HKs Travels

On Sunday, March 25, Tom and I took a short flight from Honolulu to Kona on "the Big Island" of Hawaii. Our first impression upon arrival was that we were landing on the moon! This is because the airport is built on a huge field of lava that gives it a bare, moon-like, appearance. We discovered that Hawaii is an island of 5 volcanoes, 3 of them now extinct. Kilauea is still very active, and because of this, smoke, or what the locals call "vog"( volcano smog), covers the southern part of the island, as you'll see from the photos.(Note: There are 50 photos in all, so please scroll down to the bottom of this page and go on to subsequent pages to see them all.) We also learned that the island is very agricultural, growing ... read more

Believe it or not, it's 70° F. (or 20° C) here in the San Francisco Bay Area today! It's been like this for a week. Of course, we need rain, and it may be coming next week,but in the meantime, I'm certainly enjoying "summer in February" here. I'm back until June in Berkeley and have returned to my activities (playwriting, storytelling, book clubs, tennis, hiking and Spanish). I've even been weeding and pruning in the garden.I love the outdoor life here--a nice compliment to city life in Paris. Last Sunday, I attended the Warren Hellman Memorial Concert out at Ocean Beach in SF. He was the millionnaire financier who started the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass yearly music festival. Among the singers --for those of you who know about bluegrass music which I didn't--were Emmylou Harris, Boz Scraggs, ... read more

My five and a half weeks in France just flew by. In addition to spending time with my sons Sebastien and Marc, their partners and my granddaughter Elea, seeing friends and entertaining my friend Tom, who came over for two-weeks, I did a number of fun and interesting things that I'd like to describe and illustrate with photos in this blog entry. The first event I attended was Elea's "Republican baptism", which is a unique French ceremony. Completely secular, it is performed by a mayor in a town hall. In this case, the mayor was Maude, my daughter-in-law's mother, who also married Sebastien and Aurelia in her fiefdom (the city of Les Ulis outside Paris) two years ago. Wearing the mayor's blue-red-white banner across her chest, Maude stood beneath a picture of Nicolas Sarkosy, the French ... read more

Last weekend, my friend Tom and I went "wilderness camping" in the Stanislaus National Forest, which spans about 900,000 acres and is situated between Lake Tahoe and Yosemite. The weather was in the 90's (F.), so we were able to sleep "a la belle etoile" (in the open air without a tent), as the French say. What an experience for the "city girl" that I am! I've never seen so many stars. It was also fun cooking our steaks on Tom's Coleman stove and hearing the crickets. Luckily, we weren't visited by any bears or mountain lions--just by a few mosquitoes and ants. On Monday evening, July 4, a friend of Tom's took us for a ride on San Francisco Bay in his speedboat. It was really fun seeing Tiburon, Angel Island and Sausalito from the ... read more

We continue to have a wonderful stay here with very good weather. It´s the perfect time to come to Peru. Here are two photos of our rafting trip on the Urubamba River. I´m going to let the photos and the captions of Days 2 and 3 in the Cuzco area speak for themselves. I hope you enjoy the colors and costumes. Tomorrow, three of our party of 15 return to the U.S. while the rest of us continue by bus to Lake Titicaca. I´ll probably add my last entry at the end of our 3 days there. Hasta luego! (enjoying using my Spanish again, but it sure is "rusty".) ... read more