Phase 0-Day 2, A walk along Rio Segura

Today we decided to walk through the countryside rather than the village.  A bright and beautiful late afternoon it turned out to be as we walked along the Segura River.  Last September the Gota Fria hit us and the area we walked was totally inundated and the river burst through its channel walls, cutting our town off by flooding three out of four roads.

Anyway, other than noticing the repairs to infrastructure, one couldn't tell what had happened.  We just enjoyed the flowers and songbirds. 

If this page looks haphazard, it's because I haven't figured out how to reliably move images.  Oh, well...take it or leave it.

Spain: Easing Lockdown-Phase 0, Day 1

Here's a shot of Callosa de Segura taken at about the same time as the sunset one, below.  Top is today, the first day of the lockdown easing and the lower was taken on the actual day it started.  I had thought it was taken the day before, but we were out unknowingly. 
Anyway, Callosa hasn't changed, we have.  The world seems drab now, colorless, unsafe, arid.  While we were happy to be out wandering around, we felt alienated from those whom we encountered.  Hellos, if uttered, were muted, eyes averted fearful or distrustful.  We all kept our distance, easily, which was in stark comparison to photos I had seen of crowds in Madrid "distancing socially".  As if!  I wonder when the second wave will hit, even worse; what the second lockdown will do to us.

But, for now, we're soaring.

Lockdown in Spain-Day 48, 73rd birthday;House Arrest

This is what it feels like for us here in Spain.  Fortunately this is the last day of almost complete sequestration.  My birthday seemed pre-climactic, but then after seventy-two priors, what's the big deal?  It's the living in between which counts.  Tomorrow the in-between gets better as we will be allowed to exit our homes for other than absolute necessity. 

I'm going to fly over the cuckoo's nest.  

Tomorrow Isabel and I will go for an hour-long walk, but that will be after I do an hour's worth of cycling.  I wonder how that will feel after about a week of relative inactivity after the "great Everest Climb".  If it hurts, it will be a good hurt.

Lockdown in Spain-Day 47, limited freedom after tomorrow

This image was taken the day before lockdown started.  I think it had actually been implemented as the town was deserted when I walked through about two hours earlier.  I had walked Isabel to church, so it had to have been Saturday.  Anyway, the day after tomorrow we will be allowed one hour of outdoor travel each day.  We can do it between 0600 and 2300, will be allowed a one kilometer radius and can walk with one member of the household, but not be able to have contact with a third party.  I suppose we could shout across the street or wave at friends in their houses. 

It will be nice to have something to look forward to each day.  These past 47 days have seemed interminable and have blended into one long stream of tedium.  Prior to Lockdown my life was not exciting but had a sort of rhythm apart from the occasional trip away. 
Monday was mopping and shopping and I cooked, Tuesday maybe a bike ride and Is cooked, Wednesday a bike ride and lunch out with friends.  Thursday was my day to cook so odd jobs and reading or maybe a bike ride.  Friday was Spanish class, walk to the plaza and maybe a beer with friends while Is cooked and buy the lottery ticket which was going to make us rich.  (We had great plans for being rich.  We were going to live in Algorfa and live an easy relaxed life). The weekends were fraught with activity, namely the Saturday barbecue I cheffed and the Sunday dinner Is would create.  A bike ride was not unheard of on Sundays.  During the week, Is had her own distractions, T'ai Chi twice, Keep Fit once and Spanish lessons with a different teacher because she is more advanced than I.

Our only sorties during lockdown were three trips to the grocery store and two the drugstore for me.  Is did the same but also went to the card shop twice to mail things.  Our post office is closed indefinitely.  I will now start doing my grocery trips on Iron Hoss as it has the capacity to carry a good load.  I will either be exercising or going to the store on a bike because I don't own a car-depending where I am when I'm asked. 

Here's a shot of Iron Hoss taken during the 2018 Tip-to-Tip Tour of Maine.  It can hold quite a bit of cargo, particularly in the front bag which is hidden behind the blue "spoiler" I made from a granddaughter's roll-up sled.  Of particular importance is the pewter flask of snakebite medicine on the rear seat stay.  It warded off numerous snakes during the trip.

Lockdown in Spain-Day 46, entertainment

One time-killer I've employed is  Catch-and-Release swallow hunting.  I use my camera with long zoom set on 8 frames per second to try and catch images of the feeding swallows.  When the shutter release is pressed it sounds like a muffled machine-gun and the result is not always successful.  Of a few hundred "shots" I have only taken about three good images, and though I have set the shutter speed at 1/1000 per second, the images are still blurred. 

Another type of hunting I do is for flies.  We have a very annoying rounded wing-tip fly in this area.  They buzz around in small squadrons of anywhere up to five, very erratically and utterly unpredictable.  I use a swatter and have downed 92 since they started hatching about three weeks ago.  Most of the kills were in air combat, but I have ambushed a few resting on walls early in the morning.  I pile up the carcasses in a specific spot and the ants carry them away over time.  I feel I'm doing the ants a good deed.


Am awaiting a definitive news piece describing just how we are going to be allowed to wander.  I suppose a few more days of ignorance won't bother me.  A new book arrived today, but I just started the third in a trilogy by Ivan Doig about Scottish homesteaders in Montana around the turn of the 19th century.  I'd already read and listened (on National Public Radio) to one back in the 80s.  Finished that one today, and was surprised how little I had remembered.  It was good to re-read it, as it is obviously the link between the first and last.

Lockdown in Spain-Day 45, An article from the IRISH TIMES

Irish Times
April 25, 2020

By Fintan O’Toole

THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.
If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.
Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?
It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.
Abject surrender

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.
Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.
In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”
This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.
It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.
The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.
Fertile ground
But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.
Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.
And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.
That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.
As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.
Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

**********************************************************************************************************

Lockdown in Spain-Day 44, Envy the swallow

Meanderings of a mind in captivity:
The Spanish government has announced that it is considering allowing seniors to go out for walks and "exercise" around the beginning of May.  It's what I've been waiting for, pining for...right?  It's a small taste of freedom, after all this time, but why am I not ecstatic?  Is it fear that I might walk through a cloud of infection, or that I might crash my bike because I haven't ridden in so long and wind up in an hospital where there is a concentration of the virus?  Or is it resentment, not at the government, but at fate that I'm being offered this taste, when just forty-five days ago I had the whole feast?  Freedom is no longer the norm, no longer a right.  It has become a privilege to be doled out, albeit with good reason, by government whether enlightened or befuddled.

"Go with the flow." I tell myself, " Lie down baby, see what tomorrow brings."

Lockdown in Spain-Day 43, Who's feeding the birds?

Just before the lockdown, I was wandering around Orihuela, a city about 12 kliks away, looking for images.  As I was locking my bike to a building I became aware that pigeons were descending in groups to a corner nearby.  As I watched about fifty hovered and eventually landed on the sidewalk with no apparent reason.  So I set up my camera to catch the take-off in the event someone rounded the corner, and waited.  The pigeons began to get agitated and seemed to be looking in my direction.  I thought they were waiting for me to provide a handout.  Shortly, an elderly fellow in a housecoat passed me from behind and walked to the expectant flock and began doling out handfuls of rice.  When he was done, he walked over and we talked a while despite the language barrier.  It turned out he is a priest who lives around the corner and he feeds the flock daily at this that time.  He also told me that he feeds them twice on Sundays because the bars and restaurants close after lunch and the birds have less opportunity to feed.  As soon as the lockdown ends, I'm going back to see how he's fared over the intervening months.

Here are a couple of drake mallards who approached me when I was taking some shots along the river Segura which flows past near the pigeon corner.  Again, I failed in the feed department and they departed in disgust.  I played with the color and found that I liked the way the ripples showed with this treatment.  The water was not really that hue.  I'll make sure that when I return, I'll have something to toss.

Lockdown in Spain-Day 42, where to now?

Early morning Day 43, looking back at yesterday, Day 42, trying to differentiate from Day 1; what is different?  It's warmer, the sparrow chicks are noisier, construction on the new medical center has started again and can be glimpsed between the buildings in front of my window.  Children under fourteen are allowed to roam while supervised by an adult for an hour.  Adults under sixty who are healthy and don't have children under fourteen or dogs may not.  Adults over sixty who do have dogs may walk the dogs until, until...  What self-respecting police officer is going to ask someone whether his dog has crapped and if so, why is he still walking away from home?  Those of us who are bereft of dogs or minor children are a sub-class, victims of discrimination pigeon-holed without concern for our need for exercise, freedom of movement or just plain mental health. 

Most of us over sixty and healthy understand the need for social distancing, masking,  preventative practices, etc.  That the powers who are have not relaxed our sequestration even the slightest is beginning to gnaw at me.  We have another fourteen days of lockdown to look forward to unless they announce another extension.  I will spend my seventy-third birthday in virtual captivity.  I will have television, telephone, the internet, lots of food, booze, books and myriad other amusements but I won't have the freedom to take a walk.  They have taken away my birthday, something I used to joke about.  Then I think of forgetting my nineteenth birthday in 1966 and have to smile.

I was on the road, a college dropout, staying in the YMCA in Billings, North Dakota.  I had a 99-day Greyhound Bus ticket, about twenty dollars to my name and an invitation to a family reunion at the home of one of my college friends.  Steve was back at the University of Hawaii and I had been invited to represent him at the reunion.  His high school girlfriend picked me up about noon and drove me to the family home where the party was just getting started.  It was a pleasant time, friendly conversation and country western music playing constantly.  It was interesting that The Ballad Of The Green Beret was one song played repeatedly.  Toward the end of lunch and the clearing of tables, the whole family broke into song as Steve's mother exited the kitchen carrying a birthday cake with a few lit candles.  I looked around for a child of the approximate age but found none and was completely surprised when she sat the cake on the table in front of me. 

Mrs. B had spoken with my parents who had met Steve at my old rooming house after they arrived on a surprise visit.  The surprise was theirs when they found that I was not there, having left a week earlier, heading for L.A., Oregon, and wherever else the ticket would take me.  Steve informed them of my plans to roam the mainland, but that he had asked me to stop in Billings to see his parents.  So, after a tense collect phone call to my parents' hotel in Chicago, their reasoning and my imminent poverty convinced me to head to Maine.  The cake was really good.

Lockdown in Spain-Day 41, other places I'd like to be

La Lapa-a small town in Extremadura.  We had just left Zafra where we spent our first night on our way to Portugal.  Why Zafra?  I liked the sound of it and it was about the right distance for a break from driving. 

These falls are somewhere in Aragon, don't ask me where.  All I remember is that they are in a beautiful park where I took many images. 

Another Aragon scene

Lockdown in Spain-Day 40, another extension

Bleak!  Lifeless!  Uninteresting!  That's what's ahead if we don't find some silver lining in this cloud of isolation.  Yes, I know it's the right thing to do.  No, I won't demonstrate against it like those idiots in the US.  Maybe, we'll be safer if we get to wander around on the 10th of May. 

My virtual climb up Mt. Everest is nearly done.  I have three days to meet my original goal of 2925 flights of stairs, and only about 104 flights per day to do.  Piece of cake.  Now to find some other addiction to replace the self-afflicted one of stair-climbing.

I wonder how this fellow has fared during this pandemic.  He is a priest, probably retired, who feeds this flock of pigeons daily.  We've spoken a couple of times, but with his rapid, regional speech and my embryonic grasp of the language, very little is understood.  I did get that he feeds them extra on Sundays and holidays because the bars and restaurants aren't open as long, if at all.  When this is all over, I'm heading back to Orihuela to say, "Hola" again.

Lockdown in Spain-Day 39, Farewell to "Ching" Luzuriaga

A Time To Mourn

The next phrase in Ecclesiastes 3 is "A Time To Dance".  That is the farthest thing from my mind right now.  My childhood friend, Frances Mae Luzuriaga was one of the 435 deaths in Spain in the last 24 hours.  

"Ching" was literally the girl next door.  She was two years younger than I and went to a girls school far from my boys school.  Two years difference when you are 12 to 16 is a great difference and as a result we hung out with different crowds.  We were always friendly but never close, and after I moved to Spain, we did connect a couple of times though we lived quite a distance apart.  Even so, the news of her infection and resulting death from coronavirus has affected me deeply.  

Aside from the fact that, to my knowledge, she was a really nice person, I have to wonder why I am grieving.  I have always had a problem relating to and reacting to death.   Growing up in a violent country, not the US, where sudden unexpected death came frequently could be one reason.  Having two cousins die by gunshot and being close by as my grandfather and mother were dying likely thickened my skin to the pain.  Being in the Army during the Vietnam War, though I never left the States, and being inundated with news, images and training for combat as well as the domestic riots didn't help.  And finally twenty years on the street dealing with death and near death on a fairly regular basis hardened my soul, or so I thought.   

Am I grieving for her, or for my generation, or for myself?  Having grown accustomed to the knowledge that age is catching up to me I pride myself in the fact that I can ignore or minimize the aches and pains and work around the physical limitations.  But this unexpected pandemic is decimating my generation, as well as others.  That causes me pain, now personally, but generally to know that it rips the hearts out of all the family of the deceased, the younger generations.  

And then there are the questions.  Why is this happening?  Is this the doing of the God in its wisdom?

I know the Catholic answer, but I have rejected Catholicism and, for that matter, all organized religion.  So, disregarding the vengeful god theory, and not being able to believe that a loving god could do this, in what can I believe?  My unenlightened belief is that God/god is an organizational power who designed and created...Creation (for lack of a better name).  Why?  For it's own amusement?  That could be the reason behind freedom of choice.  It couldn't be for "love of Man" because Man doesn't necessarily love back, and in fact often returns the opposite.  Besides, if a god is all-knowing then why bother to create if you know what is going to happen?  

Certainly there are many truly wicked people being killed by this virus.  They deserve it.  There are the mildly or occasionally bad people who deserve some sort of punishment...Oh, screw it, kill them too, but not as painfully.  But what about the innocents, the good people, those who made one or a few mistakes but atoned for their sins already.  Why?  Don't give me the "Test of Faith" answer.  I can't point to a better reason to lose faith.  Has God/god tired of creation, of mankind and Earth, and is now putting an end to it all?  

Been rambling on too much and gotten away from the point.  Goodbye, Ching, I believe you're going to a better place but I think it is too soon.

Lockdown in Spain-Day 38, Flights to US cancelled

That was the good news today.  Ordinarily it wouldn't be, but now that they have cancelled, I can apply for a refund or a ticket voucher. That poses a few questions.  Money in hand...someday versus a chit which holds a much more expensive but just as uncomfortable seat for me on a flight...someday?

Who knows when regular flights will resume?  I expect numerous airlines will have folded or shrunk into much less frequent and infinitely more expensive budget hops.  With them all hemorrhaging millions on a daily basis, not even the American taxpayer can keep them in any semblance of the "service" they were.  I have read of the daily routine necessary to keep the planes in flight-ready status, the time and the personnel required just to keep them safe on the ground.  Don't expect the honest corporations to keep your safety first in the list of concerns.

My plan is to wait a significant period after regular flights resume.  That way, hopefully, the least safe and more shoddily maintained aircraft will have failed (on the ground would be nice) and be weeded out.  Maybe I'll look into a tramp freighter.   I like the idea of going ashore for a beer and winding up in some other faraway port a few months later...

Lockdown in Spain-Day 37, Not solitary

I sure am glad that I have a cellmate in isolation and hate to imagine what it would be like being solitary.  My one complaint is that she's beaten me at scrabble nine out of nine games.  I've lived alone in the past, for extended periods, even, but I always had the privilege of going out into the world. Thinking about solitary made me remember some of these photos:

Every time I see an older person out walking, I think "Good on you, mate!"  I remember visiting my parents in Brookline and going out on their balcony so that my pipe smoke wouldn't pollute their flat.  There was an elderly fellow who would slowly work his way up the street every morning with a walker, making what looked like painful progress.  His fortitude impressed me as he did it in all sorts of weather.  And then he stopped appearing.  

Sometimes there's solitary because you want to shut the world out and be alone with your thoughts.

Or solitary because you just ate a big meal and need a siesta before going back to work.

Lockdown in SpainDay 36, Experimenting with HDR

This is written on Day 37, as last night was TV night.  We're watching the last season of Homeland, a disturbing series which is all to close to the truth, or what leaks out of Washington and can be distilled into "truth".  Who really knows? 

Anyway, on to happier topics or, at least, more interesting topics?  In preparation for the Covid-torpedoed trip to Turin, I bought a new digital camera, actually two and a lot more equipment as well.  I think I posted previously that of my three existing cameras, one crapped out, the other couldn't do what I wanted it to, and the third was fine, just a rather specialized foul-weather, rough-activity camera.  Along with the cameras, I subscribed to LightRoom, an organizational and procedural set of software for editing and manipulating images.  I finally got to the point where I could start experimenting, so started with HDR or High Dynamic Range imaging.  It is what produces those unbelievable landscapes and fantastic color photos that look too real to be real.  Below are a couple of shots taken during a thunder shower near dusk..

On the left is the best exposure of three, bracketed to underexpose by two stops and overexpose by two.  It was merged with the other two to come up with the second image which has been cropped.

The final result can be better, but I was impressed with what can be done without really knowing what I was doing.  Back to the lab.

Lockdown in Spain-Day 35, (written on #36)

"Nevermore"

Quoth the Fat-headed bird when I asked what today will be like.  Then I asked what will go on today that didn't happen yesterday and he answered, "Nevermore", a reply which afeared me to reflect upon the morrow. 

Lockdown in Spain-Day 34, The orchard road revisited

One of our favorite walks is on a back road we call The Orchard Road.  It is about a 2 km walk, not challenging, but usually rewarding.  These photos were all taken on the same day.  I wish it could have been today but, no,  it was a few years ago.

These lemons should have been picked a month or so previously.  On the right of the picture, you can see this year's buds about to open in a couple of days.













Not my favorite artichoke photo, but those
are takenin the heat of late spring or summer,
when they bloom.  They taste better this time of year.

Lockdown in Spain-Day 33, some random photos Paris to Lisbon

Shot on the Paris Metro a few years ago when I met Dylan who had a conference there.  While he was working, I toured museums and wandered around.  I did some shopping on the Champs-Elysees, buying a tiny piece of lingerie for the obscene price of €85.  Skipped lunch that day.

After hours, he took me around a lot of the areas he had haunted back in the day when he studied there.  At 0430 one morning we were wandering along the Left Bank looking for a cocktail bar he knew of, and I wondered just how much studying he did back then.  We found it and I passed on the more exotic offerings, settling for a shot of Jose Cuervo.  I paid €8.50, over half what a bottle would cost in the US at the time. 

The coup de grace came at Orly airport on the way out when I spent another €8.50 for a 33cl/11.64 oz. bottle of water.

Paris will never see my shadow again.

This fellow was a reveler at the Orihuela Medieval Festival back around 2014.  That was the year that Shan, John and Jordan toured it with us.  The wind was so strong that it picked up the blacksmith tent with all the hanging iron and blew it down the street.

This was at a restaurant in Calasparra, during a coach trip to the park and chapel in a mountain. 

Three guys relaxing on the waterfront in Lisbon, taken in 2015 at the start of my bike ride from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.












Not thinking much about the lockdown, at least trying not to.  I've been going through old photos and reliving some of the great times past.

Lockdown in Spain-Day 32, A couple of quiet places

This was shot through the front window of Grace Neill's pub which was advertised as the oldest in Northern Ireland.  I was not able to quench my thirst there as it was "closed until further notice".  It was really quiet.


















        This was a small stream, a tributary of the Saco River in
Maine.  I love tiny overlooked spots like this.

This is a spot where I spent many, many memorable hours, both quiet and raucous.  The wind chime is one I made for "Howieland", my partner Howard Antworth's camp in Bowerbank, Maine.  It is on the less settled shore of Sebec lake, home of many togue and salmon we either lost or released over the years.  I took this photo the last time Howard and I were there together, my last hunting trip back around 2016.  Howard has passed on and I've given away my shotgun and sold the fishing gear.  I bet the togue still tinkles in the breeze, though.

Lockdown in Spain-Day 31, a challenge from Gareth Danks

I've been viewing a lot of videos and tutorials about  "street" photography, a genre which seems to have been my favorite over the years.  I've taken many more landscape and travel photos, shots of fish caught, game shot and the ensuing feasts, but what I enjoy most is capturing people as they live their lives. 

Anyway, one of the photographers I've been following, Gareth Danks, was challenged by a colleague of his to do a "lockdown" challenge.  This consists of three self portraits illustrating life in isolation,  one's reaction to it and a "quirky" selfie.  The challenge was then opened up to all, and the results were to be put on Instagram.  Even though I don't subscribe to Instagram, I thought the idea was interesting, so set out to do it. 

 This one is in my sanctuary, where I spend most of my waking lockdown hours other than those I spend climbing the stairs.  I found an old self portrait I painted, a composite of a scene in Andalusia and a shot taken of me in front of El Greco's home in Toledo.  I'm wearing the hat so that those who don't recognize the similarity make the connection anyway.

I shot this strange scene while cycling in Scotland a few years ago.  At first, I caught the figure out of the corner of my eye and almost crashed.  Good thing I didn't, as I had already done so and was cycling with three broken ribs, hoping to find an hospital or clinic soon.  As it turned out, I didn't get to one until about five days later, in Bangor, Northern Ireland.  Let me give you a hint; don't go to the Emergency Room in Bangor on a Saturday night.