Tag: travel

Hit the Road, Jack!

Kent with a parrot in San Augustin, Colombia in 2019.

When Kent and I volunteered as hospitaleros at the pilgrim albergue in El Burgo Ranero on the Meseta in Spain in October 2016, we had a morning playlist that got the pilgrims up and out so we could clean before the next pilgrims arrived. The final song was “Hit the Road, Jack,” and “don’t come back, no more more, no more no more, no more!”
After the last pilgrim boogied out the door, we listened to this and other songs on the playlist while we cleaned the bathrooms, wiped tomato sauce off the kitchen tiles, and swept and mopped the floors. You can listen, too:


Hit the Road, Jack

Camino Sign on the Meseta, Spain

Camino Markers on the Meseta near El Burgo Ranero

We’ll be hitting the road, too in the next couple of weeks. First, we have three nights enjoying the opera in Santa Fe, catching up with old friends and some favorite operas, La Bohème, Rigoletto,and Die Walküre (click to listen)

Beginning on Monday, August 25, we’ll be on the road for almost two weeks, with stops in Denver and Fort Collins, CO; an overnight in Lander, WY; then on to Big Sky, MT; Sheridan, WY; and Frisco, CO. We’ll be catching up with friends and family in most of those places, too.

If any of you are along the way and would like to see us, just holler or reply to this email.  

We’ll have a copies of We Ran Away to Sea with us.

Big Horn Mountains, near Sheridan, WY

Good news about the book!

Earlier this week, I researched Amazon’s categories and keywords, making a few adjustments. To my amazement, in the past week, our sales have increased from just under one per day to two per day, and moved into the top 10 (varies from day today) in the Sailing Narratives category. Since then, I’ve also adjusted the keywords. We’ll see if that makes a difference, too. There’s a lot to learn.

Book, booklet, and medal

Recommended Sailing Books

Desperate Voyage

Kent has been writing book reviews (under name Kent on Amazon). He recently returned to the classic Desperate Voyage (1949)  by John Caldwell, who sailed across the Pacific from Panama to Australia singlehanded after World War II to unite with his bride. He was perhaps even more ignorant of sailing than Kent was, and the book is a sometimes hilarious, always compelling read.

Cape Horn: One Man’s Dream, One Woman’s Nightmare

Kent also finished Cape Horn, by Reanne Hemingway-Douglass. Its subtitle: One Man’s Dream: One Woman’s Nightmare intrigued me. Kent’s review is under the name Kent on Amazon. I thought that would have been a great subtitle for We Ran Away to Sea. Or, maybe we should have subtitled it A Love Story?
We found these titles on the Money for Mangos sailing blog which has a nice short list of great sailing adventure books.  I suggested they add We Ran Away to Sea to a future list.  See Money for Mangos list below, and enjoy reading!

Money for Mangos: Best Sailing Adventure Books

Audio Book

One review of the audio book (available through Amazon Audible). We don’t know who CHS is, but thank you! 5.0 out of 5 stars, Great adventure. Impressed with AI narrator.
 As soon as the audiobook was available, I purchased it. Enjoyed going on this adventure with the authors. I learned sailing can be a lot of work. I was very impressed with AI narrator. — CHS

We’ve got more news … maybe some new books …but this is already long, so check back in September.

Enjoy the Rest of August!

The Dinghy Under the Bed

                The dinghy with mast in the Caribbean                                

One of my favorite passages of Pam’s writing is the “The Dinghy Under the Bed.” Unlike her letters which were sometimes hastily written on a rocking boat, this was a polished piece, probably intended for publication. It is now included in Part 2: Between the Boats.

After listing the sailing paraphernalia stored in their South Dakota guest room closet Pam describes the inflatable dinghy that lives under the bed and is their most important purchase next to the “mother ship.”

My startled guests tell me it looks like the pale, flabby remains of some unidentifiable monster.

Although many readers feel that Pam reluctantly went along with Kent’s dream of returning to a life at sea, this passage expresses her longing, too. She was writing on a cold rainy day in October, not so different from early March, when winter seems to drag on forever, and we long to cast off on a new adventure as spring approaches.

            After the mother ship herself, the dinghy, a lovely new roll-up, is our largest purchase and represents much more than a dollar value. Our future home, a 31-foot steel sloop pulled ignominiously out of the water in Duluth, Minnesota, is wrapped now in her winter cover. It would be a long seven-hour drive through uncertain midwestern weather to assure ourselves that our dream has some substance. But the dinghy is here, living quietly like a friendly, elderly dog beneath the bed. I sometimes think I can hear it sigh a little wistfully, just as I do, for the time we’ll both be at sea.

* * *

            It’s a long and frustrating process to move from a landlocked South Dakota job and home to the sea. It’s also a lonely process, for none of our friends share or even understand our dream. But the dinghy, peacefully resting beneath the bed, silently encourages us to keep dreaming.

Keep on dreaming, Dear Readers, and  Happy Spring!

The dinghy afloat on the Rio Grande

Home again and an upcoming event

Welcome to 2024! We are home from our six weeks in Scandinavia, Finland, Estonia, and Latvia, finishing with two days each in Berlin and Amsterdam. We met wonderful people (many helped us when we were lost, which happened a lot!), spent Christmas with families in Sweden, and enjoyed time on boats, trains, and buses. We loved the beautiful snow and endured some rain, dark days, icy walking, and record-breaking low temperatures.

Snowy night outside of the opera house in Riga, Latvia

Our “seat of the pants” travel had some surprises. The weather was record-breaking cold by the time we reached Tallinn, Estonia, which was beautiful in the snow with the Christmas market still going in full swing when we arrived on New Year’s Day. But, we soon realized we weren’t going to have time to see all the Baltic countries and make our way through Poland and Germany to Amsterdam unless we traveled nonstop, so we found a patient travel agent in Tallinn, who booked airline tickets from Riga, Latvia to Berlin for us.

We took a bus to Riga where we stayed in a hotel near the Latvia National Opera house. We had heard that the Latvia Opera was outstanding, and we were fortunate to get tickets to a stunning performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. We left snowy Riga before the first light in the continuing all-night snowfall. In Berlin, we rode buses and trams and visited two outstanding museums that were free on the first Sunday of the month.

Inside the Latvia National Opera House

Stairs to nowhere, at the Riga airport

Enchanting pastoral scene by Jacob Philipp Hackert (1737-1807) in the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Berlin Hauptbahnhof (central train staion)

First view of Amsterdam, looking back toward the train station

We took the train to Amsterdam, where we stayed in a lovely, quirky old canal house hotel with stairs that were almost like climbing a ladder.  We spent an entire day in the Rijksmuseum, where I loved watching the docents working with school children. One energetic young man had the children so excited by the details he pointed out in Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” that they stood up, crowding around him to get a better look. Even though I didn’t understand Dutch, I, too, discovered details I’d never noticed before.

Home at last, we’re plunged into taking care of things ignored for six weeks, connecting with friends and family, and working on Kent’s Oasis talk, which is going to be brilliant!

In some ways, he succeeded; in others, not. Kedl reveals what he learned about himself and the world during seven years of adventure – crossing the Atlantic, cruising the Caribbean, sailing through the Great Lakes; and traveling overland through parts of Central and South America. Listen and learn about the grand experiment.Kent Kedl is the author of We Ran Away to Sea: A Memoir and Letters. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Oregon and taught at South Dakota State University for 22 years. After returning to land in 2000, he taught philosophy for two more years in South Dakota. He moved to Albuquerque in 2011

For more information and to register click on the Oasis link below. Class number is 224, Cost is $12 plus a minimal registration fee to join Oasis


Oasis

Book Reviews

See new reviews of We Ran Away to Sea posted in the book review section.

Also, good news! The book is now available at the Albuquerque Public Library and there is a waiting list for the two paperback copies we donated: The call number is 813.54 KEDL. Please request they order more copies!

If you know any place that would like to schedule a book talk, please let us know.