My punishment for going away is that I have to wade through and catalog all of the photos I took. We watched this guy for a while, waiting for the light to turn red and then darting out in front of the stopped cars to juggle for a minute and then hit the drivers up for money. Better than someone spitting on your windshield and then using a dirty rag to wipe it before accosting you for spare change.

Margaret Explosion – Juggler
Margaret Explosion “Juggler”

The great Antoni Gaudí picked up what they were putting down in Barcelona and transformed the city and architecture worldwide. Pablo Picasso painted here for twenty years. Juan Joan Miró was born here and spent most of his life here. Dali lived and worked nearby. Surrealism, Modernismo or Moderisime in Catalan, Novcentisme, new century movement (last century change, not this one), Manzana de la Discordia or just plain Psicodèlico, Barcelona wears it well.

We flew Delta but I’ll bet all airlines share a similar game plan in their race to the bottom. They took our bottled water at the gate and gave us a short lecture for having it in our bag. Bottled is $4.50 at the concession stand on the other side of the gate. There is a charge for the disposable headphones and the monitor on the back of the seat in front of us works fine when they’re showing you ads for Lincoln Continental and Coca Cola but you have to swipe your credit card for movies and special programing. The plane is equipped with WiFi but it costs $12.95 for the flight. We paid $31 for two sandwiches and a drink and they wouldn’t take cash. Tiny bags of salty peanuts are free, just like in bars where they want you buy more drinks, but on our flight the attendant announced “we were traveling with a passenger who is highly allergic to peanuts so in order to ensure that passenger has a safe trip we will not be serving peanuts.”

My nephew is considering a move to New York to continue making his top tier chef inroads. We asked if he could handle real weather and he said it was a concern. LA is unreal. You forget. My sister-in-law said, “If I lived in Seattle or a place like that I would kill myself.” That is SAD or seasonal affect disorder in a nutshell. I’m a minor key kinda guy so I don’t even notice when its cloudy. If fact I found it hard to take photos in LA because there is too damn much sun. You need a polarizing lens to minimize all that glare. My skin gets so dry out here that my feet pop open and wearing a hat and all that sun screen in eighty degree weather is whacky. But I do love LA and I was sad to leave.

Jeff Koons makes perfect sense in LA. and his sculpture of Michael Jackson with his pet monkey Bubbles, is over the top.

Los Indignados in the Puerto del Sol decided last night to extend their protest for “democracia real.” I’m all for it but it seems like heaven to me. People out strolling not trapped in their cars. Couples, families, old people. Window shopping, talking, eating, smoking and drinking.

The coffee ritual (small plate, spoon, a bag of sugar and expertly frothed cafe con leche) puts everything right with the world. I’ll never forget being scolded for not saying “Buenos dias” immediately on entering a cafe on our first visit. Coffee shops turn seamlessly into “Menu del Dia” restaurants and then tapas bars often doing triple duty throughout the day. Food on display everywhere. No barriers to enjoyment. Spain is the perfect host or at least it seems that way to us.

Barcelona meets Manchester United in Wembley Stadium for the European Champions Final in fifteen minutes. I had hoped to be sitting comfortably in a Madrid bar screaming at the telly but instead I’m crammed into a British Airways plane sitting on the runway at Heathrow.

Air Canada’s evening Toronto flight out of Rochester runs late regularly. Two hours is enough to set your whole itinerary back. It gave us plenty of time to play in the Richard Serra sculpture in the Toronto airport.

We approached Pete and Shelley’s mountain kingdom by sea on the Port Henry ferry that is temporarily replacing the Crown Point bridge which is currently being rebuilt. Lake Champlain separates the two states but there is a whole lot more at play. We spent some time looking at the New York mountains from the Vermont side and then the snow capped Vermont peaks from the New York side and we couldn’t quite put our finger on the difference in the two states. It is mostly perception but that is a lot.

There was so much snow up there we kept skiing into three feet of powder and getting so bogged down that we were tempted to take our skis off but we knew full well that would be the last anyone would see of us. We sat around the stove enough to learn what a condition called “Granny’s Tartan” is all about.

We came home without driving on the Northway or the New York State Thruway proving the adage that it is not the destination but the journey. We whizzed by a sign that read “Highway Hair Cuts”, hand painted in all caps. I pictured a brush cut with a flat top.

Rick Simpson played Pete LaBonne‘s “We Live Like Kings” on his radio show last week. I plan to request it this week.

Pete LaBonne – We Live Like Kings

Gary and Kathy come see Margaret Explosion quite a bit and they were telling us how much they like Vergennes. Gary called it “the smallest city in the US.” But the sign on the way into town read, “The Smallest City in Vermont.” All we knew about Vergennes was that Ted and Janet Williams used live in a museum there. They were the caretakers and Ted was the editor of the newspaper there, the oldest in the US until it folded. We asked around but couldn’t find the museum. We spotted a few posters for Chad and Jeremy who were playing that night at the Vergennes Opera House (which also doubles as the Vergennes Town Hall).

We had a delicious dinner at the Black Sheep Bistro. We couldn’t get in until eight at night because the place was booked. People drive down from Burlington to eat here and they are celebrating their tenth year so you know they are doing things right. The salads are incredibly crisp and distinctive. The walls are covered salon style with old drawings and prints. We sat near a Daumier. I had the vegetarian lasagna which had no pasta but held together like Mama Tacones.

The next morning we stopped in the Vergenes Laundry, a stylish bakery with white walls, steamy windows, rocket fuel espresso, wifi and some delicious bread. We drove up to Burlington and walked up and down the pedestrian friendly Church Street. Pretty idyllic up there overlooking Lake Champlain. They pipe soft classical music onto the street but this morning it was interrupted by some students cranking The Mothers’ “Trouble Coming Every Day.” It occurred to us that we had forgotten to feed the meter so we ran back to the car and got out of town.

Peggi and I jumped at the the chance to slip into the void and spend a few days in the mountains at a cabin with a stuffed moose head, a whole stuffed mountain lion, a stuffed snapping turtle and something that looked like a stuffed crow. Actually those animals were all in my sister’s cottage. We were staying in the knotty pine lined cabin next door along with my parents. We threw the contents of our refrigerator into a cooler and split right after our noon phone conference on Tuesday.

We climbed Castle Rock trail near Indian Lake on Wednesday, went kayaking and sat around the fire at night. My father bought a bird app for his iPad and my brother-in-law hooked it up to his iPod speakers so my father could play loon sounds to answer the real loon that was calling from the woods. They got an interesting dialog going but our nephew said the other voice may have just been another guy on his iPad.

On Thursday we drove an hour north up to Pete and Shelley’s place in the Adirondacks. We got trapped between a Whiteman camper with a Marines sticker on it and a drunk delivery truck driver who kept crossing the yellow line in our rear view mirror. We surprised Pete and Shelley and took a hike across the marsh and up the hills out back. Shelley took us to a wild strawberry patch. At about one tenth the size of farm raised they have an delicious, intense flavor. She pointed out a deadly “Death Cap” mushroom and some golden Chantrells that she was planning to pick when they got a little bigger. On the way back to Rochester we listened to the Brazil game as they lost to the Netherlands.

There are only two days left to see the Charles Burchfield Watercolor Show in Buffalo. The show was put together by the Hammer Museum at UCLA and it travels to New York next but seeing it in in Buffalo, where Burchfield worked as a wallpaper designer (his “hack” job), is a special treat. Burchfield paints “the healthy glamour of everyday life.” Passages from his journals accompany each of the paintings. He was a marvelous painter and writer. The show includes his compulsive doodles, a notebook of drawings called “Conventions for Abstract Thoughts” and rooms full of his transcendental landscapes. My favorite painting was of an oak leaf in his neighbors snow coverd front lawn, “The Constant Leaf.”

The Burchfield Penny Museum here, across the street from the Albright Knox, is brand new building. Their state of art men’s room use Sloan Technology on their “zero-water consumption urinals”. Thank god the water fountains were not similarly equipped.

A trip to Buffalo would not be complete without a visit with Mark from PosterArt. We started talking about the old days and he went in the back room and returned with a stack of “Closet Punk Productions” posters that he designed when he was booking bands at the Continental. A lot of them had dates one day earlier or later than the posters on the Scorgies website.

Mark recommended Coles, down the street on Elmwood for something to eat. This place has been around since the thirties and the outdoor tables were the perfect perch for taking in the Buffalo vibe. “Anarchy in the UK” was playing on the sound system as we sat down. Back on the thruway, pointed at Rochester, the trees looked Burchfield trees.