Category: Truth

Peonies in Bloom in June

Peonies in Bloom in June

Posted on by Kathryn Atkins

I wondered if people would consider a uniquely colored peony worthy of a travel blog. But then, one person’s peony is another person’s mountain top.  We (my husband and I) planned a few weeks in Michican’s Lake Whitmore to be with the grandkids… but we had time some days to do a little sightseeing. We discovered that peonies were on their way out of their short-lived bloom period, and we didn’t want to miss it. Off to the University of Michigan arboretum we went.

While there were literally dozens (who knew?) of peony varieties, I had to choose one that caught my eye. Isn’t that the way? Whenever you’re traveling, you have to make choices. Where do we go today? Where do we eat? Do we want to drive a lot or walk a lot?

Then, when you get there, do you just see stuff, or do you have to photograph every little thing? Are you really there when you’re snapping the photo, or are you saving the now for a future time when you can relive the experience you missed because you were taking the photo? It’s the perennial travel question. (Wait, are peonies perennials? Yes… actually, they are. Sorry about that.)

For me, a photograph does pull me from the moment, and it lets me save the moment, too. Sigh. Travel is about seeing yourself as much as it is about seeing the world. Isn’t that cool??

A note about timing while we’re here. If we’d been a few days later in our stay, we would have missed the bloom!  In fact, we were told they were on their way down from the height of their beauty. A few of the petals had begun to fall, but many flowers still held that breathtaking “peony-ness.”) Travel timing is another whole post, but I couldn’t ignore the thought of it here.

So, let’s leave it at peonies and the perennial question of photography versus being in the moment.

Sigh.

 

Enjoying the DIA in No-Way…Detroit???

Enjoying the DIA in No-Way…Detroit???

Posted on by Kathryn Atkins

Travelers love to find gems in unexpected places. The DIA, Detroit Institute of the Arts, is one of those.

According to this website, there are 35,000 museums in the United States. They listed the top 30, one of which is the DIA (#13). Yes, it’s in Detroit, Michigan.

A famous installation is that of the Detroit Industry Murals (1932–1933) by Diego Rivera. They are permanent as they were painted directly onto the walls.

I’m looking at one of the smaller frescos, and my husband and I are standing in front of an entire wall of one of the murals.

Rivera’s murals here… “create a tribute to industry and workers. These murals reveal Rivera’s fascination with industrial processes — and his critique of the political and social realities of capitalist enterprise.” (Source: DIA information piece about the murals.)

Tiff Massey

The exhibit (on view through May 2025) that tickled me the most was that of Tiff Massey. I had never heard of her, which is why we go to museums, right?  From her website, we learn “…She was the first Black woman to earn an MFA in metal smithing from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. She draws on 1980s hip-hop culture and her experiences as a Detroit native to examine the concept of adornment as an examination of the African diaspora and contemporary issues of race, class, and popular culture.”

I like her work because she makes statements about the connection of community, jewelry, and large works of art that put her “art in a context” — a theme of the DIA, according to our docent.

I’d like to put all her work here, but a better idea is for you to go to Detroit before May 2025 and see this exciting, inspirational installation. You’ll love it.

By the way, I’m making a general statement here that I hope to repeat as my travel blog grows.

“Always take a guided tour of any place you can when traveling. It helps you know what you want to see and see what you’d like to know.” — Kathryn Atkins, Blogger, “Gone on an Adventure ”

And speaking of curation (we weren’t but I wanted to see if you were paying attention), the museum houses 65,000 separate pieces of artwork. At any one time, they exhibit about 10% of them, sometimes because the artwork is too fragile to the light and other times because the featured work does have to be rotated so we get to see it all eventually. As in, “keep coming back!”

We will. 🙂

With or Without

With or Without

Posted on by Kathryn Atkins

In the past, we have used travel agents, then gone without them, then added them back, and finally, we went with a tour company for our last two trips—until recently.

Just last month, we surrendered, tail between our legs, and went backward in travel time. The airline gods would not bless us with a passage from point A to point B, no matter how we tried and how many airlines, travel routes, multiple cities, and layover combinations we searched online. After two hours, we gave up.

“Honey, we have to see a travel agent.”

[Photo credit: Tom Barrett, Unsplash]

We sat across from our local travel agent—the flesh and blood kind—with another person from our foursome. They, too, had surrendered and agreed to pay a little extra for peace of mind. The travel agent cracked an indulgent smile, cracked her knuckles, and began the same search we had attempted. Her smile yielded to pursed lips, then a full-out frown. Then, the muttering started. Sweat all but gleamed on her forehead.

Two hours later, we (she) finally had an itinerary that worked. “It may be tight,” our stalwart travel agent announced. “You have a 45-minute connection between flights in the Madrid airport to achieve your final destination.” She hesitated. Then she looked at each of us individually to gauge our reactions as she said the five magic words: “It is a legal connection.”

I was game. I pulled out the airport’s map and airline gates for each of the flights we’d be taking. “It’s the same airline, for goodness sake, and the gates are in the same terminal,” I told my husband, who always fears the worst. (That would be his nickname, and I would, of course, be Tigger.) Besides, what are the best travel stories ever? They’re the ones when something goes wrong, and you have to sleep standing up in a doorway or something.

You’ve been there. You’re at a party. The conversation dims and slows, and the refrigerator hum becomes the loudest noise in the room. Finally, some brilliant soul begins talking about their latest trip. Then, before you know it, each person engages in travel one-upmanship, vying for the prize of the most outrageous (and memorable) story in the room.

What’s yours???

We travel to see the world, but we also want to find ourselves in the world. Traveling tests our resilience and resourcefulness. If we go to the gym and the library on Tuesdays and Thursdays at home every week, we don’t get to learn how fun it is to “nearly miss our train” (we did that in Pisa) or “take the wrong boat” (which we did in Venice more than once). Traveling is a battle. It’s a puzzle. It’s a joy. It’s sickness sometimes. But there are stories in those times, too!

Traveling is a test—a wonderful, expensive (usually but not always), exciting journey. And with or without travel agents, tour guides, travel companions, or itineraries, travel is always an adventure.

Besides, our travel agent was happy she had redeemed herself and protected her profession. But it was a close one. Whew!

 

Travel Writing — It Wasn’t the Truth

Posted on by Kathryn Atkins

Perhaps I’ve traveled too far. Perhaps not enough.

Perhaps traveling is not about geography but traversing the soul.

What I believed was the truth bore me down the river

With rocks and rapids until

the falsity turned the river into a stream and then

a dry trickle.

I missed the truth because what I thought was important

–the white spiral-bound book I’d written–

still lay on the shelf

as 75,000 words of blood squeezed

dry of white lies.

 

Travel Advice: Smell Where You Are

Posted on by Kathryn Atkins
Capturing Rural Boston Aromas

“Nothing awakens reminiscence like an aroma.”

                               ~Victor Hugo

If I whiff a sunscreen that remotely smells like the old “Sea and Ski” suntan lotion from back in the day, I think of Lake Tahoe, California, where we spent every summer when I was growing up. One of the most enjoyable parts of travel across this wide world is the aromas that assault or massage our olfactory nerves, depending.

For instance, when I exit a plane (or an airport), I inhale. Deeply. It’s a first hit. Before your eyes and ears adjust, your nose has the leading edge, as it were, to breathe in the essence of a milieu, enhancing and enlarging what your eyes and ears see and hear. As you move toward a city’s beating heart, you’re sure to gather the odors of its humanity… to smell the country’s living conditions, if that’s fair to say.

Equally, as you approach an uninhabited forest, desert, or mountainside, they each exhale their singular natural beauty. The tang of critters’ scat or the musky, mulchy loam in dark forests might invite tears. I often find the welling up of such feelings so sudden and unexpected that I am ashamed. “Really? Get it together!” I say sternly to my maudlin, sappy self. Yet, the wise salty flow ignores me, happy in its reminiscence and glad we were caught unaware.

It’s another reason to travel. By traveling, one finds oneself. It’s not the same as seeing the National Geographic version on YouTube. It’s not the same as looking at travel photos and brochures, magazines, or those thick guidebooks. Are they helpful? Perhaps. “Tantalizing?” Yes! They are stuffed with the food you’d like to smell and the sights you’d like to see. The well-written, feels-like-you’re-there descriptions of the animals, people, buildings, art, culture, music, and landmarks of all kinds beckon you to visit from the shiny pages. But all you can smell is the ink. The pages are flat. The animals don’t make a peep. The gorgeous food photo is, in the end, as tasteless as the paper it’s printed on. Please don’t try to smell it or lick it. Bleyah!

When you take your next trip, don’t forget to smell where you are. You can “see” where you’ve been with the snapshots you take. You can “hear” the noise of downtown and the silence of the desert with your videos. You can almost recreate the food with recipes and ingredients available everywhere these days, thanks to the internet. But, alas, you cannot recreate the tropical aroma of Hawaii, the humid, human inner city squalor smells in parts of Bangladesh, or India, or, say, downtown Los Angeles. And best of all, you have to stop and make yourself present in the moment to experience a smell. You can use a photograph and videos as memory cheats for scenes and sounds. But you can’t cheat your nose. It won’t let you! At least not yet.

“Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

 

Travel.

Inhale. 

Exhale. 

Smile. 

Repeat. 

 

 

 

 

 

Feeling All the Feels

Posted on by Kathryn Atkins

Poet imageIt’s a scary place to go–down there in the dark with no net of busyness to protect us from falling into the pool below, where feeling all the feels is worse than the bottom of a wishing well where we keep throwing pennies, hoping for whatever.

We don’t dare lower ourselves in the bucket to pick them back out because we may have to act on the wishes and, oh heck…feel all the feels. The truth is in the mirror at the bottom of the well, right above the pile of pennies. And so it’s easier not to go there at all. Or is it?

 

Food Waste, Insecurity, Expiration Dates & Climate Change

Posted on by Kathryn Atkins

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration[1] estimates that food waste is 30 to 40% of the U.S. Food supply. Meanwhile, the Economic Research Service (ERS) study dated September 2022 (the latest report) finds that 10.2 percent of all U.S. households were food insecure. The term refers to “households that had some difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members because of lack of resources.” Food insecurity and low food security are used interchangeably. From the same ERS study, the report states, “In 2021, 3.8 percent of U.S. households had a very low food security.”

The USDA graph shows that food insecurity statistics have stayed pretty much the same over the last 20 years, so Covid was not the culprit.

Why not use the wasted food to feed the food insecure?

It’s not simple. Overproduction of agricultural outputs, for instance, cannot always be moved to  fill food insecurities because it spoils. Even if it could be put into a can, the canning plants could be at capacity. Work stoppages occur from time to time. Import and export snafus affect supplies over and under to cause surpluses and shortages.

Weather happens. Agricultural underproduction can result from droughts as well as flooding. Distribution channels are sticky. Over-production of bread from the local bakery may or may not have available transportation to the community food bank. Once at the food bank, there may be no staff to unload it and either distribute it directly or pass it on to more remote areas where people can get it.

  • Is it an infrastructure problem?
  • Is it a volunteer shortage?
  • Is it a lack of innovation?
  • An absence of motivation?
  • A failing of education

How can the food waste be decreased in the first place?

A September 9-10, 2023, Wall Street Journal article by Josh Zumbrun suggests food expiration dates are part of the cause of food waste and food shortage! And the well-respected non-profit Refed.org does an excellent job of identifying food waste causes. One of the causes is at the consumer level. Few people know what the used by, best by, enjoy by, or any of the other “by’s” or “until’s” mean on food labels. It’s more surprising to know that these dates are not federally regulated! Retailers are also guilty of throwing food out that may or may not be bad, but do they dare sell anything “past the date”? Probably not. It is time to look at food date labels.

What does food waste have to do with climate change?

It’s one word: Landfill. For all the food dumped into landfill, landfill gas (LFG) is a natural byproduct of the decomposition of organic material in those landfills. LFG is about 50% methane, and methane is “a potent greenhouse gas at least 28 times more effective than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere over a 100-year period.”[2] Per the World Economic Forum, tackling methane is one of the quickest ways to slow climate change.

Source: US EPA

THE BOTTOM LINE:

Many people are hungry. Many people are throwing away perfectly good food. Many dates on our food labels are unnecessary and mostly misunderstood.

Climate change could be lessened if more people knew what happens to food in our landfills. One great way to start is to educate ourselves; and an excellent way to do that is through the Carbon Almanac.

It’s. Not. Too. Late… to save our planet.

[1] https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/food-loss-and-waste

[2] https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-gas#methane