North America

Mark, Pam, & me toasting Mark’s parents!

Whew! This was a whirlwind; after leaving Savannah we made five stops in three days. Our first goal was St. Augustine, but first we had to make a lunch stop in Jacksonville. At some point after leaving Duluth, with the route all planned out, an old graduate school classmate with whom we’ve had very limited contact over the years noticed on Facebook that Mark & I seemed to travel a lot. “If you’re ever in Jacksonville,” she wrote, “let me know!” Well, Jacksonville is right on the way between Savannah & St. Augustine, so a couple of days out I suggested lunch.

It was fun to catch up with Mary Beth, however briefly. Just a brief stop, but given that the last time we saw her she was single and living in Boston, and now she’s married with two kids and has been in Jacksonville for 15 years, it was definitely time to catch up.

Mark, Mary Beth, and me after a too-short lunch. She was teasing me about wearing a sweater in Florida, but I like being warm….

Then it was on to St. Augustine, “the oldest continuously occupied European-established settlement within the borders of the continental United States” as Wikipedia puts it so precisely. The original goal was just to see this old colonial city and spend the night but after planning it we learned that one of Mark’s old bosses – the campaign manager for Tom Harkin’s presidential campaign that was Mark’s introduction to the Harkin world – lived there. So we had dinner with Tim after spending a bit of time exploring to town.

Our first impression was that we were surprised just how touristy it was. I mean, I’d certainly heard of St. Augustine but I never thought of it as a particular destination. Well, it is. Founded in 1565 on the feast day of St. Augustine, it served as the capital of Spanish Florida for over 200 years. Besides the old history the more recent landmark was Flagler College, founded in 1968 and headquartered in what was once the grand old 19th century Ponce de Leon Hotel. Mary Beth had raved about the architecture and it was definitely worth passing through.

The old Ponce de Leon Hotel, developed by the industrialist and railroad baron Henry Flagler and now home to the highly regarded Flagler College

An interior shot of the old hotel

From St. Augustine it was down to The Villages, an age-restricted community in central Florida, largely to see Mark’s Uncle Bill & Aunt Debbie. We were both a bit skeptical of The Villages; we’re not really ready for a retirement community yet. Still, we were both a bit surprised by how nice it was. The Villages is a big and growing place; it has been listed by the Census Bureau twice this decade already as the fasted-growing city in the U.S. As Uncle Bill & Aunt Debbie showed us around it was obvious there was a lot to do and that it would be easy to be a genuinely active older person there. In fact, the one night we were there Mark & I went to a steak place for dinner where at 8:00 PM or so the bar was surprisingly full and buzzy. In an old folks home! We’re not ready to buy anything there yet, but I have a definite appreciation for it that was previously lacking.

Here we are with Uncle Bill and Aunt Debbie

One of the utterly amusing parts of being in The Villages is that pretty much everyone gets around in these souped-up golf carts, whether they’re playing golf or not. Here’s Uncle Bill in his cute little vehicle after our tour of The Villages.

The next stop was supposed to be Fort Myers, but again we learned of someone to visit en route. This time it was Mark’s Aunt Nancy, the recently widowed youngest sister of Mark’s mother. I’d heard a lot about Aunt Nancy over the years but had never met her; Mark, in fact, hadn’t seen her in perhaps 40 years. So we stopped at her winter residence in Spring Hill (summers are way up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula), went out to a late breakfast, and caught up on the last four decades. She seemed like an utterly lovely lady, though the big takeaway is how difficult it must be to lose a spouse after thirty-plus years. Fortunately I’m older than Mark so he’s the one who’s going to have to deal with that!

Aunt Nancy with Mark & me

And then it was down to Fort Myers, where our great friend Pam lives. Just one night, but a great night hanging out in her house on a golf course, catching up on life and talking politics. Instead of going out for dinner Pam whipped out a great appetizer course, stirred some mean martinis, and then we grilled and roasted a simple dinner. Life doesn’t get better.

That was our race down Florida, then; a lot of family and old friends. Next stop is Miami Beach, one of our favorite places in the world, for a week on the beach. Sweet!

Set in the oldest public space in the U.S., here’s a Spanish history lesson for you. In 1812 Spain – which at that time still controlled Florida – briefly had a constitutional government. The new government sent a decree to towns throughout the empire to rename their central squares Constitution Plaza and to build a monument there. St. Augustine complied. In 1814, then, the monarchy regained power and ordered all the monuments destroyed. This time St. Augustine wasn’t so compliant and they kept theirs. This is believed to be the only Constitution Monument from that campaign left in the world!

We stayed, naturally, at St. Augustine’s St. George Inn, right on St. George Street

Another picture of Flagler College

One more

And the entrance to the hotel/college

Another grand building in St. Augustine

Aunt Debbie & Uncle Bill after lunch in The Villages

Bill & I are both Navy veterans, so we figured this was meant for us. And yes, I wore the t-shirt in honor of all these Michiganders!

What passes for a thoroughfare in The Villages

Enjoying hors d’oeuvres in Pam’s screened-in porch. We were honored to learn that this was the inaugural event for the new furniture!

Pam & Mark toasting my grill work. Or something else maybe.

Just one of an untold number of beautiful old southern buildings in Savannah

A short post here for a short two-day stop in Savannah. For many years now I’ve heard of what a beautiful city Savannah was and I’ve wanted to see for myself. As we plotted out our Duluth to Key West road trip, we figured this would be the one new city that we’d go to just to see it, no friends to visit or anything.

It was totally worth it. People weren’t lying; Savannah is an incredibly beautiful city, evoking all the charming and iconic visions of the Old South. Of course the Old South wasn’t quite so charming for all the people who lived here; one is reminded that Savannah was Gen. Sherman’s goal in his “March to the Sea” across Georgia in 1864. To our good fortune, and presumably theirs, the city surrendered to the Union forces before they had the chance to destroy it.

What southern city would miss the chance to honor the traitors who tried to destroy our country so they could continue to own slaves?

Sadly I didn’t get to enjoy or discover the city as much as I would have liked. On our last day in Atlanta I somehow developed a truly nasty blister on one of my feet and really just couldn’t walk for a couple of days. Still, I somehow managed to limp around a bit to enjoy the grand old buildings, the live oak trees (the name “live oak” refers to oaks that are evergreens, keeping their leaves year-round) with hanging Spanish moss, and at least a couple of the 22 squares in the historic district that give the city so much of its charm.

One of those squares, Chippewa Square, deserves special mention. I was pretty excited to just stumble on Chippewa Square, since my family is Chippewa. What the heck is this park doing honoring my very northern Plains tribe? Turns out it wasn’t. Instead it was a misspelled park honoring the soldiers from the War of 1812 who fought in the Battle of Chippawa in Chippawa, Ontario, today a part of the Canadian city of Niagara Falls. Too bad. One other charming story about Chippewa Square: it’s the spot where Forrest Gump famously sat on a park bench. How cool is that?

Oh, and speaking of charm, I loved being in a restaurant and hearing people order beer to go. Seriously. Us northerners take so much pride in being so much more progressive than those damned southerners. Go ahead and try to order beer to go in any of the great progressive cities I’ve lived in up north. Hell, until just a few years ago there were no sidewalk restaurants in Cambridge because the city wouldn’t allow beer or wine to be served in sidewalk restaurants.

Two days wasn’t enough for Savannah, particularly given how lame I was during those two days, but that was all the time we gave ourselves. Now it was off on another whirlwind schlep through Florida down to Miami Beach, thought of by some of us as the Holy Land.

A statue of James Oglethorpe, founder of both the Georgia Colony and of Savannah, in Chippewa Square. He was also the designer of the set of squares around Savannah that give so much of the charm to the city. The statue is by Daniel Chester French, the same guy who designed the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial.

Parks and beautiful buildings

And one more

A big fountain

Easter Sunday morning in the Atlanta Botanical Garden with our friend Susan

Atlanta in April – and it feels like summer already!

We had two friends to see and three days to do it in. Officially Mark had never been in Georgia before – connecting through the airport doesn’t count – so we figured it was worth three days. And indeed it was even though one of our friends ultimately was sidelined with back trouble so we couldn’t see him (getting old sucks). The three days with our friend Susan Shaer, though, was fantastic.

We were close friends with Susan back in Massachusetts, but not long after we left to start our world adventure she sold her house in Arlington to buy smaller places in Denver and Atlanta where her daughters, and perhaps more importantly her grand-children, live. And after these exciting years we had a lot of catching up to do.

After driving down from Nashville we had our first lunch in Atlanta at Bistro Niko, a very respectable French bistro (except that it was about four times the size of anything you’d find in Paris). We ate at the bar and quickly found ourselves in a fun and lively conversation with David and Kelly, locals who were delightfully liberal. Such fun!

Lunches, dinners, drinks – we did it all. Susan is a fascinating woman who had an impressive career working in politics and non-profits. She ultimately survived two unfortunate marriages and these days is thriving on her own spending winters in Atlanta near one daughter and summers in Denver near the other.

Lots to catch up on. But even with all that time with Susan we had a lot of time on our own to explore at least pieces of Atlanta. First, the mistake. Mark spends a lot of time researching where we should stay and based on that research chose a nice Starwood property in the Buckhead neighborhood. A place you’re supposed to be able to walk around and all that. Hah! You can walk as long as you like walking along broad, busy, noisy thoroughfares. And everything that you want to see is miles away. I actually did a bunch of those five- and six-mile walks to get to various places and back … and ended up paying the price when I got a really nasty blister on the last day. Word to the wise: stay in Midtown, not Buckhead!!

Now, what was there to see in Atlanta? Besides some really good restaurants, we enjoyed the Martin Luther King Jr. Center, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, and the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

The boyhood home of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was then known as Michael King, Jr.

The King Center was good, and we were there just days before the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination. I always cry when I see a tape of that last speech in Memphis the night before he was killed. You know the one:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live – a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

You worry that fifty years later in a land where white nationalists are equated with people protesting racism, the promised land maybe ain’t what was promised.

The tombs

And then we went to the Carter Library. In some ways for me that was even a bigger deal. That was the first presidency that I experienced as an adult, and of course the great Walter Mondale played a big role in it.

Before Carter’s presidency, Vice Presidents were pretty much just so much office furniture. Carter was the first president to give his Vice President real work; thus Mondale was he first consequential Vice President and essentially the model of the modern Vice President. And for what it’s worth, this isn’t a bad legacy.

There were two exhibits in particular that I found striking. One was a 10-minute video of a “day in the life” of the president, showing the many meetings, discussions, memos, and calls Carter dealt with on just one ordinary day; truly an impressive array of issues to deal with. The other was a detailed review of the Camp David accords, 13 days of intense meetings with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin that were deep, deep in the details of that historic conflict but that led to the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt that has held to this day.

What was so striking in particular about these exhibits was the juxtaposition of Carter – trained as a nuclear physicist – handling these difficult issues in extraordinary detail and sensitivity, compared to the current piece of shit in the White House. Utterly inconceivable that Trump would ever have intelligent discussions about the minutiae of transportation policy and energy policy and education policy, or could break away from Fox News to spend 13 days hashing out a successful peace treaty in the Middle East. I always thought Jimmy Carter was a good man, but I also recognize that he had distinct shortcomings as a president. Compared the current incumbent, though, he was a giant.

A replica of Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office

Enough ranting about politics; I usually prefer to save that for pre-dinner drinks with Mark.

Atlanta, though, was good. We have quickly leapt from winter in Duluth through spring in early summer here, where the daytime temperature on Easter Sunday was in the low 80s. From here it’s east to Savannah and then south into Florida. Lots of driving but it’s been a great way to visit with old friends.

Mark and Susan in the Botanical Garden posing in front of a glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly

And another picture of Mark & Susan. We were there relatively early on Easter Sunday. The crowds would arrive later as church let out, but for a while we had pretty much free range of the place.

Enough color for you?

Pink Jim with pink buds

More from the Botanical Garden

I have no idea whose house this is, but as I was walking back from the Botanical Garden I thought it was kind of pretty

And then there was the Carter Presidential Library. I expected to like it, but instead I loved it.

The grounds at the Center are gorgeous

This was interesting. I thought Carter pretty much came out of nowhere to enter politics, but in fact his father, James Earl Carter, Sr., had served in the Georgia House. I love the line in the letter “While it would be a waste of your time to go into details as to what I would hope to accomplish in the Legislature when there is no way to forecast the issues which will arise …”. In other words, I’m a good person so just trust me. That seems so simple.

And then there was a photo exhibit of portraits by Yousuf Karsh, an Armenian survivor of the Turkish genocide who moved to Canada (though he died at age 93 in Boston when we lived there). He took this iconic portrait of Winston Churchill, making the great man look every bit the bulldog anti-Nazi he was. The background of the picture – which I read about in William Manchester’s three-volume biography of Churchill – is that after a speech in Canada he learned that Karsh had been told Churchill would sit for him. He didn’t want to but said “OK, you have two minutes,” or words to that effect. Karsh wanted a picture without Churchill’s ever-present cigar but Churchill didn’t want to give it up. The photographer then just reached over, grabbed the cigar out of his hand, and quickly snapped the photo. Churchill was pissed … and this was the result. One of the great portraits ever taken.