Finding Home ...

There is a coming-home-kinda feeling about a lazy, early North Carolina summer. It’s like your heart is reset in its secret lodge in your chest and it’s back in rhythm. 

There is a strange saying around here that winter lasts for about 4 months, summer lasts for 6, and spring falls on a Tuesday. This feels, quite literally, like the truth! We have very little remembrance of true spring - the blooms are all we know about it. But the heat and most importantly, the humidity, this NC staple, is in a hurry to come back every year. We go from boots to thong flip-flops literally in one weekend.

The first sign of early summer is a blooming Southern magnolia

If you never spent any time in a subtropical climate, it is hard to describe the water in the air. The drips down your chin and under your arms just because you’re alive. You do nothing but sit there, looking at your hydrangeas and you feel a soft bead rolling down your temple. It’s only 10 AM and you can feel the hot air creeping in like a thief ... 

Kitties are lazier than usual, if such a thing is even possible, moving ever so slowly, for fear they’ll waste their energy in a hurry if they jerk around too much. Their eyes are blinking on a delay ... 

One of the must-haves in a Southern home is a screened-in porch, preferably in the back of the house, where no human traffic can bother you or disrupt your God-given peace. Lots of people dream of a house with a nice, deep front porch, but I like that just for the architecture. I would not think of ever using it to sit and take in the world. My world is that of the back yard, facing the woods, and allowing me no human pollution whatsoever - just birds, deer, bunnies, and squirrels. Maybe the occasional snake - because what is NC without its snakes?! 

On a day like today, I sit and melt away in the warm, wet air, and think about life, about what’s important, about where to next. If I learned anything in 50 years, it’s that humans will disappoint and fail, but through failure they will learn, rise again, and move on. I cannot measure my days in human victories or defeats. My beat nowadays is more that of nature, with its untainted beauty, permanence, resilience and steadiness ... Nature and that which is not human is what I seek for thy disappoint the least. 

If the most consequential trip of my life, my South African safari, taught me anything, it was that to find happiness is to be the most you you can ever muster. An impala never wants to be a lion, and a lion never wants to be a leopard. They are authentically who they are and they are the best at who they are because they wish nothing against their nature or against their natural grain. 

Human intelligence is our ticket to progress and to our demise ... Nowadays, I limit myself to what I know is true and permanent - gorgeous, massive hardwoods mixed in with Southern pines, whispering in the faint wind in my forest, finches, cardinals and sparrows having some sort of a quarrel over the shortage of bird seed, blue birds moving on after their first batch of babies have flown the coop, butterfly bushes in full-bloom waiting, patiently, for their residents to move in. 

About 4 years ago this landscape lady promised a scrawny butterfly bush she planted on a rocky hill behind my house will one day take over my yard. Every year since, I doubted her. I think it's finally time.

These are true, honest, solid things. There is no pretense, no lying, and no A.I. Just the pure, verifiable (but not needed to be) source of what is true ... I live for this. I cherish this. It's restoring ...  

Some days, it's hard to pick a favorite ...

I started this blog 20 years ago next month. I started it to document my travels, and I have been blessed with so many. I have lived a truly charmed life, with many opportunities to learn and open my eyes and my heart to a world I never knew would be possible for me ... 

But the one thing I have learned the most is that sometimes the most memorable journeys are not very far from just where you are. Not very far from your home or even from this chair, right here, where I type these words ... Not very far from the lazy kitten sprawled on the chair next to me ... It’s how you look at the world that makes the adventure and not always how many miles you travel ... 

For now, for today ... The world is warm, familiar, and soft, like an embrace of someone kind and trusting. The air is lingering, sticky and wet. The birds are getting lazier and lazier, judging by their fainting songs, as we approach mid-day. The sun is almost on top of me, I feel it and it makes my eyes squint a little, even under the roof of my screened-in porch. The fluorescent blue wasps are buzzing around and the branches are slowly nodding in the light wind. 

The skies are just waiting for some kind of signal to drop buckets on our heads yet again, despite the desperate attempts of the sun to peek through and shoo them away. 

It’s a quiet day in the country. The neighbor’s dog, suffering from some terrible separation anxiety, is the only chatterbox out there - disrupting the peace and the birds’ subdued symphony. He gets tired after a while and you hear him wail and yawn ... 

It’s another day in The South and, I am fairly sure that even if it’ll bring about change and even eternal pause to so many around the world, it will also bring a new day for those left behind. As life and physics will have it, the world still moves on. And I choose to move with it, when humanity allows, always waiting for the next chapter ... 

Autumn Hikes

I love hiking in the fall, especially down here, in The South! I am not quite as bothered by snakes as I usually am in the summer, and the (still) warm temperatures make for a pleasant excursion - winter hikes can be chilly, even around these parts. 

I also like fall hikes because, for some reason, there are not many people out. I guess there are so many fall festivals, harvest gatherings, Oktoberfests that people are not much for solitude in the wild. It’s a quiet, peaceful time and you feel like you have the trails for yourself. You and just a couple of random loners like you, being walked by their dogs. 

Fall is the best time for pictures, too. The colors are popping, even when they are not 100% in full peak - like it happens to be the case right now in the area we live - in the middle of the Tarheel state. 

Leaves float in the air like butterflies: they catch my eye on their way downward and I turn with a startle trying to catch the creature only to figure out that it’s not a winged beauty afterall, but a dead, dry leaf. Pretty nonetheless. 

The air is dusty and crisp with dead-leaf smell. Bath and Body Works have this candle called something like “Leaves” and it’s no surprise that they thought about bringing that to the home. They smell like lumber, fire, warm, soft sweaters, and mulled wine all wrapped up into one another. They smell like what a cozy night in front of the fireplace feels like. 

The light is soft and it’s almost hard to focus the camera - it’s not the sharp air of the spring or that of a bright summer morning - it’s dimmed, like a wispy hair of a on woman; the lines of things are blurry and you feel the need to increase your contrast when you process the pictures to get some clarity. 

We picked a couple of spots to take in nature this time of the year during this past week, and they were very different but of course beautiful in their own right. 

The first one, Reservoir Park in Southern Pines, is a 2 mile loop around a lake, the trail flanked by tall Southern pines. Since the forest was mostly piny, the colors were not as bright as you’d expect in the fall but a few bright pops were peeking from here and there. It’s almost a completely flat trail - wide, groomed, sandy in parts, very comfortable. The trail makes it for a nice walk where you could just get lost in taking it easy and taking everything in - the lake, clear and calm; the fish jumping out of the water catching lazy flies resting on the water for dinner; the ducks, lazily drifting by, the dragon flies (still!) mating, and the trees, in all their height and glory. 

The lake at Reservoir Park in Southern Pines: it is almost completely round with a 2 mile trail around it and views of the water from every corner.

A duck was drinking water but it looked like she was gurgling ...

As the name suggests it: Southern Pines is full of ... pines. These beauties surround you anywhere in Reservoir Park.

Another favorite during autumn (and winter) hikes are the berries: there are so many of them, in various colors, to remind you that all is not dead, after all!

The trail at Reservoir Park - pretty flat and wide - and some beautiful colors popping from among the pines.

Is it a leaf in the air? Or on the water?! Who knows or cares - it has given up for this season ...

We could never figure out what "fruits" these are (persimmon, maybe?!), but the tree in the picture below was loaded with them. They looked like tomatoes and if you didn't look too carefully they got lost in the overall fall color of the whole tree. So cool!

Your "typical", if there is such a thing, fall-colors picture at the entrance of Reservoir Park.

The second hike we ventured on was the loop trail at Raven Rock State Park which takes you all the way up to Raven Rock, on the banks of the Cape Fear River. The trail goes up and down - not quite as flat as the first one - and it’s full of trees of all sorts - oaks, and maples, and pines - and others we could not identify. We kept seeing these nuts that looked like pecans all over the forest floor - we still don’t know what they were ... 

The two main points of attraction on this trail are the “overlook” - from where you can see the river from up high on the hill. There is something filled with tranquility and perspective, seeing a river meander between hills from up-above, carving the shape of the world, that I always find fascinating. 

The other landmark on this trail is the Raven Rock itself: a 150ft massive rock nested in the cliffs by the river. You come up to its tippy-top on the trail and you have to climb down these steep stairs to see it from the bottom. It’s a breath-taker, for sure, but so worth the trek. 

Once you’re down at the bottom it feels like you just descended in the belly of the earth - everything is so quiet and peaceful, and lost. The river is calm, almost like a lake, and there are no sounds. No creatures. Huge, enormous, knotty roots spread along the side of the rock, barely clutching on to the soil, almost floating above earth. Trees taller than the 150ft rock itself doing a frail balancing act on these roots like ballerinas on toe points. 

In fact, the entire trail in this park is covered with stone-like, dry, knotty roots which makes it treacherous to walk on: you feel with every step like you’re going to slip and fall - the roots are covered by newly fallen leaves and it makes for a slippery, unstable-footing journey. But again - so worth it. 

The Cape Fear River as seen from "the overlook" on Raven Rock Loop Trail - Lillington, NC

The Raven Rock forest was almost exclusively of deciduous trees going through "the change". So, we got a lot more color on this hike.

The Raven Rock forest was full of trees like these - that seemed to have taken "detours" (perhaps around rocks, at one point?) to find the sky, during their lifetime.

The 150ft worth of wooden stairs you need to climb down to find the river and the bottom of the Raven Rock.

The Cape Fear River once you made it to the bottom of Raven Rock.

Under the Raven Rock - it is a massive monolith with tiny streams of water dripping in its crevices.

The amazing above-the-ground root system of these massive trees at the bottom of the Raven Rock - there is no place for the roots to go - it's all rock everywhere, and yet, somehow, the trees figured out a way to anchor themselves for many tens of years and survive despite it all.

The trail in Raven Rock State Park is sheltered by the trees and very, very root-y ...

The gnarly roots right on the trail that you have to step on for 2+ miles to get ahead ...

My favorite picture from the escapades of this week - dead bugs, empty spider webs, dead leaves and a smooth, dimmed light that makes everything bright from the inside out. What says "fall" better than a natural jack-o-lantern?!

Get out there, folks! The world is amazing!

A Weekend in Washington, DC

April 2022 ... 

This blog was supposed to be all about travel and the lessons that it teaches us. Or me, rather. I have fallen by the wayside with that goal, in the past few years, because of one thing or another that has delayed trips and made them smaller, closer, and less frequent. 

But trips have happened and I need to catch up. Maybe the blogs I am about to post are not as thorough and long as others in the past, but I hope they will serve as inspiration for you all to pack and hit the road, if you can and if some of these places are handy, or as a reminder for me that the past year or so has not been completely empty of adventure. 

This one is about a trip to Washington, DC that we took on Easter weekend (around April 17th, 2022). It was also the weekend of our 12th anniversary. 

We have both been to the American capital several times before. But every time you go, the city offers the same familiarity and comfort of a small city, really, and it’s fresh with a new vibe. Whether it’s a new presidency at the White House, or just a different season, the city feels old and new and fresh at the same time. 

Although it feels much like a historic, cozy Southern town at times, it has the same thump as a big metropolis (think New York and the likes) - busy traffic and ambulance and police sirens.  It even smells like a big town, human urine and throw-up included. 

We didn’t want to drive during our stay there. We booked a hotel just about 5 blocks off from the National Mall and we wanted to walk everywhere - to the Capitol, to museums, to restaurants. 

The highlights of this trip included: 

A walk-about The Capitol building - still surrounded by scaffolding and awaiting renovation after the January 6th, 2021 insurrection. It was a sad, daunting sight - a dark spot in our recent history to be sure.  “Not in America”, some said. Yes, in America, the facts beg to differ. 

The US Capitol building

The reflecting pool was emptied out of water and it added to the gloomy vibe. Although the National Mall was resounding with music and crowds (Easter weekend is not a slow weekend for DC, we found out), it felt gutted and unfriendly. 

A walk in the US Botanic Gardens right off The Mall was relaxing and refreshing, a spot of peace away from the exhausting party-like life of crowds beyond: the famous Washington cherry blossoms were on their way out that weekend, but some still around,  and flanked by dogwoods and rising proud over blankets of multi-colored tulips. 

The US Botanic Gardens

The highlight of the trip was probably the visit to The Museum of the Bible - a new one to us and I don’t think it’s an old one for the city either. What better place to be around Easter?! (We realized quite fast that other ten thousand other Christians had the very same thought that day!)

It is a very well-done museum, following the history of the Bible through many traditions and across cultures from all over the world. It houses what seems to be hundreds of thousands of Bible versions in that many languages and dialects - some languages that you had never heard of before. It’s a museum of the printing press, and of languages as much as it is a museum of this one book and the faiths that it sprung into the world. 

At that time, it also housed a replica of the Shroud of Turin - a length of linen cloth bearing the negative image of a man and believed to be the fabric in which Jesus was wrapped after the crucifixion. Much research has been done to estimate its age. All of the research points to a time around the Middle Ages, maybe around as early as 1200s. But why people place it as belonging to someone roughly 1200 years before that date was unclear to me. However, reading about the effect it has had on so many generations, and reading about its history and how it was passed on from generation to generation, a sacred symbol of faith and hope is still remarkable. 

The Shroud of Turin

For our anniversary dinner, we went to The Dubliner which was right around the  corner from our hotel. We were supposed to be in Ireland (among other places in a tour) for our 10th anniversary, but Covid got in the way in 2020. So The Dubliner was an appropriate “consolation prize” two years after the “real” trip would have happened. The Dubliner was remarkable for two reasons, for me: they had the best home-made salmon pastrami Reuben sandwich I have ever had! I didn’t even know that salmon pastrami existed. And they carried my favorite beer in the whole world on draft - the Kilkenny cream ale. If you only knew how hard it is to get this beer on draft (or at all, really) in America, you’d understand what a momentous occasion this was. 

Salmon pastrami reuben sandwich and mashed potatoes at The Dubliner

We started our first day in DC by paying our respects to a new (to us) (small) memorial erected in honor of victims of communism. Although small and off-the-beaten-path, it bore an enormous amount of significance for me. It’s one of those memorials that makes my heart stop and skip a few beats when I think of all the faces that fell for nothing more than a belief. Puts things, still, into great perspective today, and it’s still a raw and alive part of who I am. Of who I will always be. 

The Memorial of Victims of Communism. Click the picture to view more from this trip.

A Winter Walk

There is something of the reverence and deep silence of a gothic cathedral - a walk in the winter. Nature, usually so lively, so loud, turns off the music, and all other noise. Nothing but the sound of your shoes beating the pavement, maybe a random leaf finally giving up and shedding from a high branch. Defeated by the shy whisper of a February, sharp, but timid breeze. 

For three weekends, we have been kept inside by unseasonably (for North Carolina) cold, rainy, snowy or frozen weather. This weekend we ventured out because it was the first one with no precipitation. But it was cold. Man, it was cold. But our bodies needed it. And our minds needed it more. 

Even the puppies out for walks were speechless. Their owners, sleepy heads hurrying through (you could read cabin fever all over their puffy eyes), were blowing hot air into their high collars and rushing along. "Let's get this over with" written all over their faces. Not many people out. Nor creatures. 

The usual liveliness of nature in the warmer season - the swishing of the bushes, the fish leaping from the creek besides us, the birds chasing in the thicket - none of this was there. It was just us, the crisp air, fingers almost frozen inside gloves, and focusing on the nature around us to find something, anything, to shoot. Trees, dead grasses, the murky creek asleep, frozen in time. 

But life was there ... if you listened. If you looked. There were squirrels chasing each other, birds silent, but awake and puffed up to keep warm. It felt like the cold weather froze the birds' song. The sky was cloudless and the sun blinding. With no leaves, not much shade was there. The sun was there, but it gave no heat. 

When the sun hit the water just so, at some point, it must have woken up a family of frogs because for a brief minute they started singing so loud - their shrieks sounded mad, but they could have also been just saying thanks for a few rays of light. If you closed your eyes and you forgot the frostbite in your fingers, you'd think it's summertime - the frogs, so desperate! And then it got quiet again. Like a tomb. Just silent. 

And then, the king. This beautiful (I think) hawk, just sitting there. Observing. Not more than maybe 20 feet from us, on a fallen tree. Majestic and lofty. Taking in the grounds like it were his kingdom. Demanding respect. Towering. 

For a few minutes, he stood there, gracing us with a couple of head tilts for a couple of shots. Then, he drifted away in the woods, quiet and barely there ... Like a ghost ... 

It would have been so easy to miss him. He made no noise. He was not moving. He was the color of the dead trees around him - brown and gray: we could have totally missed him. And yet, if you listen, if you watch, if you look to understand - life is always there. 

Our trail guardian: a red-shouldered hawk (I think)

Tree gaping at the cold world, by Sanford Creek

Sanford Creek - Wake Forest, NC

There were so many diseased and fallen trees. This one was full of burls and incredibly tall.

Sanford Creek Greenway - Wake Forest, NC

The dead grasses draping on these fallen roots looked like a soft blanket, arranged just so

A spell of light ... the promise of warmth ... 

In cold and warm - life wins ... 

More trail companions - mostly quiet and elusive, but there nevertheless ... 

A Gorgeous, Restless Summer

I cannot believe it's September and my mums have bloomed already. Some blooms are actually already dried out. 

Where has the summer gone?! I don't know whether it's because we are getting visibly older and they say time just slips from under you when that happens, or what ... but this whole year's been nothing but a dream ... Here and gone before you knew what's what ... 

This summer's been busy beyond words with all its summery events and long, languid days of dolce far niente - if that can be ever busy ... 

We visited the cool mountains, hiked alongside fast springs and calm, deep, cold lakes; we drove on steep, twisty green roads, framed by roadside waterfalls and rhododendron-covered cliffs; we sipped sweet (or dry, but mostly sweet) Southern wine right from the wineries; we made some smoke in the back yard cooking meats, or in the woods while camping; we scouted numerous farmers' markets in search for just the perfect fruit and tomatoes. 

We listened to live music in the toasty evenings, and marveled at the gorgeous sunsets at the end of hot days. Have you noticed how sunsets are more colorful because the days themselves are literally burning in the summer?!  We chased butterflies and breathtaking rainbows after hot summer showers... 

We are lucky to be here, to be mobile, to be healthy, to have the energy and mind and willingness to explore and learn another thing about our town, our state, ourselves, to have each other and to live another day to tell the tale ... And all this with almost no vacation days. Just weekends and national holidays. Time is always here for us to fill up, and for that, I am so grateful! 

Here's to a long and hopefully gentle fall, and to more summers to come ... 

Some of the sights of this summer: 

Sunset on Smith Mountain Lake, VA

Camp fire on Smith Mountain Lake, VA

Chasing dragon flies in Natahala National Forest, in Highlands, NC

Sitting by Mill Creek in Highlands, NC

The dam and rhododendron at Cliffside Lake in Natahala National Forest, NC

Grilling in the back yard

Listening to Booker T at the NC folk festival in Greensboro, NC

Chasing birds at Duke Gardens, in Durham, NC

Chasing butterflies ... everywhere ... 

Relaxing on the patio of our neighborhood bar after a hot day

Chasing rainbows on Haw River - Pittsboro, NC

Sunset in Hickory, NC 

The view atop Grandfather Mountain, in NC

Out of all the wineries we visited this summer, this was our favorite: Grandfather Vineyards outside Blowing Rock, NC