now we are enjoying the most wonderful May in my memory.  For weeks now the air conditioner has hardly ever turned on.  We are able to keep the windows open for most of the day, if we're careful to close them when the sun is shining directly in.  Those of you who were brought up in Florida know how unusual that is for any month after February!  The humidity is relatively low, as are the temperatures (today's high was only in the low 80's!), and best of all we have been enjoying delightful breezes!  Breezes are unusual here.  Mostly the air is so calm that clothes on a line stiffen into boards rather than attaining the gentle wind-graced softness we remember from our time up north.  It's as if Florida stores up all its wind, only to release it in big hurricane bursts.

Among the more bizarre stories of the day, here's a study that claims to be able to predict your child's future SAT performance based on the relative lengths of his fingers.  Those whose ring fingers are longer compared with their index fingers are statistically likely to do better on the math portion, and those with the reverse situation to do better on the verbal.  This supposedly reflects prenatal testosterone/estrogen exposure.

It's a lot harder to measure finger length than I thought.  I finally settled on measuring from the knuckle, and it seems my ring finger is a bit longer than my index.  It's true, I did very well on the math portion of the SAT.  But I did even better on the verbal, so I must have measured wrong.  :)

The researchers plan to expand their studies into "other cognitive and behavioral issues, such as technophobia, career paths and possibly dyslexia."

My hearing is very good, probably better than that of many my age because I didn't ruin it in my teens with headphones and loud music.  But I still find that I can understand what people say better if I can see their faces.  Now I know why.

A Canadian study indicates that there is a signficant visual component of language understanding even amongst hearing people.  The four-month-old babies in the study were able to distinguish when adults in a silent video were speaking English and when they were speaking French.

Were it not for the probability of disturbing other library patrons, Li'l Writer Guy would be dancing a happy little jig.  Instead, he allows himself a pleased smile and a contented sigh before getting back to work.

One article in that issue detailed the search for a new logo for the University of Rochester.  I participated in a survey in which I expressed my opinon of various candidates, but I think the whole idea is silly.

Another article promoted the university's commitment to increasing the diversity of its faculty and of its medical center personnel, in order to better reflect the student and patient populations.

The March-April issue, with its articles on the great effort being put forth to improve both the University’s logo and its diversity, disturbs me a little. It makes me worry that the administration is concentrating on superficialities rather than foundations; on how things look, rather than how they are. There’s a possibility—though by no means a certainty—that all other things being equal, I’d feel more comfortable if my professor or my doctor were of my sex and ethnic background. But all other things are never equal. I want my teachers to be excellent in their fields, fair in their judgment, and able to lead their students to a knowledge of and enthusiasm for the subject. As for my health care professionals, of primary importance is that they be highly skilled, followed by compassionate, open-minded, and respectful. That any of them look like me is way down on the list, if anywhere. Let’s go for excellence. If the University is known as a place of highest quality, it won’t matter what its faculty looks like—or its logo.

Porter put the bikes on the back of the car again this morning, and we headed off to the Tosohatchee State Reserve near Christmas.  That's Christmas, Florida—we're still much nearer Memorial Day than Christmas.

We knew this would be a different kind of ride.  We knew it would be on unpaved trails through a wilderness area, and we thought we were prepared.  We had sunscreen and bug repellent, emergency bike kit (tube, CO₂ cartridge for inflating same, patches, wrench, and those little thingies for helping you put the tire back on the rim), water to drink, and cell phones.  Knowing we'd be in a game preserve, we also had a monocular and a camera.  We had a change of clothes and a picnic lunch waiting in the car for our return.

"Unpaved trails."  I was expecting something like the crushed-shell-and-sand trail at our local park.  Silly me.

Everything went pretty much according to expectations at first.  They do have an interesting honor system for the park entrance fee:  You put your money in an envelope, slip it through a slot, and don't forget to sign in so we know where to look if you get lost.  We drove a little along a very washboard-y road, and parked the car.  (Florida sand roads develop a series of "washboard" ridges that can shake loose anything not firmly attached:  exhaust pipes, dental fillings, whatever.)

It was after we parked that things began to go not quite as planned.  The trail was wide and inviting, but certainly not crushed-shell-and-sand.  This was more like riding over a not-too-well-maintained lawn.

Make that not maintained at all.  Both of us have all-purpose (cheap) bikes, so they were built to take the abuse.  My body may have originally been built to take it, too—but it hasn't been all that well maintained recently itself.  Although the trail was flat, it required the work of a signficant uphill grade, with no hope of a corresponding downhill.  The really fun parts were where we had to put on a good burst of speed to build up enough momentum to get us through the soggy, wet parts.  You don't want to come to a dead stop in the middle of a boggy place.

Little did I know that this was the good part of the trail.

This trail map gives you a rough idea of our route.  I say "rough" for two reasons:  (1) the map itself is not completely accurate, and (2) because of reason 1 I'm not exactly sure where we were some of the time.  Location A is where we parked. (Just a reminder—the pictures are preview links; click on them for the full view.)

The trails are not well marked.  That is an understatement.  As you can see, we veered off the trail and found ourselves on the other side of the park boundary. Too bad we couldn't stay there, because the going was significantly easier on that side.  But we knew we had to get back into the park, because we could now see the trail, just on the other side of the...barbed wire fence.  Porter wasn't going to let a little thing like that stop him.  He climbed over the fence, then took the bikes as I passed them to him.  I was not at all sure about climbing the fence, so he held two of the wires apart while I squeezed through.

There!  We were back where we should have been.  But doing what's right is not always the easier path....

The grassy trail had deteriorated into a humpy, clumpy much-torn-up (by deer, possibly, judging from the hoofprints) ordeal.  At some point, Porter intellgently and kindly suggested we swap bikes.  His is enough easier to ride to make it worth putting up with the fact that I can barely sit on the seat and reach the pedals.  I was having to ride standing up much of the time, anyway.  When I wasn't walking.  Yes, sometimes I gave up and got off the bike.  Walking allowed me to catch my breath and make progress at the same time.

In choir we've been rehearsing a song that includes the words, "I can do all things in Christ who strengthens me."  It's a lively, repetitive song that's a lot of fun to sing (think gospel meets barbershop quartet), which means it's the kind that gets stuck in your head and won't go away.  This one asserted itself about 4 a.m. and didn't stop until we were on our way home.  At first it drove me nuts, but soon it became a prayer....

We began to doubt again:  Were we on the right trail?  Or was this just a firebreak along the boundary line?  Surely the real trail couldn't be this bad.  I wish I had pictures to show you, but I was incapable at that point of thinking about my camera, and anyway no picture could do it justice.  No doubt for a mountain biker this would have been a walk in the park.  No, wait.  For me it was a walk.  A mountain biker would have ridden straight through.  Anyway, we later concluded we were probably on the right trail, because we saw several others that were equally bad.

After the longest four and a half miles (give or take a bit) of my life, during which we thought we were mostly on the right trail but still had our doubts, Porter found a path that connected with a road.  (Approximately location B on the map.)  I was totally exhausted but this brought me back to life.  Here was crushed-shell-and-sand!  Here I could ride!  Suddenly I felt great!  Porter asked if I'd rather take the road back to where we had parked, instead of continuing on our planned route, but the road had inspired me and I was ready to go on, as long as we stuck to the road.  The road and the trail were one for most of the remaining trip, anyway.  We switched back to our own bikes and were on our way again.

Deceptive road!  After about two minutes of delightful riding—still quite a bit harder than paved road, but worlds better than the trail—it became all sand again. The weather has been very dry, and the road is not well travelled.  This translates to loose sand.  My cousin was a lifeguard at Daytona Beach, and he used to train for his job by running on the beach—because running in loose sand is very hard work.  So is biking in loose sand.  Not only does it require a lot of power, but if you don't keep your front wheel completely straight, you immediately go into a screeching-halt skid.

I still didn't want to turn back.  We again traded bicycles.  Sometimes the road was better, especially in the middle where a few springs of grass had grown up.  Sometimes it was awful.  Sometimes I rode—ganbarimasu!—and sometimes I walked.  Porter managed to keep riding, stopping periodically to allow me to catch up.  Here is the resting point where I finally remembered that I had a camera.  (Location D on the map.)

One of the great things about riding in a game preserve is all the wildlife you can see.  And we did, if you count grasshoppers and butterflies.  Riding took so much concentration it was not possible to look around, so all I saw was what happened to be between me and the road.  Despite the park rules that say that all wildlife is protected, Porter did make up his own real-life video game by trying to run over the grasshoppers.  There were so many he was often successful.  When I was growing up I thought grasshoppers were cute.  Now that I've seen the devastation wrought by our giant Florida varieties, I feel differently.  I did manage to see a vulture, and Porter flushed a wild turkey, but other than that all our wildlife was insectival.

It was a long haul, but we finally made it to Long Bluff road (see map).  There the way really did get easier, as the road was more travelled.  There were still bad spots, but they were fewer, and every once in a while we got up to the dizzying speed of eight miles per hour!  Though it might have been exhaustion that made me dizzy.  :)  At some point Porter also took my backpack.  Neither his pack nor mine were at all heavy, but at that point I was taking all the help I could get.  This road would have been much less of a challenge had I not been so worn out by the first part of the trail.

I'm accustomed to having one bottle of water be sufficient or more so when we go riding.  This time we were at the halfway point on the trail when I realized I was much more than halfway through my water.  Comes from breathing so much with my mouth open (i.e. panting), I guess.  Most of the trails we've travelled have water sources along the way, but not, of course, this one.  So we both decided to be a little more conservative in our drinking.  At some point it was going well enough that we switched bikes once more.  I missed my more padded seat, and the extra seat-to-pedal distance on Porter's bike, combined with the bouncy road, was more than a bit uncomfortable for the, um, more delicate parts of my body.

Finally, we reached the "Praise the Lord!" point:  Power Line Road.  (Location C on the map.)  I could see that it was a much better path, and so did not mind taking a short detour (about six tenths of a mile round trip) to see the St. John's River.  This is where we met up with the first people (fishermen) we'd seen since the beginning, except for one truck that had passed us on the road.  We saw a few more cars before getting back to ours, but no one else on bike or foot.

Muddy, battered, but unbowed

Power Line Road stretched long between us and our car, but we were able to make a steady 7-8 mph most of the time, and the riding was easy enough we could look around and actually see some wildlife.  Birds, actually.  White herons and Great Blues and lots of smaller birds.  We heard a couple of alligator-shaped splashes nearby, but didn't see what made them and didn't feel like investigating.  Alligators can run faster than I could pedal at that point.

Scofflaws that we are, we enjoyed breaking the speed limit by bicycle, crossing two wooden bridges a good two or three miles per hour over the posted 5 mph limit.  We were significantly under the 30 ton weight limit, however.

There was one more bad stretch in the final mile, and I had to walk a bit more, having totally lost my momentum having to pull off the road to let a car pass.  But I finished the trip by bike, joyfully greeting Porter who had already opened the car and pulled out a cold drink.  We ate some grape tomatoes, but otherwise were in no mood for our picnic lunch—we just drank and drank.

It actually was a great trip.  A wonderful feeling of accomplishment.  We're both very glad we did it—though neither of us feels any need to do it again.

On the way home we had another great adventure, but that will have to wait for another post.

I'm not all that fond of palmetto bugs outside the house, though I acknowledge that they, like vultures, have an important part to play in God's creation.  But I really don't care for them inside the house, so thus began the amusiing scenario.  I don't recall laughing at the time, but it would have been funny to an onlooker with a camera, who I'm very glad was only hypothetical.

I skittered frantically after the bug, whacking at him with my sneaker.  (It's a good thing we keep our shoes near the front door.)  Alas, I whacked at him, but not on him, or at least not with sufficient strength to penetrate his chitinous exoskeleton.  Through the hall he ran, then ducked into our bedroom.

No fair!  This pushed into the red zone my desire to catch him, as anyone knows who has ever been awakened in the middle of the night by a large insect investigating his belly button.  He ran under a suitcase.  I moved it; he wasn't there.  Ah ha!  He thinks he's found safety in the shadow of the treadmill support.  He's partly right, as there is no way for me to whack at him.  I carefully position the shoe over him and press down, then slowly, gingerly lift it up.  Zoom!  He's out again, unharmed.  There are disadvantages to soft, high-pile carpet, I'm learning.

Now I'm mad.  He's in the open now, and I may run more slowly for my size, but my legs are a lot longer than his.  Whack!  This time I know better than to assume he's dead.  I push down on the shoe really hard, though still with care; one wants to kill the beastie, not squeeze cockroach guts into the above-mentioned soft, high-pile carpet.

Once again, I tentatively raise a corner of the sneaker.  There's an antenna, and it's not moving....  Taking no chances, I grab a tissue from my pocket and use it to entomb the bug, then finish the job.  Bug thoroughly squished, and I mean thoroughly, else I would not have felt comfortable consigning him, paper tomb and all, to the trash bin.

Still, for sheer amusement value, this doesn't come close to an occasion several years ago, when similar circumstances led me to chase one of this guy's cousins under our kitchen cabinets.  I was lying on the floor, seeking him out with the help of a flashlight, when he suddenly re-emerged, zipping past my face, through the neck of my shirt, and into my bra.  He died for his presumption, but I'll leave imagining the scenario as an exercise for the reader.

This one had apparently managed to crawl from the road to the nearby bicycle trail, but not before the vultures got wind of the event.  Porter was biking a little ahead of me, and I saw them beginning to circle as he approached.  A few had descended upon the poor beast by the time he rode by.  His presence more annoyed than scared them.  When I reached the scene there were at least a dozen blanketing the pavement, and I chose to veer off the trail and leave them to their vicitim.

Vultures are ugly birds, and their behavior was uglier:  fighting, shoving, greedily tearing the little armadillo apart.  By the time we came to that part of the train on our return trip, there was nothing left but a dark spot on the pavement.

And that's the point.  Carrion-eaters may be ugly, dirty things, but they are also God's creatures, and their work is important.  They are the garbage collectors of the natural world, and they, too, deserve the more lofty title of "sanitation engineers."  Maybe even more so, because they don't just cart the bodies off to the landfill; they are the ultimate recyclers.

...but even I am amazed.  Heather introduced me to Book Collector, and I've been thrilled.  I've long wanted to make an inventory of our books, and had made a few half-hearted beginnings, but the enormity of the project always dragged me down.

There's one problem:  a large proportion of our books are too old to have UPC codes.  But that's okay, I can enter the ISBN by hand, and then initiate the same search process.

We also have a large quantity of books too old to have ISBN's.  For those the program will search on title and author. 

There's still some of clean up that needs to be done with many of the book entries, and I've had to make liberal use of our scanner, because few of the older books have cover images available online.  However, the process is so much faster than entering all the data by hand.  A little concentrated effort over the past few days has enabled me to finish entering all the books—not that we own, but that are in one room of our house.  The family room.  It probably has the second-largest collection of books, although I won't be sure till I'm done.

But here's the shocker:  I catalogued 263 books in the family room alone!  I knew we had a lot of books, but that astonished me.  I wish I could say I've read them all!  I'm working on it....

This post is going to be about our Sunday bike ride, but I have to admit that coffee hour is also a favorite after-church activity, especially on the Sundays when our friend K. is in charge of the food, for she always brings (among other goodies) her famous sausage rolls and infamous monkey bread.  Everyone knows to get over to the parish hall pronto after the service when it's K.'s Sunday, because those items disappear fast.  Not exactly a healthy breakfast, but a wonderful Sunday treat.

We drove to the western end of the West Orange Trail, and biked the South Lake Trail and the Lake Minneola Scenic Trail, along with an unnamed (as far as we could tell) side trail.  I just love the Rails-to-Trails program.  Not all parts of these trails are built on old rail beds, but most are, and it's clear we would not have this wonderful resource if they had been sold off.  One of our favorite trails ends abruptly because we have have Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and other stores sitting where the trains used to run.  It's not impossible to make room for the trail to continue around them, but it's more difficult and expensive.  Anyway, I'm grateful to the foresighted people who made these bike trails possible.

As great as I felt this morning, my body soon informed me that it had not fully recovered from yesterday's 14-mile journey.  I was fine on the level, but today's trails had a lot of hills—for Florida, anyway—and that's where my legs complained.  I normally ride without making use of my gears, but this trip taught me the value of downshifting.  :)

What goes up must come down, and I set a new speed record for this bike (or at least for this speedometer):  27.4 mph.  Funny how that's barely creeping in a car, but felt gloriously, even dangerously fast this way.

I've given up my search for an organic farmers' market; around here I should be happy with a farmers' market of any kind. So today we decided to check out the Winter Park Farmers' Market.

Thanks to Porter's foresight, we had our bikes on the back of the car, so we drove to the nearby Cady Way Trail. First we followed it south, to Route 50 and the Fashion Square Mall in Orlando, then turned around and went northeast, experiencing the joy of crossing SR436 on the new trail bridge, which had intrigued me every time I took that route home from the airport. We followed the trail into Seminole County, where it joins the Cross Seminole Trail.

At this point I was very excited, because the Cross Seminole Trail connects with our own Seminole Wekiva Trail, just on the other side of the bridge over I-4! We began right away to make plans to get on the Cross Seminole Trail where it passes one of our churches, and ride south to where we ended today.

Then I came home and looked at the map. Turns out the Cross Seminole Trail has a couple of significant portions that aren't finished, and even when it's done it won't be a simple trip to the Cady Way Trail, because the trail leads through Lake Mary, Winter Springs, and Oviedo before turning back west and south. It will be a great ride when it's all finished—but not a short one.

Or hospitals in general, if you can help it.  I realize they perform a vital service, and I really am thankful for doctors and hospitals.  But sometimes I think they've completely lost touch with reality.

Check out this article about an Ontario woman who gave birth.  In her First Nation (Native American) culture, burying the placenta is an important ritual.  But the hospital wouldn't let her take her placenta home.  In the end, she finally received it, but only after it had been sterilized and passed through the hands of a funeral home!

Biking after church could get to be a habit.  A good one.  Last Sunday we returned to the West Orange Trail, this time heading east.  (You may recall that the Sunday before we had gone westward.)  We made a late start, having become involved in a good conversation at church.  But it didn't matter—we'd already decided that a little sunscreen would be in order.

We biked nearly 20 miles, round trip, saving the remainder of that leg of the trail for another time.  In general this direction was not as pleasant as the previous week's trip—it took a while to get out of the industrial area and into the shade.  But all trails are interesting if they're new to you, so it was a great ride.  Along the way we discovered something else new:  the Clarcona Horseman's Park, and we stopped long enough to watch some young girls and their horses being judged in a show.  What was especially interesting to me was the names of the various gaits.  The riders were asked to walk, jog, and lope their horses.  Back when I was a horse-crazy young girl, I knew of four gaits;  walk, trot, canter, and gallop.  When did they change?

We have been blessed with a surprising number of very bright friends, their talents ranging from math to music, from business to origami, from computing to law.  It was with the last that we had a disturbing conversation recently.  The conversation itself was delightful; what we learned from it was not.

To begin, the background.  Most of my readers are familiar with the following story, which I told several years ago in our family newsletter.  But for the benefit of the one or two who meander over here from random places, I'll reproduce it here, sufficiently altered to protect the innocent and the guilty alike.

At the time these events occurred, our friend Curt was a junior at Swansea High School.  He was a top-notch student (he would later be valedictorian), a phenomenal musician, and as clean-cut as a teenage boy gets:  no body piercings nor tattoos, short hair—but not too short—typically wearing neat, khaki shorts and a white polo shirt.  His family was comfortably upper-middle-class.  Both parents were professionals; his father employed full-time, his mother part-time.

Curt was taking a course in biotechnology at his school; as part of the class he often left school early to do research for the Scopes Cancer Institute, sometimes at home, sometimes at the Institute itself.

One day, Curt was riding his bicycle home as usual, and had made it into his own neighborhood, when suddenly he was stopped by a police car.  The policemen asked him what he was doing out of school, and, when he explained, they responded, “Do you expect us to believe that?”  He told them that if they would call Dr. Hedges, his teacher, he would confirm the story.  Curt never heard the phone call directly, as it was made from headquarters; what apparently happened was that they did not speak with his teacher, but called the school attendance office, which only confirmed that Curt was a student at the school who should have been in attendence that day.  The word came back from headquarters to the policemen:  he’s supposed to be in school.

Curt was frisked, and his backpack searched.  He was allowed to ride his bike home, followed by the policemen.  One of them held onto the the front door of his house (“so you can’t sneak out the back”) while he put his bike in the hallway—he wasn’t allowed to take it to the garage.  Then he was put in the police car and taken to the Swansea County Juvenile Assessment Center (JAC).  There, he was interrogated.  (“Do you have any tattoos?” was one of the pointless, insulting questions.)  Curt is brilliant, but not quick of speech, and his slow responses apparently infuriated the officers.  When Curt said, at one point, “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you,”  the officer yelled, “You’d BETTER hear me!”

Finally, Curt’s mother was contacted.  (The message she received at her workplace was, “Did you get the strange phone call from the police about your son?”  It took ten years off her life, she said.)  She called the school and spoke to Dr. Hedges, who then called the JAC.  Curt's parents immediately left work.  At the JAC they found Curt sitting between two very scruffy-looking boys, with a police officer, arms crossed, glaring at them.  By this time, Dr. Hedges had succeeded in convincing the police of the truth, so he was able to go home.  All's well that ends well?

Not quite.  Curt was a shy child, and this incident shattered both his trust in general and his respect for the police.  One absolutely innocent child abused and terrified, his parents pulled out of work, scared to death—and needless to say, Curt’s cancer research did not make any progress that day.  For what purpose?  According to the county sheriff, the purpose was to prevent crime.  Teenaged boys who are not in school are likely to be commiting crimes, so we stop them before they have a chance to do so.

Does anyone else find that as chilling as I do?  And what if Curt had had long hair, or an earring, or parents who couldn’t be reached, or didn’t care, or were too poor to make a fuss—and was still just as innocent.  Would he have fared still worse?

So that's the story.  Nothing in the intervening years has lessened my belief that the police—and the sheriff—were wrong, wrong, wrong in their attitudes and actions.  Curt was not threatening, he was not running away, he was doing nothing wrong whatsoever, not even anything suspicious.  But here's what I learned in the conversation with our legal friend.  Curt did absolutely nothing wrong—but neither did the police.  All the police need to arrest someone is probable cause, a reasonable belief that a crime has been committed.  There are truancy laws in the state of Florida, and—despite private schools on different schedules, and the legality of homeschooling—the fact that public school students are expected to be inside a school building during certain hours provides probable cause for believing that a teenager riding his bike toward home during those hours is truant, and is therefore committing a crime.  Especially if the school tells the police what they expect to hear instead of the whole story.  The fact that the crimes the sheriff was hoping to prevent were more serious than truancy, and that there was absolutely no probable cause to suspect Curt of any of them, does not change the legality of the situation.

It probably falls into the same category as one of the more absurd motor vehicle laws that were on the books in Pennsylvania when I was studying to get my driver's license:  the speed limit through all intersections was 15 miles per hour.  No one expected it to be enforced, but it was there, and the police could use it as an excuse for stopping someone if they wanted to check the car or driver for some other reason.

I still believe the police were morally wrong in their actions—though I admit my views are biased by my belief that truancy laws themselves are wrong—and especially in the way they treated Curt.  But when a hot-shot attorney who knows criminal law and correct police procedure inside and out tells you that such actions are legal, and not only in Florida, it's smarter to listen and act than to argue.  Even in these days when homeschooling is widespread and well accepted, if my homeschooled child were in a position to be alone in public outside of public school hours, I'd be sure to equip him with a letter, on our school letterhead (thanks be to computers and printers!) explaining that he is not truant.  Not that a policeman who would respond to a reasonable explanation with "Do you expect us to believe that?" would necessarily believe a letter (they know about computers and printers, too), but it might help.  And in fact such a letter did help Janet at one point.  She wasn't in danger of being hauled off to jail, but being forced to miss this particular math class would have been unpleasant enough….

(Memo to self:  When discussing a subject dear to your heart, test your arguments on Janet's unrelenting logic before subjecting them to one of the most brilliant legal minds in the state of Florida.  Better yet, don't argue at all until you can do it dispassionately.)

Having written recently about my love of student recitals, I have to mention that we went to a Florida Symphony Youth Orchestra concert yesterday.  In my limited, and admittedly biased opinion, they are far and away the best student orchestra in the area.  Not perfect:  Depending on whose philosophy happens to be strongest at the time, the emphasis is sometimes more on education than on making music. As most of you know, I strongly believe that real learning more often takes place in an atmosphere of "let's do something wonderful and important together" than in a "Me Teacher, You Student" situation.

But we went yesterday, because it was the last concert of the season, and we hadn't been to one yet this year.  More than that, we went because the concert included three commissioned pieces, one of which (Mountain Air and Dance) was written by our friend John Dupuis.  Unfortunately, John's composition was for the Prelude Orchestra (third from the top of the four orchestras, one above the strings-only group of beginnners), which for various complicated reasons had not had enough time to practice it.  It was a bit of a stretch for them.  Still, there was a gorgeous melody in the middle, and in the rest I could detect an interesting piece that reminded me of why I fell in love with John's Atlantis many years ago.  (Atlantis, which was written with a particular group of FSYO musicians in mind, was recorded by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and used by Universal Studios for the grand opening of their Islands of Adventure theme park.)

The Prelude Orchestra was interesting to hear.  (They did much better with their other pieces).  My experience with student orchestras has been that the winds are, as a section, better than the strings.  For one thing, the competition is more fierce (fewer positions); for another, good orchestral music tends to have very hard string parts.  But this time the situation was reversed, probably because the strings had a few really good players, and in the winds there's no place for a less confident player to hide.  Playing tentatively is a major mistake for an oboe or a trumpet, and these kids haven't yet learned to "sin boldly."  There was a lovely oboe solo in Edelweiss, however.  (Hmm, I did manage to work a flower into this post after all.)

The Philharmonia Orchestra's commissioned piece (Stephen Foster Song-Suite) was by Joe Kreines.  He may be world famous, but "Mr. Kreines" will always be remembered in our family as the person who came in occasionally to enliven band practice, and who could get more out of an ensemble that any other conductor.  He still can, as today's concert proved.

We don't know the composer of the Symphonic Orchestra's new work (Sojourn), Robert J. Brownlow, but I suppose two out of three is pretty good!  His work matched the ability of the orchestra best of all, I think.  The Symphonic Orchestra itself has been better.  Don't get me wrong—it was still very good, just not up to the standards of a few years ago, when it was absolutely stunning.

Not that I'm prejudiced in this matter or anything—but not one of the orchestras had a decent A to tune to.  I'm a bit particular when in comes to oboes.  Their solos were fine; it was just the A's.  A 440, 460, 415...whatever!

Being involved with student musical groups for so many years, it was impossible for us not to notice the frequent coorespondence between musical and general academic ability, today's Frazz comic—in which Caulfield asserts that we need arts education so the bottom half of the math class can do something for a living—to the contrary.  This year's FSYO graduates are no exception.  Take the assistant principal cellist of the Symphonic, for example.  Valdictorian of his high school, going off to Harvard to major in biochemical sciences, and scored a perfect 2400 on the SAT (on his first try, even).  Hmm, only assistant principal cellist?  The slacker!  Oh, wait, the principal is taking her cello to the Eastman School of Music next year, so I guess the competition was a bit stiff.  She, by the way, is graduating with a mere 4.7 weighted GPA....  C'mon folks, invest a little time and money (okay, maybe a lot of time and money) in your children's musical education.  It'll be great for their brains!

Now I must report on my first dissatisfaction with the Swiss transportation system.  The bus we rode from the airport could not take us back there, because it disappeared overnight!  Fortunately, observant Janet had noticed that the sign was conspicuously missing from the stop.  At first we assumed this was just another of the BaselWorld alterations to the city, but she did some investigating and discovered that that particular run was not popular/profitable enough, so off with its head!  This turned out not to be much of a problem, however, as we were able to take a tram to Basel SBB, the main train station, where we could catch another bus to the airport.

We checked in with British Airways, and were able to get boarding passes for the entire trip this time, which eased my mind.  Later we were to discover that two of the three passes were no good, but that did nothing to diminish my relief at this point.

After a pleasant flight, we landed at Heathrow.  (I never can type that without first typing "Heatherow" and having to correct it!)  Once again we faced the long, circuitous walk and the even longer, more circuitous bus ride, followed by security screening and the "one bag only" rule.  This we were expecting.  But going from London to the United States is more complicated than going from London to Basel, probably with good reason.  There was yet another security check at the gate, and we were issued new boarding passes for our next two flights, to replace the for-whatever-reason defective ones we already had.  The process was smooth and we had no trouble, but a connection time of an hour and a half is none too long and in some cases much too short, I'm sure.  We were very glad our flight from Basel had landed a little early.

The next leg of the flight ended in Chicago.  Porter was able to sleep much of the way.  I was not, and distracted myself by watching a movie:  Miss Potter, a reasonably-accurate-for-Hollywood story of the life of Beatrix Potter.  I'd left my book behind with Janet, and I wasn't in the mood for French lessons.

Our connection time in Chicago was two and a half hours, which turned out to be 'way more than we needed, but better safe than sorry.  I've written about our reentry shock before, so I won't repeat it here.  Our passports received their first official stamps of the trip.  There's no evidence there of our time in Switzerland, France, or Germany; not even any evidence that we left the United State.  But we now have proof that we returned!  Going through customs was not a problem.  Our flight to Orlando was delayed, but that didn't matter so much since our only remaining connection was to the rental car Porter had thoughtfully reserved in Orlando—a very good thing, as the buses had long since stopped running for the night, and it was much too late to call a friend outside of a life-threatening emergency.

Then we were home.  All was well, thanks in part to our good neighbors, and we gratefully collapsed into bed—though not until after we'd rebooted the water, electricity, telephone, and computers, and sent off an e-mail reassuring family of our safe return.

For all I dislike about much of our current culture, and fear about the direction our country has been headed for the last half century or so; for all I loved about our visit to Europe; with all my certainty that we have much to learn from other countries and cultures; still, the United States of America is a great place to live, and other countries and cultures could learn a lot from us as well.  Unfortunately, all they're likely to get is the very distorted view of our country presented by Hollywood and the news media.  One thing I got tired of quickly was the assertion, "Americans do/are thus-and-so," repeated all the more emphatically after I've stated that no, we don't do that and neither do many other Americans we know.  I'm more convinced than ever of the value of cultural exchange programs, in which real, ordinary individuals from one country get to know real, ordinary individuals from another—as I've written about here, here and here.  As we discovered in Japan, and again in Switzerland, France, and Germany, there's nothing like good conversation with people from different backgrounds for dispelling misconceptions and dissolving stereotypes (unless we intentionally retain them; see above), and for providing new insights into other cultures—and our own.

Not long ago, a friend was lamenting to me about how tedious elementary recitals are.  Little piano and violin students plunking and scraping away on the same, boring pieces, making the same mistakes you've heard hundreds of times.  I couldn't disagree more.

But I love music recitals, elementary and otherwise.

Today we made up for our disappointment with the Tuileries by visiting Leu Gardens. It was delightful to wander amongst the palms, bromiliads, wildflowers, camelias, cacti, roses, and other Florida and non-Florida flora.  Especially the gardenias, which take me right back to my grandmother's garden.

Standing by the lake, watching the fish, a turtle, and a white heron—while watching out for alligators and water moccasins—we heard music.  Violin music.  Suzuki violin music.  Talk about natsukashii!  We had to investigate...at the main house there was a luncheon, for which a single violinist was providing entertainment, and she was working her way around the Suzuki repertoire—books three and four, if I had to guess; it's been a while.

Our first live Suzuki contact was made at Leu Gardens; we happened to be there when a group from the Suzuki Music Institute of Maitland was playing on the grounds.  For me, it was love at first sight (sound).  That great music coming from those tiny kids!

A day of rest, recovery, last-minute shopping, and…packing.  None of us wanted to think about the next day's departure; we weren't ready to part; and yet each of us was looking forward to getting back to "normal."  It was a fantastic vacation, but life is not, should not be, and cannot be, all vacation.  The pleasures and projects of "ordinary life" are the attractions that make the end of such a lovely time bearable.

This may be a good place to mention BaselWorld.  If you're planning a trip to Basel in 2008, don't even think of going in the first or second week of April.  When this watch and jewelry show comes to town, Basel is a different city.  They create new facades for the buildings, build temporary entrances complete with cascading waterfalls, haul in trees as well as tents, and take over the world.  It's a very good thing Janet's host family allowed us to stay at their house, because otherwise we'd have had to stay in Paris.  Or Luzern—that's how far you had to go to find a hotel room.  Actually, Porter's Diamond status with Hilton guarantees him a room anywhere, anytime—but it doesn't guarantee the price, so I'm sure it would have been astronomical.  I'm told that the restaurants in Basel use a different set of menus during the week of BaselWorld, ones with much higher prices.  When we went into town to one of Janet's favorite bakeries, she barely recognized it.

When Janet writes about this day, she may post a picture of us under a BaselWorld sign, which is the closest we got to a world where we SO did not fit in.  I mean, if Paris Hilton is there, should I be?  Besides, it cost about $37 to get in—the Louvre itself was under $12.  Not my kind of place.  This, by the way, was the only time we worried about pickpockets in Basel.  If I were a pickpocket, I'd plan a trip to Basel during BaselWorld—if I could find a place to stay.

Update: Here's the picture:

Speaking of pickpockets, the only place we really worried was in Paris, particularly in the high-tourist areas.  There were conspicuous signs in many places warning of them.  But I'm told that the problem has diminished significantly because of the many well-armed soldiers now present.  They're obviously there for fear of terrorism, and probably wouldn't bother to collar a pickpocket, but I can see how the sight of a machine gun might be somewhat of a deterrent to lesser crimes….

We even found time to watch a movie today:  Die Schweizermacher.  Otherwise known as The Swissmakers, it was a window into Swiss culture the way Swing Girls provided a glimpse into Janet's Japanese school life.  Both are comedies, and exaggerated, but contain enough truth to be insightful as well as amusing.  I'll write more about the movie in an upcoming post on my recent insights into socialization and homeschooling.

Today we finally managed to be together in the same room long enough to enjoy a chat with our hosts.  They even showed us their bunker, part of a legally-mandated system designed to provide safe, underground shelter to the entire Swiss population in case of emergency.  There's been a lot of grumbling recently, because the requirements add significantly to the cost of housing, and people are doubting both the necessity and the efficacy of the bunkers in this post-Cold War, suicide-terrorist age.  But to a Floridian without so much as a basement in which to ride out a hurricane, the bunker was very impressive.  If the Swiss response to potential disaster is overreaction, the American response of burying our heads in the sand cannot be any better.

You can tell it was a day of miscellanea when I'm reduced to philosophical ramblings rather than photos and stories.  But it was a good day, and when it was over we were packed and ready for an early start on our journey home.

When we first began planning this trip, Porter's one goal in Switzerland (besides visiting Janet) was the Jungfraujoch experience, with its cog railway and ride through a glacier, because he remembered it with such pleasure from 40 years ago.  This week we gave up on that idea, deciding that it would be better done in colder weather.  Every day has been somewhat hazy, and if you're going to spend an unreasonable amount of money to climb a mountain, the view ought to be spectacular, not merely good.  If Janet ends up in grad school here, we may have another chance.

So we settled for "second best," a trip to Luzern (Lucerne) and a cog railway ride up Mt. Rigi.  That was a lot less expensive, and made for a very nice day trip from Basel.

After about an hour's train ride (punctual and pleasant, as usual), we arrived in Luzern, bought our tickets for the Rigi trip, and did a little sightseeing, first to an old church, and then across the Kapellbrücke, Luzern's famous old wooden bridge, much of which had to be restored after a fire in the 1990's.

The first part of our Rigi trip was by ferry.

It was so cold on the boat we were seriously regretting not wearing heavier clothing.  If it was this cold on the lake, how much worse would it be on top of the mountain?  Eventually we retreated from the lovely view for some hot drinks inside the cabin.

When the ferry landed, we transferred to the cog train.  It's been said that if you've only been to Basel, you haven't been to Switzerland.  But this is the Switzerland of Heidi.

No worries at the top, because it was not windy.  Warm, sunny, and just the spot for a picnic lunch, even though there was still some snow.

This was our picnic view.  Remember to click on the picture to see it all.

We went back a different route, this time via cable car, picking up the ferry at the little town of Weggis (pronounced "Vegas").  Say, what?  Palm trees and snow-covered Alps?  Strange, but true.

If it wasn't the Jungfraujoch, the Mt. Rigi trip is still enough glory for one day!

But the day wasn't over.

In one of those Small World events (cue music), Janet's piano teacher and friend from Eastman is now living in Luzern.  So we teamed up with Sergio for dinner and a grand walk around the city.  (I figure someone with his own promotional website won't mind being mentioned by name.)  It was a welcome reunion for Sergio and Janet, who only once excluded the old folks by speaking in German, and I believe that was to say something like, "We could have a private conversation by speaking German."

We crossed another wooden bridge, the Spreuerbrücke, which features a set of plague paintings called Dance of Death.

We took a small, private cog railway up to the hotel that Michael Jackson tried to purchase for his personal use, but the Swiss would have none of it, or so the story goes.

Some views at the top

We had a bit of an adventure getting down—more of a long wait than an adventure, but the instructions weren't clear and the upward train had started spontaneously and without warning, so even though we wanted to re-read the instructions, no one was particularly anxious to get out of the car for fear of being left behind.  But eventually we were at the bottom and on our way again.  Here are a few more pictures of the random beauty we found in Luzern.

Then it was time to part, and to depart.  We boarded the train and returned to Basel at a reasonable hour, because we were quite tired from two days of busy tourism.

What to do, now that we are back in Switzerland?  Let's visit another museum!  This time it was the Skulpturehalle Basel, which probably would have been more interesting if we'd seen it before going to the Louvre.  It is an extensive collection of copies of famous sculptures, including the Parthenon frieze…and many we had seen as originals less than a week before.  Even those were of some interest, however, as we could get a lot closer to the copy of the Winged Victory of Samothrace than to the real thing.  But mostly this museum seemed to be designed for educational presentations, another great homeschooling field trip.  Do you sense a recurring theme here?

Okay, now what?  I know, let's go to another country…or two!  And let's walk there!  So walk we did, through a beautiful park…

…right into Germany!  (The structure in the third picture could be a Tinguely sculpture, but it isn't.)

Then over the bridge…

…to France!

On the way we treated ourselves to Italian ice cream that was as good as Janet remembers gelato in Italy.  I had to have a double cone, strawberry and lemon, because that's what my former college roommate always raved about from when she lived in Italy.  She was right, it's wonderful.  But the lemon was the wonderfulest of all.

Germany is where the Swiss go shopping, because it's so much cheaper there.  So we shopped.  At a small health food store, and also at the store.  How to describe the latter?  The building is not a mall, exactly, but that's the closest word I can find to describe it.  Imagine a shopping mall in which one of the biggest stores is a grocery store, though not exactly a grocery store because it sells a lot more than just groceries.  Maybe a department store with food.  Maybe the next generation of Super Targets….

This just in:  middle-aged men have no business stopping to chat with young people.  After all, the young and their elders have nothing in common, right?  No reason to talk to someone who is so different from you.  Certainly no reason to smile and speak to a stranger passing on the street.  Even if you both have dogs.

Here's the story.

The 43-year-old man was the subject of a police "be on the lookout" memo because two children said he spoke to them while they were walking their dogs. Police said no criminal activity had been reported.

I don't blame the police for being cautious.  Maybe the kids had been overly hyped to "stranger danger" by well-meaning parents and teachers.  Maybe they truly sensed something wrong.  In any case, I'm glad the police took them seriously.

If you read the article, you know that this is not the main thrust of the story.  What happened next was that someone obtained the man's personal, identifying information, and e-mailed it all around the neighborhood, with the implication that he was a child molester.

The primary concern seems to be that the information was released illegally, which is certainly a problem.  But I'm more concerned, overall, by the attitude revealed here that he had no business talking to the kids.  Believe me, as a parent I understand the terrible fears, but in defending ourselves against one horror, we musn't lose sight of the cost.  "If we can save just one child/woman/person from [insert particular horror here], it will be worth it," is often flung out like a banner, with little thought given to just what "it" is that we are sacrificing.  In a world where lost children hide from adults instead of seeking help, and where kindergarten teachers are afraid to hug their students, we must at least consider the question of how many children we hurt in our efforts to help others.

Then there's the bedrock of our legal system, the idea that one is innocent until proven guilty.  Frightening as the circumstances may be, this must apply to possible child molestors just as much as to possible murderers, shoplifters, and tax evaders, to Americans with possible connections to terrorists, and to Americans of Japanese descent during World War II, or it means nothing at all.  Note that if this man turns out to be other than the completely innocent person he appears to be, it does not change my argument.

After tearful goodbyes, we traveled with our host (who had business in Paris) on an early morning TGV back to Gare Montparnasse.  Porter managed to squeeze two small suitcases, a laptop bag, and a backpack (all our luggage except for my purse and Janet's small backpack) in one of the station's medium lockers, worth every cent of the seven euros because we were then free to explore more of Paris unencumbered.

This is the train station, with tennis courts on top!

From there we walked past the Jardin du Luxembourg (without meeting any of Marius, Jean Valjean, or Madeline) to the Musée National du Moyen Âge, aka the Cluny.  On the way we found a tiny crêperie and enjoyed one final treat of crêpes and communication in French.

At the Cluny we feasted on Medieval tapestries and other works of art until it was time to retrace our steps, retrieve our luggage, and hail a taxi to take us to Gare de l'Est and our train to Basel.  I was quite proud of myself.  This driver had no trouble understanding our French, and when he learned we were going to Switzerland and tried to say that Gare de L'Est was the wrong station, I had enough confidence to assure him that this was what we really wanted.  (I appreciated his asking very much, however!)

The five-hour ride between Paris and Basel was much more restful this time, since I wasn't frantically planning and cramming French.  That also made it seem longer, however—or maybe that was because we didn't get in till after 11 p.m. and it had been a long day.  Still, it was pleasant.  I love train travel!

Today was another beautiful day.  We've had so many since arriving in Europe.  The week before our arrival was so cold that we brought hats, gloves, and scarves with us, and decided to rely on layers rather than heavy coats only because we were trying to travel light.

(The lady who checked us in at the Orlando airport marveled at how little luggage we were taking to Europe.  Two suitcases—one small, one medium; a laptop bag; and a backpack doesn't quite seem like a small amount of luggage to me, but I guess it could have been worse.  We were blessed by having convenient laundry facilities on this trip.)

Spring weather is always unpredictable.  When we were packing, I never would have guessed that I'd regret bringing only one short-sleeved shirt.  We carried our jackets with us almost everywhere we went, because early morning and evening were cool enough to need them, but hiking around at midday was sometimes quite hot.  The only rain we experienced the whole vacation was maybe a dozen drops while enjoying a café on the banks of the Rhine.  As a Floridian, I know that lack of rain can be a serious problem (we're in the middle of a drought cycle now), but as a tourist, I was grateful that it held off for our visit.

And today we were definitely tourists.  Our hosts drove us to Mont Saint-Michel, about two hours away.  It was a lovely drive through the French countryside, and the sight of Mont Saint-Michel suddenly there, rising in all its glory from the flat ground, reminded me—though on a different scale—of my first view of Mt. Fuji.  You can see a good full view of Mont Saint-Michel at the Wikipedia link above; ours have people in them, which is generally good, but not, as I said, for public blogging without consent.

Janet had broken her glasses in a little accident with a hammock, and our tape solution had to be renewed frequently.  When we returned to Switzerland we bought some glue that allowed a much more permanent fix, but in the meantime we were grateful that they could stay together for 15 minutes at a time.  Memo to self:  never travel without duct tape.  And a spare pair of glasses.

Here are some gargoyle shots for my sister

I call these my Tennyson pictures….

This structure predated by oh, about a millenium Porter's ingenious contraption for hauling heavy items to our roof.  I bet it was equally handy.

Random views

Sadly, this was our last night at the château.  We're now beginning the homeward leg of our journey.

Awaking before the rest of the household, I slipped outside to explore the grounds in the peaceful early morning light.  Just me, God, and the neighbor's cows.  It was what I needed after eight days of intense tourism.  We spent the morning enjoying our friends and their home.  Easter Monday is a holiday in France, and most places are closed, which was fine with us!

Later our friends took us to a nearby park.  We ate lunch at a small restaurant there, listening in on another group that was sitting on the steps and singing folk songs in French with an accordion accompaniment.  We enjoyed a leisurely walk past cliffs and climbers, and saw why this area was attractive to its very ancient inhabitants.  (There are cave paintings nearby, though we didn’t get to them.)

There are caves…

springs of clean water….

wildlife (okay, these are sheep, but there must have been plenty of game in such a place)…

and even beautiful butterflies.  They certainly took a shine to Porter while the rest of us were stretched out in the warm sunshine.

What more could a prehistoric family want?

Dinner that night was at a very fancy restaurant.  A very fancy French restaurant, and not just because we were in France.  I'm not a fancy restaurant type of person, but it's a nice experience to have on occasion, especially if you are sharing it with good company.

I should mention that the Fairy Princess is the daughter of an American mother and a British father, but she lives in France and attends a bilingual school.  I could have listened all night to her speaking French with the waiter.  It's not perfect French, more the French of a five-year-old.  But after all, she is only five.  I wouldn't want my grandchildren to be an ocean away—it's bad enough they're in Pittsburgh—but there are compensations, and the opportunity to grow up bilingual is certainly one of them.

When our friends asked what our Easter traditions were, my immediate reaction was, "total exhaustion, following a glorious church service for which we had a good deal of responsibility, and into which we had put an enormous amount of time in preparation.  That was the truth for many of our favorite Easters, and it left little time and less energy for other traditions.  We had some, such as decorating eggs, having an Easter egg hunt (though not, as had been in my childhood, with the decorated eggs, as in Florida the real, hard-boiled eggs spoil too quickly in the often hot Easter weather), Easter baskets full of candy (jelly beans for me, SweeTart eggs, chicks, and bunnies for the girls, and chocolate for everyone; I couldn't interest anyone in marshmallow chicks).  More often than not, we shared the day with friends, in not-too-energetic pursuits.  As far as meals go, my family's Easter tradition was ham, and Porter doesn't care for ham, so we never really settled on anything in particular.  "Easy" was a good criterion.

We certainly did not have the tradition of spending Easter at a château in France, but I could get used to that!  We awoke to a big, chocolate chicken hanging (in a basket, nothing morbid here) from Janet's doorknob, and of course the Fairy Princess had her own wonderful Easter basket.

This may be a good place to mention that Janet and the Fairy Princess fell in love with each other almost immediately, and it was painful for both of them when we left.  It helps that the FP is not only well-behaved and charming, but that she also plays the harp!  Did I mention that this castle came equipped with a harp?  The two of them had great fun inspiring each other.

We went to church.  Not the big, fancy, English-speaking church in Paris, where we would have experienced all the beauty and glory of the biggest holiday of the church year.  Not even in the cathedral at Laval.  But in a small French Catholic church in a nearby village, and even though I believe the service wasn't much different from other Sundays (though with more joy and a few more Alleluias), it was certainly special for us, because it was, of course, all in French.  One advantage to being an Episcopalian is that the Catholic Liturgy is not so much different; we were able to follow along quite well.  Even our exposure to contemporary praise songs helped; I'm finally learning how to fake the tune when all the bulletin provides is the words.  Even when they're in French.  (Or Japanese.)

Remember what I said about my French being absolutely minimal?  It's true, and Porter's is even less.  But the priest deserves a lot of credit for clear diction, as we were able to understand a great deal of the words.  Of the words, mind you, not the sense.  In, say, a ten-word sentence, I might have understood five or even more of them, but the words I couldn't figure out were the key to the meaning of the sentence itself.  Oh, well, I was just happy to be able to understand enough to feel like a worshipper rather than a spectator.

Our hosts have an Easter tradition:  a big party with an egg hunt and a buffet full of incredible food!  I won't show many pictures, because so many have people in them, and I don't like to show people unless I'm pretty sure they won't mind. But here are a few.

Our contribution, with help of course from the Fairy Princess, was the deviled eggs; I had brought our recipe with that in mind.  It was our hostess's brilliant idea to dye the whites, though!

There were five children for the Easter egg hunt, which was just the right number.  We all agreed that the Easter Bunny (who curiously goes by the initials wpw) did a great job. Afterwards we enjoyed the fabulous buffet, and conversation with interesting people from as far away as New Zealand and as near as down the road a piece.

When the guests had all left, we approached that state of exhaustion that I mentioned as our own Easter tradition.  Porter and our host enjoyed watching Manchester United cream Roma in a very exciting football (aka soccer) match, while Janet and I joined our hostess in relaxing conversation.  The Fairy Princess, being a highly intelligent creature, was asleep.

Having slept off our Thanksgiving dinner-style museum orgy, and packed our suitcases for departure, we were ready to indulge in another museum, this time the Musée d'Orsay.  The Orsay begins where the Louvre leaves off, covering more recent (but not too recent) art.  You know, Rodin, van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Monet, Manet, Matisse, Homer, Renoir, and the like.  Being a converted train station, this museum is not as user-friendly as the Louvre; that is, it was much easier to get stuck in the middle of a hoard of other tourists.  I didn't mind so much waiting my turn to get in front of a painting, but when most of the people both ahead and behind me seemed impatiently intent only on snapping a photo with their cell phone cameras, it got rather annoying.  Besides, I'm not much better with crowds than I am with heights.

Still, it was a great visit (and free with our Museum Passes).  Even this much smaller museum has 'way too much to take in on one visit.  Paris would be a great place for a homeschool year abroad!

Porter and Janet graciously made allowance for my nervousness by planning to get to the train station much earlier than we really needed to.  This was Gare Montparnasse, not the station we had come into from Basel (which was Gare de l'Est), and I wanted plenty of time to check it out and for things to go wrong.  So we closed up the apartment, grabbed our bags, and walked to the bus stop.  (To give some credit to my insecure need for checking and rechecking, we did benefit from having rehearsed this earlier, since it turned out we needed to get a different bus from the one we had been planning on.)

The bus came quickly, and took us to the station in good time.  This one is much better organized than Gare de l'Est (which is under construction), and we were able to find our train on the schedule board (though it was too early for the track number to be up) and also the luggage storage area, which would be important on our return.  Then we settled down at a café to eat and wait.

Our train to Laval was the high-speed line, the TGV.  Porter, having seen what second class train accommodations were like his previous time in Europe, had pushed to get first class tickets.  But the TGV is expensive, even for second class, and Janet and I talked him into it.  Much has changed in 40 years, and second class was delightful.  Two hours later we were in Laval.  Our friend picked us up at the station, and soon we were here:

If it looks like a magical fairyland, it is.  We would have been happy to visit our friends and their young daughter fairy princess in a small shack, but this was beyond our dreams.  It's not everyone who can say that her birthday celebration included both a museum in Paris and a gourmet dinner at a château in the French countryside.  Speaking as her unprejudiced mother, if anyone deserves such a treat, it's Janet, and we are so thankful to those who made it possible.

And so to bed, to rest, to dream….

So was being able to communicate in French!  I haven't mentioned that yet, but it was one of the most enjoyable aspects of this trip.  My French is of the three years in high school forty years ago variety, supplemented by some recent, desultory language tape practice.  Nonetheless, the French people were very patient and never switched to English unless it was necessary, and I experienced the thrill of actually communicating in another language!  Readers from other countries may find it hard to imagine that one can study a language without ever communicating, but language study in the U. S. tends to be much more theoretical than practical.  It was very exciting to understand and to be understood in another language, even if only at the most basic level.  I believe Americans would be much less resistant to foreign language study if they had the opportunity to experience this.  Saying "Bonjour, comment allez-vous?" to a fellow student does not count.

The Louvre.  We could have spent a week, or a month, or a year there, but we settled for all day today.  It was an easy walk from the apartment, and we got a good start by not having to wait in the long line at the entrance.  Because we spend so much time at the Louvre, instead of hopping from museum to museum, we didn't, in one sense, get our money's worth out of our Paris Museum Passes.  It would have been less expensive to pay direct admission.  But we highly recommend getting the passes anyway, because their true value lies in shunting you to the front of all those long lines.  (Actually, it's usually a separate line altogether.)  Too bad they don't work at the Eiffel Tower!

I. M. Pei's infamous Pyramid Entrance may not fit with the style of the Louvre, but it stands atop (and brings light to) a huge improvement in crowd-handling.  The underground hub also makes it easy to navigate from one wing to another of the huge museum, and is a great place to meet up if you've been separated.  I don't suppose most tourists think of the Pyramid as "just another work by the guy who designed Wilson Commons," but most tourists at the Louvre didn't attend the University of Rochester.

We split up, arranging to meet again at a café under the Pyramid in two hours to compare notes.  Janet wanted to be free to explore at her own pace, and rented an audio guide.  I went with Porter because I enjoy his commentary; we shared our mp3 player with Rick Steves' audio tour.   Actually, we quickly abandoned Rick, as his commentary didn't fit well with our style, and we had gotten out of sync anyway, because one of the exhibits had been moved.  Not to worry; there was plenty to see, read, and learn without help.

Speaking of help, this is as good a place as any to insert a plea to all parents of small children:  Do yourself and your kids a really big favor, and make every effort to familiarize them with great works of art, particularly while they are young and have not learned that museums are supposed to be boring.  (I could say the same about music, but right now we're at the Louvre.)  I don't mean dragging them to art exhibits (not at first), nor making "art appreciation" a formal topic of study.  But there are so many other ways to introduce them to famous art and artists, from showing Bits of Intelligence to babies (Jonathan loved them), to hanging art pictures all over the walls and talking about them together, to books and videos, such as the excellent ones by Mike Venezia.  (I didn't know until today that he has videos!  I'll have to investigate further.)  Talk about the art works with your child; it helps if you know something about them yourself, but even if you don't, you can still make comments; this will help your child notice and remember.  When you do visit a museum, try to get pictures of some of the works you will see, and let your child become familiar with them first.  Do what you can, but do it!  And the younger you begin, the better.  It's never too late, but early can be a lot easier.

Why am I so emphatic about this?  Because we found our visit to the Louvre to be so much more exciting and interesting for having watched Museum Masterpieces:  The Louvre, a Teaching Company course.  There's nothing like walking into a room and suddenly coming upon a painting that you "know," even if it's not one of the better-known works.  I believe the line at the Mona Lisa would have been a lot less long if it weren't just about the only work many tourists are familiar with.  How else to explain their ignoring the other famous da Vinci works just a few feet away?

Okay, back to our tour.  Porter and I spent our time in the Denon wing, mostly with French and Italian paintings; on the way, we caught the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace.  We went at a much faster pace than we had at Basel's Kunstmuseum, but still were caught in the middle of a huge wing when it was time to head for our meeting place.  Janet, it turns out, had spent the whole time on the second floor of the Sully wing.  So we departed, planning to meet again in three hours.

I believe we more or less swapped wings, Janet heading for Denon and we for Sully, where we learned why she had spent so much time amongst the French paintings on the second floor.  We saw much else, as well, but museum fatigue was definitely setting in.  There is only so much the brain can handle all at once, not to mention the feet.

The Louvre is too much.  It has too much.  They can't take proper care of their immense store of treasures.  At the Kunstmuseum, the artwork is protected by an invisible, electronic barrier that alerts a vigilant guard if you inadvertently cross it.  At the Louvre, we saw many examples of people getting up very close, breathing on the delicate paintings, stroking the sculptures, touching frames and probably even the paintings themselves!  The museum generously allows photography in almost all of the exhibits, but asks that flash not be used.  This was in large measure ignored, with the paintings being subject to bright light after bright light.

I don't understand why so many people bother to come to the Louvre, only to view the art through a camera lens.  I did understand the men who wanted their pictures taken next to the Venus de Milo, but why take a picture of a famous painting (without even yourself in it to show that you were there, in the same room as that famous painting), when you could buy a much better picture of the same thing on a postcard in the museum shop?  Or even pull one off the Internet?  It's true there were a few things I should have taken pictures of, because they aren't famous enough to be on a postcard, but for the most part the effort seems a complete waste of time.

So, we were exhausted, dehydrated, and hadn't eaten anything since breakfast.  Probably not the best circumstances under which not to have a specific plan as to what to do next.  We wandered through part of the Tuileries, which I found disappointing, largely because I hadn't done my homework and was expecting more in the way of flowers for something with jardin in its name.  There we had a small bite to eat and the tensest moments of our entire trip, before and after.  But we got through it, and decided it made sense to split up again.  Porter, who was still gung-ho and energetic, walked to the Monnaie de Paris, a coin museum, while Janet and I went back to the apartment to rest.   The time actually wasn't very restful, as it was spent trying to plan the rest of the evening, but at least we were off our feet.

Happily reunited, we decided we couldn’t possibly do all we wanted to, and would "settle" for some bread and cheese in the apartment and a return to the Louvre.  This time we saw a little more of each other, as we both had missed parts of the first floor of the Denon wing, and also wanted to get to the Richelieu wing.  In the latter, Porter spent the most time amongst the Dutch painters, and Janet was amazed by (among other things), Napoleon III's apartments.  She'll have to tell you about it, though, as we didn't get there.  You can't see everything in a day.  You can't even walk by everything.  But I think we did very well for the time we had.