Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Italy Travelog #4
Rome Cavalieri hotel - Saturday, 24 May 2025, 4pm

Around 3pm today we arrived at the Rome Cavalieri. It's a Waldorf Astoria hotel, so we had reasonably high expectations. Recall that our other W-A experience was the Waldorf Astoria Pedregal in Los Cabos, MX— where we had an amazing arrival experience, a very bougie lunch, and later, a touching "Happy Retirement Ms. Hawk" card.



Compared to the Pedregal hotel, which was an over-the-top, 5-star experience, the Rome Cavalieri is merely a solid 4.5 star hotel. Everything is appropriately swank— including the prices in the restaurants 😱— but, for example, we had to *gasp* wait in line at the front desk to check in. (At the 5 star hotel, staff opened the car door for us, greeted us by name, and escorted us to a private table with cocktails where the concierge came to us to deliver our keys.)



Our room is suitably luxurious, and spacious, though again without the over-the-top-ness of the W-A Pedregal. Here the balcony with a private pool and a beach vidw is replaced by a balcony with... -out a private pool or a beach view. 😅

Not that there's even a beach, anyway. We're in Rome. Though this hotel is right up the hill from Vatican City. If we were on a higher floor we'd be able to see it from our balcony.

As we explored the hotel grounds a bit this afternoon we found a hawk.



Yup, there's a hawk sitting on a railing on the terrace overlooking the pool area. As you can see from the jess to the left of the bird's feet, though, it's not a random hawk; it's kept by a falconer. The falconer wasn't around this afternoon so we spent some time admiring the bird by ourselves without knowing what species of hawk or falcon it is. Hawk noted that our iPhones will identify what we're taking a picture of, if they can. Her iPhone told her, "bird". Thanks, Apple, we were confused for a moment there that it might be a flower. Apparently that AI feature was implemented by the same team that created the original icon for Apple Maps showing a route of jumping off a bridge into busy interstate highway 280 traffic.

My partner and I like to have fun with our stuffed animals. ...Okay, it's mostly me. I enjoy posing them in situations and telling stories about what they're doing, and she mostly finds it funny. Mostly. For example: hawk on her dragon's hoard of beads, hawk on a hoard of coins, Hawkes wine tasting, learning we'd mis-gendered an eagle.

We're not into just any stuffed animals, though; or even the common ones. We have a lot of hawks because they're my partner's namesake. Hawks are hard to find, though. Owls? Slightly easier. But owls suck.

Where can one find stuffed hawks? We keep our eyes open. Sometimes we find a beautiful hawk in the darnedest place.  We like to check out visitor centers at national/state parks because that's where we have a better chance of finding such toys— or "liberating a hawk", as Hawk calls it. When we visited Amicalola Falls in Georgia a few weeks ago we saw one or two hawks that we already own copies of... but we saw two other interesting stuffed animals.

For the first time ever I saw an Ent or Treant— or "Enchanted Tree" as manufacturer Folkmanis labels it. I presume they went with that generic name to avoid licensing issues with whatever global megacorps currently own the rights to Tolkien's works and Dungeons and Dragons, though a quick web search I did indicates that the words "Ent" and "Treant" are not trademarked and have been ruled by the courts to be in the public domain.

Folkmanis makes stuffed animals that aren't just stuffed animals but hand puppets. Our first hawk ever was a Folkmanis red tail hawk, a treasured gift that sadly wore out after enough years and had to be sent to the great aerie in the sky. Though we did find another copy of the Folkmanis red-tail hawk on eBay a few years ago.

I had fun checking out this "Enchanted Tree" hand puppet. I made a short video showing how, as I discovered, you can put your fingers in the branches atop the tree's head and move them around. ...And this bad-attitude Treant can give you the finger!

Now, laughing at rude poses with hand puppets wasn't the only thing we did at the park's gift shop. While we did see a hawk or two there and they were ones we already own better versions of, we did find a hawk "accessory"— a snake!

We bought the snake as gift for our hawks to play with.



Here's one of our red-tail hawk toys, "Winter", enjoying his new toy/meal as a reward for waiting patiently in the back of the car as we were out hiking. 🤣

The other day I wrote about a few dollars of coins I brought home from Panama. "Money is the easiest souvenir," I've quipped a number of times after foreign travel. But a few coins isn't all we brought home from Panama as a souvenir. At the artisans' market in El Valle we bought a carving of a harpy eagle.



The harpy eagle, or águila arpía, is the national bird of Panama. It's a bird of prey that lives in tropical rain forests. It eats by yanking mammals such as sloths and monkeys out of trees, throwing them to the ground, and killing them while they're stunned on the ground if the fall didn't kill them. This piece of art is hand carved, hand painted wood. For now we've just hung it on our bed post. For now, also, we've named her Griega. That's Spanish for Greek (woman), reflecting that harpies are creatures of ancient Greek myth.

It's another take-it-easy weekend. I know, I groused about taking it easy for too many weekends in a row. Then travel for 6 days followed by busy-ness for a few days after getting back home tired me out. By Friday I was genuinely ready just to take it easy this weekend. And that's what I'm doing. So far. Mostly.

The mostly in mostly taking it easy this weekend is that Hawk and I started the day (Saturday) with a trip down to the south side of San Jose to visit a raptor exhibition at a county park. They had falconers and handlers there displaying a variety of birds from a turkey vulture to a few owls to a Harris hawk and a couple of falcons. We had fun at the bird show, and Hawk met up with a former colleague of hers there. We thought we might all go out for lunch together after that, but the colleague begged off as being too tired after the show.

Speaking of too tired, after we had lunch on our own and drove home we just kind of vegged the rest of the day. We watched TV. We watched hours of TV. We knocked out 5 or 6 episodes of Lucifer. It feels weird because I only binge-watch TV like this maybe once a year.

What's on tap for tomorrow? Honestly, probably more TV. Now that we've caught up on all but the final season of Lucifer I want to switch back over to Breaking Bad for a few episodes. I don't know if I'll finish that up before taking a break for travel Thanksgiving week. I'm only home for another 6 days before leaving again!

We had another new bird join our nest recently. ...Well, maybe not so recently; he joined us in June, when we were in Alaska! It's one of the things that's been stuck in my blog backlog.



"Kenai", our newest bird, is the bald eagle on the right in this photo. The other eagle, "Baldy", is one of the OGs and has been with us for over 20 years.

Hawk and I like to make up funny stories with our stuffed animals. Note that's funny as in Joe Pesci's classic "Funny how?" scene in Goodfellas. It's both funny as in amusing and as in... weird.

For years we said Baldy was a male eagle. But while he happily helped raise chicks in our stories he never displaying male courting or mating behaviors. We always played him as uncomfortable when storytelling got around to whether he'd mate with a female. Ultimately he'd back out. "That's okay, Baldy's gay," we'd say. But he didn't mate with males, either. "Okay, he's asexual. He has platonic relationships and helps other birds raise young."

Then we brought Kenai home. The first thing Kenai did was laugh at us. "Baldy is female," Kenai pointed out.

Even wildlife experts among us humans can only make educated guesses about which sex a bird is. There are cases where even the experts who work with birds every day have misidentified a bird's sex, like the case where "Romeo", a vulture in captivity, laid an egg after several years. Since then she's been "Juliet". But while humans make guesses that are sometimes wrong, birds know. Scientists believe one of the cues is distinctive coloration differences that are outside the visual spectrum of the human eye but within the range of what the birds can see.

As part of our storytelling we came up with justifications for why we were mistaken about Baldy. 🤣 You see, bald eagles all seem kind of male by human socialization standards. They live in the wilderness. They hunt all their food. They fight to protect their territory. And if there were such a thing as Eagle Tinder, you can bet that just about every picture on there would be an eagle holding a fish it had just caught. So very male! 🤣

So now we know Baldy's female. She's still asexual, though. And that's totally okay.

During the packed day of our visit to New Zealand's Tongariro National Park we made time to visit the visitor center. We always like stop by park visitor centers to get information on conditions, seek recommendations, learn a bit about the area and its history, and see if there are any cool souvenirs to buy. Generally we try to do that first... though here at Tongariro we did it almost last in the day because the park's visitor center is buried so deep within the park. I mean, we didn't even reach it until we'd been there 6 hours. Better late than never.



The park had a banner proclaiming a desire to rid New Zealand of predators. We'd seen similar things in other parks over the previous week. A variety of predatory animals were introduced by European settlers, some because they wanted their furs, some because they thought they'd control pests. Well, possums, ermines, etc. found it easier to prey on New Zealand's native species of flightless birds than pest animals. These imported animals ate some of the native animals to the brink of extinction. Now for several years New Zealand has been working to reduce the invasive species' numbers and threat.

So far, so good. NZ is hardly the only place to have a problem like this and try to correct it. But it was amusing that their "Predator Free" banner was right next to this display:



That's a Kārearea, a falcon that's native to New Zealand. It's... a predator. It eats birds. And it's endangered. And they're trying to save it. And the display that explains that (minus the "It eats birds" part; that was me) is right next to the banner proclaiming "Predator Free".

By the way, the karearea is the bird we bought a stuffed animal toy of the week before. Since we already had the toy— and had already named her Te'Anau— we weren't going to buy another. But I did buy this postcard of a karearea:



The visitors center had one of those almost-obligatory relief maps of the park. It didn't help us much in the moment— we'd already spent most of a day there and had figured out the lay of the land— but I'll include a pic now to help you (and me, when I look back on this in the future) get the context of the park:



Mount Ruapehu is the big mountain in the display. It's a cone volcano. As you've seen in my photos it's not quite as snow-capped during our visit. We were there in April, which is early autumn in New Zealand.

The visitors center is along the road (red line) somewhat below the Whakapapa Ski Field marked on the map. I shared photos from our drive up there in my previous journal entry. Kind of north of the visitors center is Taranaki Falls. I've posted two blogs about our hike there. Earlier that morning we visited Turoa, which is at the top of the road that approaches the flank of the mountain from the right side of the map, and hiked Mangawhero Falls from that road.

New Zealand Travelog #25
WLG Airport - Mon, 15 Apr 2024, 1pm

This morning we flew out from Queenstown. And wouldn't you know it, the skies were finally clear. The whole fucking week has been clouds and rain, and now I see this from the top of the stairs boarding the jet:



Oh, and I finally saw 12,000' Mt. Cook today, too. Another thing that after two days of being clouded in, is finally visible today.



Unfortunately I only get to see it from the window of the aircraft as we fly over at 36,000', and even then only by leaning over my rowmate in the window seat (after asking politely!) to snap a picture.

Then, at Wellington Airport, I found that instead of flying an Airbus A320, I could have flown a giant eagle.



Yeah, there are a bunch of places in New Zealand cashing in on Lord of the Rings lore. The location sets were famously filmed in this country. I'm pretty sure they didn't use a 21st century airport as a location, though. But I guess if you're going to have people flying giant eagles around, the airport makes as much sense as a birds-of-prey center, and these birds might freak out the actual birds of prey.



Seeing Gandalf atop this giant eagle in the airport all I can think of now is his "You would not part an old man with his walking stick" line in the hall of Theoden with Wormwood's goons replaced by TSA agents.

Australia Travelog #7
Afoot in Sydney - Mon, 25 Dec 2023, 8:30am

Our morning sightseeing on Monday began with some of the things we wrapped up walking past Sunday afternoon. It was gloomy then and starting to rain, plus we were tired, so we'd lost patience for taking things in. Today, though, we're fresh, and the weather's better.



Two streets over from our hotel is Hyde Park, a fairly large urban park in Sydney. On the far side is St. Mary's Cathedral, as you can see in the photo above. St. Mary's is where there was "No room at the inn" yesterday. In the foreground in the photo is Hyde Park's Archibald Fountain.

Archibald Fountain is named for J.F. Archibald, a publishing magnate who donated the funds to have it built. Isn't that often how monuments are? "This is monument honors the wealthy person who spent the money to build this monument with their name on it." 🙄

Well, okay, Archibald didn't commission it just to honor himself, he commissioned it to honor the French for their association with Australia in World War I. He insisted the art be sculpted by a French artist, and the French artist they chose dug deeply into French history to depict... Greek myth. Yes, apparently the French consider that French history.



The fountain depicts the classic Greek French figures of Apollo, Diana, Pan, and Theseus. In the scene above Monsieur Theseus kills Le Minotaur. Allez les Bleus, Allez les Bleus!

From the park we walked north by northeast, angling toward a different part of the city than we visited yesterday. Soon we reached the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It wasn't a place we planned to visit. We're not big on art galleries. We're also not big on giant spiders.



Yes, there's really a 20' tall spider in front of the NSW Art Gallery. And yes, that thing under it is an egg sac. And yes, there are eggs in the egg sac. Actually they're rocks as best as I could tell from looking up from underneath. They're big rocks, 6-8 inches across. I guess that's the size of giant spider eggs.

So far this morning has felt like instead of a tour map I need a Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Thus it's not surprising when we saw this bird all over the place in Sydney...



...Our first thought was, "Ha, ha, that looks like a stirge!"

Stirges in D&D are bird-like creatures that suck blood from living beings. They fly at victims, clamp on their shoulders with their big talons, and plunge their long beak into the neck to suck blood.



It's not a stirge, of course. It's an ibis. Specifically, it's an Australian White Ibis. And it uses that long beak not to plunge into hapless low-level adventurers' necks and suck their blood but to root around in loose ground for bugs and grubs and stuff.

My D&D game was on a hiatus for a few weeks due to travel around Thanksgiving week. We played again last night, Friday night. It was session 4 of my adventure, City of the Dead.

Friday's session reminded me of a funny but totally true observation about roleplaying games, about how the GM and the players influence the story:


In that vein call this week's session City of the Dead: Fool Around and Find Out Edition.



Picking up from the previous session, which the players wrapped up by killing a flock of evil, bloodthirsty zombie sheep, the group gave chase to its two mounts who'd panicked at the ravenous bleating and bolted. One PC's riding horse ironically bolted past her into the cemetery; a pack mule bolted down the old trade road... toward the haunted City of the Dead. 😱

The group split up. Because, why not? When D&D groups split up bad stuff only happens to them, like, 98% of the time. 😂

The group split 4-1. The fastest PC swung atop his horse and spurred it into a full gallop to chase the mule. He knew his mount could outrun it, even carrying him on its back. He'd trained the horse himself. The only questions were whether he'd catch the mule fast enough, before it could get into trouble, and whether it would run straight down the road or might veer off somewhere.

The Group in the Graveyard

Meanwhile the rest of the group formed up a squad and entered the cemetery. They found the runaway riding horse lying on the ground, dead, with a pair of bükken tearing off chunks of its flesh.



What are bükken? They're an undead monster I made up for my game world. They're similar to ghouls with adaptation for burrowing. They were once human but now have dried, gaunt flesh falling off exposed bones. They can burrow through dirt like fish can swim. And they're blind (no eyes) but have tremorsense that lets them determine with pinpoint accuracy anything nearby that's touching the ground and moving. Oh, and like ghouls they carry a supernatural disease that sickens victims of scratching claws. Those infected with Grave Rot waste away over a matter of days until they die... and become bükken, too!

For the posse of four PCs this encounter was no challenge. Pretty much any one of them could have destroyed these lower level monsters in their own idiom. The one fastest on the button was the cleric of the goddess of death. ...The goddess who opposes undead. He thrust forward his holy symbol and intoned. "The power of the Lady of the Grave compels you, BEGONE!" And *pffffft* the undead monsters disintegrated into dust.

Herran Gets In over his Head

Herran, the group's scout, who'd gone off on his own to chase the mule, got into deeper trouble on his own. He followed the mule's tracks to the haunted city of Graymount. The literal City of the Dead. The city that has been mysteriously cursed for over 100 years, where most who go there die and anyone and anything that remains is corrupted by evil. Yup, the scout went right into that city. 😳

Herran found the mule soon enough. There was a sinkhole in the main road through town, and the mule had fallen into it. The sinkhole was about 20' deep.

As Herran rode up to the sinkhole, the edge crumbled away beneath his horse. His horse fell into the pit, though he was able to leap to safety as the horse fell. Now there were two injured animals at the bottom of a 20' deep cavern under the road. 😰

If Herran had any sense he would have reasoned that The City of the Dead is way too dangerous to be in, alone— more powerful people have died here, alone, like literally the person they're searching for— and that there was nothing he could realistically do to get his horse out of a sinkhole by himself. But he decided to secure a rope to one of the abandoned buildings lining the road and climb down into the collapsed cave.



As Herran entered one of the builds to secure his rope to something, an unexpected monster swung into action. In D&D there's a creature type called a swarm. It's made up a large number of very small creatures but it acts as a single in combat— with some characteristics that make it very hard for low- and even mid-level characters to defeat. The rule books give examples like a swarm of bats. I made up stats for a swarm of crows.

The crows were all quietly perched on the roof edges of buildings lining both sides of the street, sitting there ominously all Alfred Hitchcock-like, until the scout entered a building. Then with an cacophony of squawking and flapping of wings they descended to harry Herran.

Herran didn't really have any attack move that could affect the swarm. That's part of the unique thing about how swarms work in D&D. Meanwhile, they could harm him. Yes, by pecking at him. And also making him nauseated. All he could really do was withdraw.

Herran backed off. The birds settled back onto their roof perches. He tried approaching the sinkhole again. This time the birds stayed perched.

As he approached the hole this second time he saw something new. Three bükken had emerged from the ground and were attacking the two animals!



Now, any normal person at this point would realize the situation in the sinkhole screams "TRAP!" But Herran was really attached to his horse. He swiftly lowered himself down the rope, Army Airborne style (climb is one of his skills), to fight for his prized steed.

Down in the hole, Herran quickly found himself in over his head... literally and figuratively. As the first three bükken killed horse and mule, a fourth emerged from the ground to attack Herran. Soon all four were attacking him. He was skilled in fighting undead (Ranger class ability Favored Enemy) but fighting 4 of them, solo, was a tall order. I was kind of nice to him and left it at 4 rather than having 2 more emerge from the ground. He barely managed to defeat the four.

I was nice to him again as he climbed out of the pit, finally having the sense to flee town and find his companions, by not having the swarm of crows attack. I'd decided anyway that the crows had particular rules for what would trigger a swarm attack, and neither emerging from a hole in the ground nor fleeing the area were not one of those things.

Herran made it back to the cemetery, grievously wounded, just as his companions exited from their adventure. It had been a bad day for horses as Meraxes's horse had died, too— also killed by bükken. It had taken the foursome split of the party just as long for their side trip as Herran's, even though they had traveled far less, as Meraxes, the nobly born mage (who attended an elite magic school in a foreign country), cried a lot over her dead horse.

To be continued....

Update: the group decides to head toward danger, entering the City of the Dead, this time together.

After sharing a few nice hawk pics from the Carolina Raptor Center yesterday I've got a few more to share today. These two aren't hawks; they're vultures. Carrion eaters. Technically they're raptors, a somewhat loosely defined category of carnivorous birds that seize prey. (The word raptor comes from a Latin verb that means to seize and carry off.)

First up today is a turkey vulture.




The species is found across much of North and South America. In the US it's especially common in the southwest. Out in California, for example, I see turkey vultures constantly.

Vultures occupy a macabre but important part in they cycle of life. They are nature's gravediggers. Though instead of digging graves for dead bodies they eat them.

Turkey vultures have a number of interesting biological adaptations to fit their role in the ecosystem. A key one I chose the picture above to highlight is their bald heads. The red skin on their scalp is how they got the name turkey vulture. From a distance their head resembles a turkey's. Up close, though, they look ghoulish. (BTW, if this bird were to turn slightly sideways you'd see straight through its nostrils.) The featherless head allows it to plunge not just its beak into a carcass but to stick its head in all the way up to the neck, without splatting soaking its feathers in blood and guts that become a hygiene problem.

As far as eating blood and guts— but mostly dead, rotting meat? Turkey vultures have incredibly acidic stomachs. They're, like, a 1 on the pH scale. Their stomach acid breaks down meat so they can digest the proteins faster than bacteria in the flesh (like the ones that cause botulism in humans) can make them sick. And parasites? Ha, ha, stomach acid.

There are a lot of other facts I could share about vultures (and when we were visiting these birds at the Carolina Raptor Center a an enthusiastic staffer nearby told us she could talk for hours about vultures) but instead of that I'll share another bird pic first.

This next bird is an Andean condor.



The Andean condor ranges along the west coast of South America— in, well, the Andes. Like the turkey vulture it's a carrion eater. You can see it has the same adaptation of a featherless head.

Andean condors are huge birds, with adult wingspans of 10 - 10.5 feet (up to 3.2 meters). This is much larger than the turkey vulture— which is not exactly a small bird, having adult wingspans of about 6 feet (2.9 m). It's even larger than the California condor, which I thought was the largest raptor species in the world until I saw this bird's display.

The white ruff on this bird's neck is interesting. It reminds me of how vultures were always depicted in the Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons years ago. That's a geographical misplacement, as the cartoons were set in the colorful red rock country of the US Southwest, particularly the kind of landscapes with narrow rock towers and arches found in southern Utah, while this species is only found 5,000 miles away. All I can figure is that some of the Looney Tunes artists saw an Andean condor on a visit to South America, or perhaps in a zoo or even a picture book back home, and were impressed by the fur-like collar as an evocative characteristic to use in their art.