Travelogue, Part 2
God this fricking blog. I love my new website which needed to be done after my last was DELETED in July of 2020, but the bugs in the blog are never ending and turn what is already a somewhat heavy lift, - writing about my journey - into something altogether not fun, with unpredictable issues nearly every time I try - UGH. Maybe the 4th time will be the charm of trying to post this update (I'm sitting on a balcony on the 12 floor of the Atlantis in Dubai, home to the world's largest water park. There also seems to be 2 military jets skimming the coast line for the last few hours. I need to find the name of these crows that crow a bunch in a really obnoxious.
Ok, here goes the cut and paste again -
I chose wisely, my reading for this trip. A book about Stanley finding Livingstone in the African jungles, a Bill Bryson short book about his visit to Nairobi, and Out of Africa, which I also watched on the plane over.
(insert pictures of books here, not available though)Lucas doesn’t get why I read about the place I’m at, but for me it’s a no brainer. Like understanding something about art before looking at paintings, like appreciating the finer parts of music while listening to a composition, reading about where you are traveling to adds texture to the experience, especially a place like Africa, where it can go unnoticed, undetected without prompts from another more studied observer.
It could be the ‘boma’ which is a structure that is made to protect homes and herds from the native thorn bushes, encircling the encampment with hard to penetrate thorns 1” or longer.
It could be a narrative from the 1850’s journal of Dr Livingstone, the fearless Briton obsessed with trying to find the source of the Nile, describing the impregnable vegetation of the western Tanzanian jungle as it leads to the Lake Victoria.
Few can pick up Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa without hearing Meryl’s Streeps cadence and accent as she begins the 7 Oscar winning movie with Robert Redford and others. Streeps intonation and pace seems perfectly pitched to capture the voice of Dinesen’s writing - without rush, mirroring the natural movements of both the tribes and the animals of the African Savanah - without a jerk, or quick movement to draw attention to oneself, in a world of predators.
I’m gone, and will be until July 3rd. We will have closed on 3 homes in that time - one resale of an early Ranch in Narrowsburg on Lake Ridge Road, a forgotten road that I picked up some land in 2008 and have continued to build on since.
Another is Ranch 3 ( I believe), our first sale at the Crest, a several hundred acre project that I bought from an investor/speculator that got tired of carrying it on his balance sheet for 13 years without much progress.
So the show must go on, even in the boss’s absence. In fact, it’s a good test of the team, which I know will do just fine since they are good people, take pride in what they do, and have shown in many instances years of loyalty and respect for both me, themselves, the customer, and all else who play a part from town building departments to all the other assorted factors/components of productions.