Category Archives: Wanderer

London, Stromboli, Wanderer

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[ 14:55 sunday 26 april – haggerston road, london ]

last weekend i made a stretcher for antonio’s splendid painting and got it mounted. then yesterday i hung it on the wall above the piano where it seems to fit quite comfortably. evidence beneath. you can see stromboli at the top right with the god eolo blowing over it. on the rock an octopus, a hermit crab and a salamander. neptune’s symbolic trident hovers at his side and he holds a piece of coral in his hand. a ghostly dolphin jumps behind him.

: c :

antonio's nettuno stromboli painting hanging at haggerston road

antonio's nettuno stromboli painting

Stromboli, Wanderer

c a m b i

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[ 01:23 thursday 16 april – piscita, isola di stromboli ]

here i sit at the little table in front of the window where i have spent so many thousands of hours typing at successive computers. the window is open, admitting the rush and scrape of waves breaking on the beach beneath. the lights of a yacht several miles out glitter against the dark horizon. the air hangs still and listless, hung between the passing maestrale and the coming scirocco. these are weeks of constant change and volatility for stromboli.

just before eleven i set out on the mule track to punta u brunzu. as is my wont i carried no torch. the night is moonless but once my eyes have habituated themselves the starlight is enough to sense the outline of the path in peripheral vision. i enjoy the heightened sense and alertness that comes with this. one’s feet become like cats’ whiskers, sensing with each step for a loose stone or unexpected root, ready to reply in a moment by switching weight or springing aside. in the absence of artificial light one walks in a world bounded by stars and the wide horizon, whilst a torch shrinks one’s awareness down to the immediate cone of light. tonight the island’s air is thick with the perfume of bushes and shrubs still verdant from the winter’s rain.

having reached punta la brunzu i spent an hour and a half sitting on the helipad watching the volcano. two craters emit a continuous red glow, the pulsing light indicating that magma is close to the surface. one of these, to the ginostra side, erupts every fifteen minutes or so with a broad orange fountain of lava several hundred metres high. the other, to the stromboli side, erupts less frequently with a narrow white-hot jet of similar height, accompanied by a terrifying report and roar. walking up the sky was clear and bristling with stars. as i reached the helipad the whole sky became covered with cloud and within ten minutes not a star was visible. an hour later the cloud dissolved as swiftly as it had appeared and the full panoply of stars was revealed once more.

when i arrived on saturday it was serene and sunny. that night a strong scirocco sprang up and easter sunday saw huge waves crashing on the beaches at punta lena and scari. the waves were breaking over the quay so the island was completely cut off. the evening brought heavy rain. then on monday the wind and waves subsided but later in the day a maestrale sprang up and blew through the night throwing the sea against the rocks here at piscita. this in turn dropped off and tuesday was a glorious day of intense sun. everyone on the island has changed colour, myself included. again today again was hot. tomorrow another scirocco is expected.

to my delight caroline was was able to come over from saturday until tuesday, joining the small group of friends who have visited me on both islands of st agnes and stromboli. meanwhile almost all my stromboli friends are here and there has been the usual thrill of catching up with each other’s lives and adventures. it remains a thing of wonder that so many years after i left the island and returned to london it still feels like i have a life here. after two days gathering threads and absorbing myself into the island’s rhythm it’s as if i never left. every time i come here i’m confronted with this parallel life and the opportunity to pick it up again. but every time it’s clear to me that my path still lies with the complexity and abstraction of my other life and to that i willingly return.

this visit has been particularly freighted with memories. paolo kindly let me stay in his beautiful little house on the lava promontory overlooking spiaggia lunga, which was my first house on stromboli. i lived here for my first six months, my first winter. at this table i wrote the specifications for the school for social entrepreneurs’ learning web in november 2001. in this room i was joined by friends from all over the world to celebrate the arrival of 2002. in this room i learned of michael’s death in january 2002 and constructed my simple shrine as a focus for my mourning.

it was cold on monday evening so i lit the wood-burning stove. i remember it being delivered from lipari and installed by paolo. the only other time i’ve stayed in this house was in june 2003 when sergio and i stayed here for my final week before moving back to london. we organised a huge dinner on the terrace for my friends. sergio and i cooked far too much food including a vast rice salad which ended up being fed to the fishes.

tonight is my last on stromboli for now. i declined several dinner invitations to be here on my own. this afternoon i collected the huge painting of neptune that antonio’s been working on for the past year. it will hang above my piano in london.

: c :

In transit, London, USA, Wanderer

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[ 17:09 thursday 26 march – virgin flight 11, london to boston ]

arcing across the ice floes towards nova scotia the cabin crew distributes a meal they badge as “breakfast” or “a light snack” depending on the time of day. today the latter. the meals are identical either way. inflight time has a structure and grammar of its own, blithe to the daily cycle of hamlets and cities far beneath.

each time i cross the north atlantic i’m fascinated by the changing character of the sea ice. at the moment i’m seeing it frequently enough to start discerning its language of structure and motion telling the seasons as surely as the cycle of buds, leaves and blossoms with which i’m more familiar. the monolithic expanses of white i saw a month ago are now fractured and stretches of blue are beginning to gaping amidst them. from my vantage point eleven kilometres in the air patterns become evident. as patches of ice become detached from a larger body and float out into open water they form T-shaped units with graceful curlicues at the branches. these units sometimes form convoys, each element smaller than its predecessor. flying, whilst destructive, permits us to appreciate aspects of the earth’s beauty that are otherwise imperceivable.

this is my fourth trip to the united states since the start of the year. the first was in mid-january, immediately following my return from egypt, when i travelled to san diego to give a talk and receive an award for trampoline. the weather was serene and sunny but i was obliged to spend all but a few minutes inside a conference hall. from san diego i flew to san francisco to attend meetings. i was staying with shemoel so each evening when my trampoline work was complete we recorded songs and experimented with different ways of combining acoustic and electronic sound elements. one day we drove up to point reyes to meet sara winge at the home of bart hopkin, a friend of hers who invents instruments. bart showed us some of his creations, which ranged from a plucked string instrument with strings were connected in triangles to wind instruments where corrugated tubing was used to generate standing waves. shemoel demonstrated one of his sound sculptures and we showed how live processing frameworks such as max/msp can be combined with micro-controllers such as arduino to create extended instruments. after that we all played together for a couple of hours, a delicious mass of filigree sounds.

the second trip was in february when i travelled over to long beach with emma and james to give a talk about one click organisations at the bil conference. bil was conceived as a parallel-universe ted with a focus on new thinking but with open access and free entry in contrast to ted’s exclusivity and expense. i caught half a day of the very first bil in monterey last year on quinn’s advice and this year i was eager to attend the whole thing. the organisers gave me the second slot in the main hall, following a talk about privacy by brad templeton. i’d decided not to use slides but changed my mind at the last minute and threw together a deck during brad’s talk. it was a lovely event. i particularly enjoyed meeting the folks behind the noisebridge hacker space in san francisco, who drove down en masse. also a young photographer called michael strout with a great talent for lighting, who did a shoot with me in the courtyard. mitch altman was there with his brain machine glasses. they flash leds over one’s eyes and buzz into one’s ears at carefully calculated frequencies which change over a twenty minute cycle. the effect is most peculiar, one is gradually drawn into a meditative state and begins to hallucinate colours and patterns. mitch also invented the magnificent “tv b gone” remote control. entering a japanese restaurant with him on the final evening in long beach the two giant tv screens mysteriously deactivated themselves leaving us and our friends to converse in peace. on the way back to london i stopped in san francisco for one night to see shemoel. we recorded a couple of songs and decided to call our project “the dupio”.

my third trip was at the beginning of march when i came over to boston and cambridge for some trampoline meetings. it was bright and clear for the first couple of days, though there was still snow on the ground. i drove out to point halibut and traversed the jumbled granite boulders around the coast. it was hard going but this is a terrain i know and love from cornwall and the isles of scilly. the trick is to keep one’s momentum up, trust one’s instincts and resist the temptation to think about it. in a way this has become a metaphor for how i live. there is a pleasure in sensing the angles of each rock in turn and allowing oneself to ricochet from one to the next. on the third day there was a snowstorm which i enjoyed mightily. i found my way to a noisecore show at tufts university where one of the bands dressed as giant rats. i heard a performance by a minimalist cellist called jeremy harman and we got together to play the next day. late one evening i visited mako hill in somerville to better understand his position on zero-cost duplication and swap notes on web music services. he was very impressive.

this fourth trip is to attend foo east at microsoft’s research centre in cambridge. having been invited to last summer’s event in sebastopol i wasn’t expecting another chance so i was flattered to receive the invitation. i may talk about any of organisational analytics, emergent structure, one click organisations and live processing. i’m also bringing some musical kit with me so it’ll be possible to do a session with reaktor if i can interest anyone in that.

: c :

Egypt, Wanderer

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[ 14:22 monday 12 january – nile palace hotel, luxor, egypt ]

in the second half of 2008 i only managed to take one week of holiday. by december i was gasping for an escape so i set aside the first week of january to run away somewhere on my own. i didn’t have any specific plans but as soon as i got back from berlin i started scouting for cheap flights anywhere in the world. finally on sunday night i found a last-minute package to luxor in egypt departing at ten the following morning. i booked it and started throwing things in bags.

package holidays are the purest antithesis of what i seek in travel. my best experiences arise through having no plans and ready to throw myself into unexpected adventures that present themselves. but in this case the deal was irresistible: a flight plus a week’s b&b in a five star hotel on the banks of the nile for less than the cost of an air ticket. if i got there and hated the hotel i could abandon it and take to the road.

on my first day i wandered into the centre of town, thick with tourists and felluca touts, then crossed over the railway line and set off into the periphery where tourist faces rapidly disappeared and sugarcane fields started to peek in between the houses. i soon had a gaggle of children scampering around me laughing and tugging me towards what turned out to be a little stall selling sweets and plastic chinese trinkets. the lady proprietress was stern and not inclined to negotiation. i bought a bright pink plastic gun with flashing lights and space-invader sounds for about fifty pence then distributed a few small notes to the children to buy sweets.

the next day i decided to take the train up to aswan. tourism is tightly controlled in egypt and visitors can only travel on certain roads and trains. mine was two hours late arriving at luxor during which time four or five regular trains passed through the station, packed with farmers, workers and their baggage. i would gladly have jumped aboard one had this not been prevented by officers of the tourist police positioned at each carriage. finally my train arrived and i stretched out in a reclining seat in first class. over the next few hours it threaded its way up through the verdant fields lining the river, sometimes straying into the edge of the arid desert beyond, whilst mice scampering about the carpet at my feet.

arriving in aswan i had no plan. i’d bought a map in luxor but left it in the train. following my nose to the river i was immediately drawn to a long island in the middle of it. there was was a hideous concrete hotel at the southern tip but it was hard to see what the rest of it was like. i walked along the corniche fending off felluca touts and bowing to the youths complimenting me on my hair. soon i spotted what looking like a pontoon for a public ferry and walked down. after ten minutes a scruffy boat appeared, i clambered into it and we set off.

the crossing was beautiful. for all the irritation of being encouraged constantly to hire a felluca the sight of their white triangular sales thronging the river is achingly lovely. soon we drew up at a narrow steeply-ascending quay on the island hemmed in by trees on both sides. i walked up and found myself in a different world. although the hurly-burly of the city was only a couple of minutes away across the river, i was in a village of mud-brick huts linked by narrow mud pathways with no motor vehicles. the transition was magically unexpected.

i spent the rest of the afternoon exploring and taking photographs. i found what appeared to be an ancient harbour, now landlocked and scattered with rubbish, its massive stone blocks suggestive of a distant period of wealth and power. further along a huge electricity transformer sat in the middle of the bare earth, its ornate steel ribs looking like the carcass of some great mechanical beast. a man came up and explained that a new one was expected soon. at the far side of the island the path descended to the waterside. three boys were paddling themselves across the water on old doors. a lady sat alone looking pensively out over the water. the river was dotted with granite boulders and on the far side the yellow desert rose up to an stone fortress. i learned afterwards this was one of the world’s earliest christian monasteries. i continued to explore. this island, which i discovered is called abu, was the most sublime place i visited in egypt.

the next day, back at luxor, i spent several hours exploring the karnak temple complex. it was over-run with tourists spectacular nonetheless. the place is immense, the result of successive dynasties tinkering and extending over fifteen centuries. i bribed an officer of the tourist police to look the other way while i climbed up a worn staircase inside a pylon that wasn’t open to the public. it emerged onto a narrow ledge from where i had a wonderful view over the complex with the huge statues illuminated in the setting sun. at twilight i pulled out my sound recorder to capture the delicate cacophony as half a dozen distant muezzins struck up the call to prayer. as i was recording a young egyptian came up to me, curious what i was doing. he was ahmed, in the final year of his studies, from a village called diouahara in the fields outside luxor.

we chatted (ahmed’s english was limited) and became friends. ahmed invited me back to his village and led me on a succession of battered pick-ups with benches in the back (“micro buses”) before walking the last stretch between sugarcane fields to reach the village. this was a mixture of concrete and bud-brick buildings intersected by dirt roads where people sat clustered around fires. ahmed led me through narrower and narrower alleyways, sometimes skirting pools of water or leaping across inexplicable pits, until we reached his house. several children were swept out of a fluorescent-lit  room where i was invited to seat myself beside a television blaring a lurid arabic soap opera. ahmed introduced me to some of his brothers, ceremonially brought me a glass of water, then swept me onward to meet his friends.

i returned to the village many times in the subsequent days. one evening ahmed’s parents invited me to dinner, which we ate seated around a huge circular tray on the floor. another evening his friend sayeed took me riding on his horse under the full moon. these were my strongest connections with egypt and its people.

yesterday, my final day, i invited ahmed to come with me across the river to the west bank. i rented bikes for us both and we pedaled off into the mountains of the eastern desert to reach the valley of the kings. i wasn’t particularly interested in seeing the tombs, my main interest was the mountain ridge above. it was a steep little climb but reaching the top the view was spectacular. the narrow green swathe of the nile stretched from horizon to horizon, slicing through a world otherwise shimmering white and barren. nothing else conveyed so strongly the sense of this fragile line in which humans could prosper and where such a remarkable civilisation flourished and endured.

: c :

Germany, In transit, Wanderer

b e r l i n t o 2 0 0 9

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[ 09:10 friday 2 january – schonefeld airport, berlin ]

my first despatch of the year comes from schonefeld airport’s excellent bakery, where i sit watching snow falling on the tarmac outside. timur dropped me off an hour ago. i’m trying to avoid rapid movement. or indeed movement of any kind. a week in berlin to see in the new year has left me feeling somewhat delicate.

between my arrival last saturday and today’s departure i have got up in daylight precisely once. every other day i’ve woken in the late afternoon after the sun had set, breakfasted in a turkish cafe round the corner from yilmaz’ flat, made my way to the conference centre at alexanderplatz, passed eight hours at the chaos communication congress, then departed there around two in the morning to commence a night of revelry in kreuzberg and neukoln’s multitude of charming underground bolt-holes, finally returning home between six and eight in the morning.

new year was the piece de resistance. starting with a dinner for twenty in timur’s huge basement we proceeded to rampage through the streets and take over any parties we found along our way. a toy guitar remained slung around my neck ready to irritate anyone in my vicinity with cheesy eight-bit melodies. timur and i developed a dreadful scouser routine which we performed for lucky travellers on the trams. then we ended up somewhere in alexanderplatz where performance artists had been let loose in a rabbit warren of tiny rooms. there was some kind of romantic interlude here but my memory is hazy. then there’s a gap and i’m at another party in neukoln with jan talking earnestly about what was important in 2008. at some point i staggered home, guided by my faithful gps, collapsing at yilmuz’ flat around eleven in the morning.

by nature i’m not a hedonist. on the contrary i’m prone to be shy, introverted and self-conscious. all my life i’ve felt frustrated with the limitations this imposed on me and have struggled to overcome them. i’ve made steady progress over the years, gradually beating down my self-consciousness enough to dance, interact with strangers and nurture the seeds of a more exuberant me. the past week represents a triumph for these efforts.

mum disapproves of such decadence and points out i’m too old for it. but at the grand age of thirty-seven i find i can generally out-dance revelers a decade younger than me. for so long as i have the energy for it and it gives me such pleasure then i intend to continue. it’s a healthy counterpoint to my overly cerebral personality and my desk-bound work.

my favourite memory from the whole week is sitting on the back seat of a tandem with timur in front, yulmaz’ piano accordion round my neck, cack-handedly blasting out songs as we pedaled round the streets at twilight on new year’s eve. timur has an exceptional gift for instigating such occurrences for which berlin provides an incomparable canvas.

so everyone, let’s make this a good year shall we.

: c :

Cornwall, In transit, Wanderer

c a m b o r n e t o b e r l i n

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[ 09:16 saturday 27 december – great western train, camborne to london ]

pulling out of redruth the sun surmounts the horizon, sending long shadows racing across the frost-crusted fields and heathland that stretches to the north coast. the sky is perfectly blue. a friendly spaniel slithers under the seat in front and nuzzles my hand. three stops into the journey and the train is only sparsely inhabited but the forest of white reservation slips sprouting from the seat backs suggests it will soon be crammed full of people returning to the capital after christmas. once i reach london i’ll have two hours to sort myself then set off for stansted airport and a flight to berlin for the twenty-fifth chaos communication congress and the new year celebration.

christmas in cornwall with my family has been delightful. yesterday we walked from helston along the river to loe pool then out to the sand bar. meg joined us with her two daughters, whom i’d not seen since my caribbean trip in march 2007. we arrived at the beach just as the sun was setting. the long silvery waves fell upon each other in slow motion, blazoned orange-red in the dying sun. i walked to the edge of the surf with a sound recorder to capture the crash and fizz. after some minutes’ recording a big wave caught me unawares. retreating rapidly backwards i fell ignominiously on my backside in the water. my camera and recorder emerged unscathed so the only injury was having to walk back with cold wet trousers.

this was my first christmas without grandparents. it didn’t cast a pall over the celebration but i suspect we were all thinking of granny and missing her.

: c :

France, In transit, Wanderer

p a r i s

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[ 09:38 monday 24 november – eurostar 9019, gare du nord, paris ]

a cold clear-skied morning in paris. four minutes to departure. the carriage is a-bustle with people stowing luggage and finding their seats. a cursory scan suggests three quarters tourist to one quarter business. that ratio would have been reversed on trains two hours ago.

i came over on saturday morning to see claire’s exhibition at the espace porte de champerret. this is my first visit to paris since i won a traveling scholarship from my school to come and investigate electro-acoustic music in 1989. somehow i’ve always travelled further afield. paris was so close it never occurred to me to come.

thinking myself very ingenious on saturday i strapped on my backpack and pedaled down to st pancras on my folding bike, expecting to throw it in the luggage rack for the journey then have my own wheels in paris. but at check in i was greeted with a firm insistence that the bike could not come unless it was packed in a bag “for security reasons”. what? in what conceivable way is a folded bike less of a security risk if it’s in a bag? i could understand if the company wanted to prevent their trains being dirtied by oily bikes, but i hate that we’re expected to nod in acquiescence at patently absurd rules if they’re justified by security. anyway i didn’t have a bag so the bike wasn’t coming. i tried to dump it at st pancras’ left luggage but got the same “it needs to be in a bag for security reasons” mantra. so i trudged across the road to the left luggage office at kings cross who took it without question. by this time i’d missing my train but the eurostar folks were kind enough to rebook me on the next service.

over the last couple of days i’ve done a lot of walking, exploring different neighbourhoods without any map or particular objective. saturday was crisp and cold with clear flat light. yesterday it rained all day, undulating between gentle patter and full-on deluge. on saturday night we all ended up at “point ephemera”, a club in an old industrial space by the side of the canal near stalingrad metro. then last night i met pierre at an event in belleville where the walls had been covered in tin-foil, a band discharged a krautrockish drone, two girls danced  together semi-naked and a cocktail based on tomato juice and tequila was liberally dispensed. it was charming.

i spent several hours yesterday afternoon at “les puces”, a market at the north-eastern periphery of the city. it was like a huge casbah, gorgeously photogenic in the fluorescent light and rain. most of the stalls offered generic hip-hop apparel, cheap north african leather goods and chinese trinkets. but i found a few vintage clothes emporia and some inventive small-scale designers. the best find was upstairs in an indoor section of the market. walking past at ground level i spotted a mannequin in victorian dress so i went up to investigate. what greeted me was a staggering collection of nineteenth and early twentieth century clothing from all over europe, curated by a delightful couple. there were embroidered peasant clothes from romania and the balkans, servants’ liveries from mid nineteenth century parisian households, military uniforms. but what caught my eye was a louis xiii herald suit, made for a paris theatre at the end of the nineteenth century, consisting of a jacket and calf-length doublet, made from scarlet and celeste wool, decorated with braid and brass bobbles. it fitted me perfectly and was ridiculously cheap so it’s here on the train back to london with me.

: c :

London, Wanderer

vote for “one click organisations”

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[ 14:13 friday 21 november – the trampery, dereham place, london ]

i’m involved in a project called “one click organisations” whose goal is to provide a free website for social entrepreneurs where they can create and manage a legal structure for their organisation. the project’s been shortlisted for social innovation camp and if it’s selected a prototype will be built over a weekend in december. the choice is being made by public vote. if you’ve got a moment please do cast a vote and spread the word. the deadline is sunday.

– cast your vote here
– project details here
– facebook group here

one click organisations is a ground-breaking project and it will solve a significant headache for thousands of social entrepreneurs. thanks for your help!

: c :

In transit, USA, Wanderer

e l e c t i o n

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[ 22:05 thursday 23 october – dulles airport, virginia ]

dulles airport again, on my way back to london. being in washington two weeks before the presidential election has been deeply bizarre. news media are saturated. nick-nack shops are stacked with election trinkets, typically including lifesize cardboard cutouts of the two pair of presidential and vice presidential candidates. verges are peppered with placards supporting one party or the other, not just in the city but in the remotest corners of countryside. driving around you can tell a lot about the demographics of an area from the balance between mccain and obama placards, the same way variations in shrubs tell you about the underlying soil.

at the weekend, out on the maryland coast, the mccain faction was decidedly in the ascendent. at breakfast on sunday morning i naughtily eavesdropped conversations on neighbouring tables. one woman was seriously arguing that obama was a sleeper agent for a hostile power: “you know there are literally thousands of these sleepers waiting for the call”.

22:56 / on the plane, ready to take off. only forty-five people in economy so i’ve got a row of four seats all to myself!

: c :

USA, Wanderer

g a l e s v i l l e

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[ 10:41 sunday 19 october – galesville, maryland ]

landing at dulles yesterday afternoon something remarkable happened: the border protection officers let me into the country.

on my very first visit to the united states in november 2002 i walked blearily up to the passport control booth at san francisco airport, the officer swiped my passport and looked up at me with an expression that didn’t bode well. “i don’t know what this means” he said. “they want to see you out back”, scrawling a big red cross on my immigration papers and pointing me to the secondary screening room. i sat for an hour in the bare fluorescent-lit room, terrified, before i was called up. it became clear the officers believed i’d visited the usa before and was lying about it being my first visit. eventually my dazed brain made the connection with a new passport that had been stolen in transit from the passport office in 2001. presumably someone had tried to enter america with it, had been refused and this had triggering an alarm on the database when my passport was swiped. after another half hour they agreed to let me through but they made it clear there was no way to remove the information from their database so “it would be a good idea never to book flights with tight connections in future”.

thus it has been that every subsequent trip (and there have been a great many) i’ve been despatched to secondary screening and treated with more or less suspicion, each time having to explain the situation anew and pray the officers would be sympathetic. the moment when the officer in primary passport control swipes my passport, does a double take and commences to look at me as a suspected criminal rather than a legitimate visitor has become all too familiar. there’s always a slight fear in my mind that one day i’ll arrive more tired and crotchety than usual and inadvertently make some sarcastic comment that would result in an officer deciding to use their power to refuse me.

so yesterday when i arrived at passport control and the double take didn’t happen my heart started beating a little faster than usual. there was no disbelieving question “are you sure you haven’t ever been denied entry to the united states?”. no red cross on my immigration papers. the officer just took my fingerprints, carried on looked bored, stamped my papers, wished me a pleasant trip. i didn’t fully believe it until i’d collected my luggage, passed through the import check-point and passed into the arrivals lobby. but it was true, i was through without having to visit secondary. it made me feel surprisingly different about the country. for the first time my reception by the authorities wasn’t characterised by suspicion, delay and indignity.

i’ve no idea what changed. maybe the original database entry expired after five and a half years? perhaps the officer in primary was incompetent or dozy and failed to notice an alert on his screen? it will be interesting to see what happens next time.

having arrived i had nowhere booked for saturday night. before leaving london i’d done a quick search for interesting-looking places on the maryland coast and jotted down a few numbers. as i was waiting to pick up my rental car i phoned a few of them to see what was available. only the “pirate’s cove” at galesville had space so i booked it, collected my car, fed in the gps coordinates and set off.

galesville is a little harbour, popular with yachties, at the edge of chesapeake bay. the shore is lined with simple clap-board homes, decorated with pumpkins and candy ready for halloween. “pirate’s cove” provides the only tourist accommodation in the area, with five rooms above a seafood restaurant next door to a boat yard. i’m sitting having breakfast now with sun streaming through the windows and a steady breeze blowing in across the bay. i plan to drive down the coast to walk in one or two of the coastal reserves. this evening i’ll drive back up to washington ready for a string of meetings to commence tomorrow.

: c :