Kent and I are enjoying a lovely, quiet Christmas at home, but we have made “Hilma’s Holiday Glögg,” spelled Glug (but pronounced gloog) on the recipe card typed by Evelyn Easley, mother of my friend Linda, probably 60 years ago. No one seemed to know who Hilma was, but the aroma of raisins, cinnamon, sugar, and cardamon seeds heating, before they are added to a gallon(!) of Burgundy wine brings back years of holiday memories. In the 1950s and 60s, drinking alcohol wasn’t common among our relatives and friends. Evelyn was a bit conspiratorial as she introduced me to this drink, which she served hot in a teacup with a dollop of brandy as we visited in her kitchen one Christmas when I was home visiting. I’m sure after the cycle of heating and re-heating, the alcohol remaining in the original gallon is minimal, but it seemed a bit daring at the time and a new experience to be treated as an adult by my childhood friend’s mother.
So, here’s a gift of Hilma’s Holiday Glug recipe! Enjoy!
Book News
We Ran Away to Sea received two unexpected honors this month. The book received first place in the Royal Dragonfly Book Award in the Letters, Journals, and Diaries category. When I saw that category for this award, I thought it would be a good one to apply for because the number of entries would be smaller than for the category memoir. And I was right! The book is also a finalist in the Global Book Award memoir category. We’ll find out in a few days if the book is one of the winners.
I’m a bit skeptical of book awards, even though I researched to avoid those that are solely money-making scams, but it is nice to be recognized. Thanks to all of you who have bought the book, especially those who have written reviews.
Kent also gave a presentation to the Sandia Civitan Club. This lovely small group meets for breakfast every Friday and does tremendous volunteer work to benefit people with disabilities. It was a pleasure to meet them and learn about the work they do.
Kent’s been writing something for the past several days that I haven’t yet seen. I wonder what it is?
The goat has gone back to its original owner. As was evident to our neighbor and all the neighbors, the fencing around his property was inadequate. I admired his independent streak and was charmed by his fixation on our front door. Goodbye, goat! I hope you will find a more suitable new home. Anybody want a goat?
Our friend Jim decided his health wasn’t up to heading across the Pacific in a sailboat one more time. He was right, and shortly afterward ended up hospitalized in intensive care.
If you’d like to support Jim, look for three books: Windswept by his late wife Ginny Sollars, A Bachelor’s Paradise, and the Yamamoto Affair. The first is an account of the family’s years sailing the Pacific; the second is about Jim’s adventures in the Pacific as a bachelor; and the third is a gripping novel of suspense and intrigue inspired by his own diving experiences and the historical World War II Japanese admiral, Yamamoto.
As far as we know, the boat is still in San Carlos and for sale. Anybody want a boat?
The Book
I keep adjusting the ads on Amazon, and the book continues to sell an average of 20 books a month, not (yet) more than the cost of the ads. We’d like more readers to discover the book. It’s gotten more ratings on Good Reads and Amazon, but we haven’t had a new review in several months. Hint, hint! You don’t have to be a great writer; just share your honest reaction. Even star ratings help, but a few words are much more meaningful to us and readers trying to decide whether to read or buy the book.
The three copies at the Albuquerque Public Library continue to circulate.
Events
If you’re within hailing distance of Albuquerque, Kent will read at Books on the Bosque this coming Saturday, October 5. We hope to see some of you there. Books on the Bosque is a lovely, relatively new independent bookstore with many activities worth checking out.
Kent will also speak at the Tony Hillerman Branch of the Albuquerque Public Library on Saturday, October 26, at 1 pm., a shorter version of his illustrated January presentation at Oasis.
Book Awards
We Ran Away to Sea is a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award finalist. Winners will be announced sometime in October. We’ve also submitted the book for a few other awards
The most unusual is The Wishing Shelf. Based in England, the award is chosen by reading groups in London and Stockholm, Sweden. Unlike most awards, where you send in your application fee and wait for award announcements, this one asks for a book description before allowing you to submit a book for consideration. The invitation from the award administrator felt like a mini award.
He wrote: “Thanks very much for contacting us. I had a look at your book on Amazon, and I thought it looked very interesting. I very much liked the look of the cover and the blurb, and the Look Inside seems to flow well. I see you also have a number of reviews, which I read with interest. So, yes,please send me a PDF of the book plus a JPEG or PDF of the covers.”
Other Stuff
Since I didn’t get a newsletter out in August, I’m doing a lot of catching up here.
Kent and I are editing stories we left out of WeRan Away to Sea, but work is going slowly because …
I’m finally working on my book, working title “Once a Pilgrim,” about the first half and maybe the second half of my first Camino.
Picture of Vézelay Courtesy of luctheo on Pixabay
We’re planning travels after being home all summer: next week to San Francisco to see family, and on October 28 to France, where we intend to walk the less traveled Voie de Vézelay, which begins at the Basilica of Mary Magdalene in Vézelay and eventually meets the Camino Frances in St. Jean Pied-de-Port at the Spanish border. We won’t manage more than one-third of the 900 kilometers in just over three weeks of walking. Weather will be unpredictable but probably not hot, and many pilgrim lodgings will have closed for the season. I’ll try to post on my blog, Caminobleu.com, or at least on Facebook because writing blogs on a cell phone after a day of walking is not easy. And there may be days with no internet.
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While we were in Indonesia in May, I saw a notice on my phone for a 36-foot sailboat for sale in Albuquerque for the ridiculously low asking price of $10,000. “Very odd to find an ocean-going sailboat in Albuquerque,” I thought, and out of curiosity, after we returned home, I wrote a note to the seller asking for more information. She told me that she had recently inherited the boat from her grandfather but not his sailing genes to go with it and wanted to sell it. It was an old boat built in Taiwan in 1977 and stored in San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico. She could tell me almost nothing about the boat and said to contact a fellow in San Carlos for more information. I did not know about his connection to the boat, but I wrote asking for more details. I got very little information in response, so I turned to Google and found an old for-sale notice for the boat. It had a few pictures and a partial equipment list. It had at one time been outfitted for blue-water cruising.
I began thinking I could afford it. Wouldn’t having a boat down on the Sea of Cortez, a body of water I had long dreamed of cruising, be fun? I imagined Linnea and I could make quick trips down to San Carlos, then gunk-hole up and down Baja and the mainland. We should not have to upgrade expensive equipment if we didn’t plan on extensive voyaging. So, we made a quick trip to San Carlos to take a look.
We spent a night on the way with our friend Jim in Green Valley, Arizona. Jim had a boat built in Taiwan in 1977 and sailed the Pacific for years before returning to Los Angeles and selling the boat. Then, about the time Pam, the boys, and I sailed through the Atlantic and the Caribbean, he took his wife and family on another voyage through the Pacific.
Jim and I grew up in Sheridan, Wyoming. His older brother was my high school classmate. Jim was interested in the boat, and because he was familiar with boats of that vintage built in Taiwan, I invited him to join us. He would know more about what we were looking at than I would. However, he declined because a back issue limited his walking.
After arriving in San Carlos, I investigated the cost of storing the boat and decided it was more than I wanted to pay. The whole trip had been a fool’s errand; nevertheless, I wanted to see the boat. It seemed to be in good shape for a vessel its age and would be a bargain for a younger person willing to put in a lot of labor (and some money) to bring it up to cruising condition.
On our return trip to Albuquerque, we spent the night with Jim again, and I filled him in on what I had found. Jim had just finished filling quart bottles of his homemade rum when we arrived late afternoon. We had a pizza for dinner and sampled his rum before and after.
“Two old men and a boat would make a good story!” Linnea said, going to bed and leaving us to our boat talk. We drank another glass of rum and imagined two old men getting an old boat and fixing it up. They wouldn’t just for gunk-hole around the sea of Cortez. Oh, no! They’d spend a year or two or three sailing the Pacific. My, that was good rum.
Our talk ignited a dream I thought I had put to rest 25 years ago when Pam and I left our boat for the last time. Our talk of the boat, or perhaps it was the rum, ignited something in Jim, as well, because, after a third glass, we were no longer imaging what a good story it would make; we were talking about how we should proceed to check out the boat more thoroughly and what it would take to prepare it for voyaging in the Pacific.
Hearing about our ideas in the morning, Linnea still thought “Two Old Men and a Boat” would make a great story. Maybe Jim and I could make it happen.
Back home in Albuquerque, all I could think about was the boat and the opportunity, even at my age, to fulfill my long-held dream of sailing the Pacific. I planned to return to the boat for a thorough inspection with my new partner, Jim, who had some medical appointments and a trip planned that would postpone our trip to Mexico for a month and a half.
Yesterday morning, after a couple of weeks of not hearing from Jim, he called to tell me he could not proceed. The medical report on his back was discouraging, and while vacationing with his family, he realized he could no longer keep up.
I should not have been surprised that Jim was not up to it. Nevertheless, I was so gripped by the idea that I couldn’t drop it. Who else did I know who might be footloose and crazy enough to join me sailing the Pacific? Maybe my childhood friend, Dick, a passably healthy, active widower, might be tempted?
“Hi, Dick! Do you want to sail the Pacific with me in an old boat?” I ran out of minutes on my phone as I talked, but I could tell he was excited about getting out and doing something adventuresome. However, he’d never sailed, never had a dream of sailing, and this would probably not be an adventure he would have chosen. Nevertheless, after talking on the phone, I wrote a long e-mail laying out everything I thought would be involved and spelled out my dream.
Where was Linnea in all of this? I knew she would not, and I did not expect her to give up her active and engaged life in Albuquerque to live on a boat for a year or two. I imagined she would fly to places we visited, and we could tour them together. She might accompany us on some of the shorter passages from island to island. We’ve talked about visiting Australia together for years; that is where we’d wait out the typhoon season for several months.
I had not thought about the burden I would be dumping on her—the constant maintenance and repairs our property requires. Nor was I thinking about how my traipsing off to sail the Pacific without her would seem to her. Did I not care for her? Or for the life that we had made together? She knew that my earlier sailing dream had formed when I was anxious to escape the life I was living. Was I doing the same thing again? This morning, as we talked, I realized that I didn’t want to escape anything. I love the life I have now.
So, I wrote Dick to apologize for even bringing up my crazy idea with him—I knew this was not his thing. I was acting on the rebound from losing Jim’s partnership. I wrote to the boat owner and told her I was no longer interested in buying. As Linnea says, I don’t have to sail the Pacific to tell a story about two old men and an old boat. I could make up a good story. Maybe I will.
Below: Kent at home and scenes from San Carlos.
Postscript: I was about to post this when I got a call that there was a goat at our front door! I opened the door, and this is what I saw:
Goat at the door.
Kent says, “Dear, I said I want a BOAT, not a GOAT!
In April, we quoted Pam writing about the dinghy under the bed, when she was dreaming of taking off to sea again and leaving the South Dakota winter behind.
At the end of April, we finally got the old dinghy out on the Rio Grande. Getting it from the back of the car and carrying it to the water and out again was the hard part. Our trip was rather short at about 45 minutes from launch to take-out, but we did it! Paddling down the Rio Grande, we’d never know we were in the midst of a city of over 500,000. It was a little taste of life on the water. Then we went to San Francisco where waves rolled in from the Pacific. I made a short video, hoping whet (wet?) your interest.
We’ve recently had some lovely responses to We Ran Away to Sea. Geoff Boerne, the captain of Lo Entropy, a boat Kent and Pam encountered in Mexico in the 1990s, last week finally received the copy of the book we’d sent him at the end of February. Apparently it takes a long time to get a book to Denmark! He tells us he started reading on Friday evening and finished the book on Saturday afternoon, sad to have it come to an end. He also saw the book as not just a sailing book, but a love story, which I, too, think it is. He had much more to say, and, of course, identified with all the sailing bits. Thank you, Geoff!
There is more about Geoff and his current endeavors in today’s blog post. Check out what he and Peter Roberts are doing to help save our planet, by clicking the following link on my Caminobleu blog:
Kent will be giving a book talk: Saturday, June 29 from 1-2 p.m at the Juan Tabo branch of the Albuquerque Public Library.
He will also be selling and signing books with a few other authors on Saturday, July 6 at the lovely Garcia Street Books, Santa Fe, from 10-12 am. We hope to see some of our Santa Fe friends!
Three copies of the book are now available at the Albuquerque Public Library, and there is a waiting list! The call number is 813.54 KEDL. Please request more copies!
We Still Need More Reviews
Check out the new reviews on Amazon and on our webpage: Follow Kent’s author page by clicking on follow on Amazon. We need more reviews! Good Reads is another place to put reviews. Can you help us get up to 50? We’re almost there! See the help on posting reviews a bit farther down the page.
There was a sudden spike in book sales in early June for three days in a row. That was a welcome mystery, and we hope it keeps up.
I also added some new content to the book page on Amazon. But, oops! Only part of the content appears on the paperback page. It’s all there on the Kindle page, so look there for now, and I’ll try to fix it tomorrow.
Send us a picture of you reading the book
Please send us your picture of you or someone reading the book or seeing the book in interesting places.
Esther Jantzen, author of Walk: Jamie Bacon’s Secret MIssion on the Camino de Santiago, and founder of Elder Activist Readers, enjoying We Ran Away to Sea.
Return from Indonesia
We took a break from book stuff for three weeks in May and enjoyed a fascinating impromptu trip to Indonesia. We were so captivated by our experiences that we totally forgot to take pictures with the book in the many intriguing and scenic places we visited. Alas! But here we are, without the book!
Linnea and Kent riding high in the sky in Bali, Indonesia
Jacana Press 