On The Road 2009: March 2009

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

And finally... Thank You!

It remains now before Christine and I hit the road again heading north for home to say some "Thank You"s to all the people who have helped along the way and made this journey possible...

Thank you to ...
Susan Snow & Wade Howie and Olivia who rescued me in the initial crisis and twice provided shelter for me (and Sean) at their home in The Beaches area of Toronto...
Frank Baker and his daughter Cindy for their warm hospitality in Lowell, Massachusetts, and to Mac Murray of Hopedale, Massachusetts for introducing me to them;
Ed Farley for his guidance and help in Lowell;
John & Jill Gilbert in Brooklyn, New York for their warm welcome and hospitality, and to John's niece, Diane Hill for putting us in touch;
Frank & Debby Fortkamp in Brunswick, Maryland for their hospitality and arranging transport for Sean and myself to get to Washington D.C. on the day of Barak Obama's Inauguration;
Brother Paul Quenon and the monks at Gethsemani Monastery in Kentucky for enabling our visit there;
Diana Boylston and Wesley Clark for their forbearance (we arrived after 2 a.m.) and warm hospitality in New Orleans and for helping us find William Burroughs' house in Algiers, also for introducing us to "Jane" who ensured we didn't get lost again ... or when we did she "recalculated!"; thank you to Diana's uncle, Jonathan Montaldo, for introducing us to them;
Misty & Brian Hopper in Austin, Texas for their warm hospitality late in the night and to Christie Manners for putting us in contact with them;
Ed & Penny Moul in Palm Desert, California for providing a port in a storm at no notice and for their safe haven and warm hospitality as I/we passed back and forth through the valley of the windmills;
David & Anne-Ly Crump for their warm hospitality at the end of the road in Montara, California (just south of San Francisco);
the monks at the New Camaldoli Hermitage at Big Sur;
Robert & Linda Inchausti for their warm hospitality and stimulating conversation (as ever) in San Luis Obispo, California;
Sisters Rita, Genny & Jacqueline at Desert House of Prayer near Tucson, Arizona;
David Omick & Pearl Mast and Daniel Baker of the Cascabel Hermitage Association in Arizona for making an exceptional retreat possible at very short notice.

I am also grateful to Sean Robertshaw for being my travelling companion and co-driver along the road;
The Wardens and Parish of St. Francis-in-the-Wood Anglican Church, West Vancouver for bearing with all this sabbatical business;
Emilie Smith for providing cover in my absence;
and most of all to my wife, Christine, for this gift of this time on the road.

Thank you to everyone who has read this Blog and to those of you who have expressed your encouragement and support through your comments.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Epilogue - The Road Continues...

In a way that last post was a fitting conclusion to this journey. What more is there to say? The journey, this journey anyway, is almost at an end and in a way found its culmination and conclusion in my time at Cascabel in the Arizona desert... but I thought I'd make one more post to tell you what happened from there in outline, take a bit of a retrospective of the time of this journey and then to say "Thank you" to the many people who helped along the way and made this journey possible.

From Cascabel I headed back down the dirt road to Benson having breakfasted with Pearl, David and Daniel who run the Cascabel Hermitage Association (mesquite flour pancakes and prickly pear syrup!) and made my way west once more heading for the New Camaldoli Hermitage on the Big Sur coast. Before getting there I procured a new tent in Tucson and spent a couple of nights at the Plaskett Creek campground about 8 miles south of the monastery - arriving at sunset and putting up the tent for the first time in the gathering darkness - I think I made an OK job of it!

The week at New Camaldoli I was once more in one of the hermitage trailers, this time called "Doxa," a much larger trailer than last time and with a bigger deck. So I spent the week reading, soaking up the stunning scenery and participating in the liturgy with the monks. Yesterday, I left there heading north to meet up with my wife, Christine, who was flying into San Francisco - hence the picture at the start of this post at the Golden Gate Bridge taken just a couple of hours ago. We have a couple of days here to enjoy San Francisco and the Bay Area (currently sitting at a "hot spot" outside Starbucks in Sausilito), then we begin the drive north back home to Vancouver.

Along the way north I stopped off at Bixby Canyon, the site of Kerouac's crisis that he wrote about in Big Sur...

So now for a little retrospective in pictures of these past couple of months "on the road." I have taken literally hundreds of pictures, many of them I've put on my facebook page, and it's difficult, maybe impossible, to adequately review this time in just a handful of images, but it is something I want to do because of the contrasts I've been through - from the snow and ice in the north to the heat of the desert... so here goes:

From The Beaches at Toronto...