Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Italy Travelog #18
Chia, Sardinia - Wednesday, 28 May 2025, 10am

We've been in Sardinia for almost a day at this point. We've been taking it easy for the most part. Yesterday we had lunch with colleagues after arrival, then I crashed in our room for a few hours before the reception dinner. This morning we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast at the hotel then got ready for the day's outing— a cave tour. While we're en route to the cave I'm jotting down a few notes about Sardinia thus far.



The first is that it's beautiful here, and rural. Sardinia has a population of about 1.6 million. That may seem like a lot; it'd be a fair sized city, if it were a city. But Sardinia is the second largest island in the Mediterranean. A size comparison shows it's about the size of Vermont. ...Well, Vermont has 6500,000 people, so Sardinia is less rural than Vermont. Perhaps a better comparison would be to Sicily, the largest Mediterranean island, which is only slightly larger than Sardinia and has 3x the population.

Part of what makes Sardinia feel so rural is that the coast is very wilderness-y. There are no towns along the rugged coastline, no multi-million-dollar mansions, no high-rise resort hotels. I've heard accounts from two people now, including a local archaeology Ph.D., that the "no towns" thing is because of the historic threats of invasion and piracy. Occupants of the island from hundreds of years ago to thousands of years ago built villages inland so they wouldn't be so exposed to marauders; whether the Romans, the Carthaginians, the Phoenicians, the Moors, or the Spanish.

Speaking of the Spanish, it's actually the Catalans who've had a strong influence here. Our tour guide (the aforementioned archaeology Ph.D.) mentioned that with a broad smile because two of our companions on our little group trek are Catalan, from Barcelona. For hundreds of years during the Middle Ages Catalans ruled the island. There are still communities of Catalans on the island today, though they are in the north and we're traveling around the far south.

One other thing that strikes me as we're driving around these remote parts of the coast in Sardinia is that it looks and feels a lot like California. Except for the road signs being in Italian I could almost swear I'm on the central coast. It's the rugged coast, the mountains near the water, and the types of trees and shrubs all around us. Climate-wise, it's a similar climate.

Italy Travelog #8
Palatine Hill, Rome - Sunday, 25 May 2025, 1:30pm

Have you seen Caesar's Palace? No, not the casino in Las Vegas; I mean the real Caesar's Palace. The original, in Rome.

Well, I was just there, atop the Palatine Hill in Rome, and I can barely say I saw it, either. That's because Caesar's Palace, called Domus Augustus (the Home of Augustus), which was built almost 2,000 years ago is today in ruins. And even the ruins haven't always been well cared for.



The palace fell into disuse after the fall of the Roman Empire then crumbled. Many of its stones were stolen—or "repurposed" to build or decorate buildings elsewhere, either in Rome or overseas. Plus there was natural deterioration and an earthquake. Together these left the palace not even a shell of its former self; more of an outline of where something amazing once stood. And it got covered over in dirt.

The ruins were rediscovered in the late 17th and early 18th centuries by wealthy landowners. They did some of the excavation and began "repurposing" all over again. They replaced several of the original limestone and marble walls with 17th century bricks, and turned the area into an open-air garden.

Georgia Travelog #5
Talahi Island, GA - Monday, 7 Apr 2025, 3:30pm

Today we continued touring in/near Savannah, Georgia with my sister, B. Her husband and daughter didn't join us as they were busy with work and school, respectively. Whereas yesterday we toured in downtown Savannah today we went out to the coast east of town. Our first stop— well, second if I count stopping for lunch along the way— was at Tybee Island.



There are miles of public beaches on Tybee Island. We drove to near the southern end of the island, where there's a pavilion and pier and a cluster of hotels and shops. I'm not sure why we did that; we didn't need or even particularly want any of the touristy stuff. Though after walking around in the sand for an hour it was satisfying to get ice cream at an ice cream stand a block back from the beach.

The weather wasn't the greatest for having a beach day so we didn't make a day of it. The water was cold and the wind was gusting hard as a storm front moved into the area (it would hit later in the day). In the photo above you can see our hats flapping in the strong wind. Our lanyards were necessary to keep them from flying off our heads every 20 seconds.

After the beach we drove back inland a bit to Fort Pulaski National Monument.



Fort Pulaski is a Civil War-era military fort downriver from Savannah. It was seized by the Confederates prior to the declaration of war in 1861 and then captured by the Union in 1862. It has an interesting bit of significance in military history. Its capture by the Union army in 1862 demonstrated the power of rifled canons.

Smooth bore canons were considered incapable of breaching the masonry walls of a fort such as this, especially from the distance of 1.0 - 1.5 miles away where the Union placed its canons. But rifled bore canons changed the equations. They could fire heavier projectiles farther, with greater velocity, and with higher accuracy. When the Union opened fire on Fort Pulaski they breached the walls on the second day of battle. The commander of the fort surrendered 2 hours later. The Union held the fort through the remainder of the war. It was decommissioned about 10 years later as the standardization of rifled canons made it obsolete.

Panama Travelog #33
Panama City, Panama - Sun, 29 Dec 2024. 4pm.

Today we visited Casco Viejo, the old town section of Panama City. It dates back to plans laid out in the late 1500s, with the city as an actual thing (i.e., streets and buildings actually constructed, not just planned) appearing in the later 1600s.

We toured on foot, and by ourselves. We could have bought into a bus tour like sites like Tripadvisor and Viator recommend, but that's not our style. We don't want to travel in groups of anywhere from 12 to 35, with the speed of the group being limited by the least healthy, least curious about foreign culture and history, members. And to get the full experience of getting around in Panama City we didn't even hire a car to get there. We took the subway.

Panama City's subway is relatively modern and appallingly cheap. A flat fare of 35¢ gets you anywhere you want to go. There aren't a huge number of choices about where to go, though, as there are only 2 subway lines. We boarded from a station 2 blocks from our hotel and rode to the end of the line, which was about a mile from Casco Viejo. That was fine with us, as we considered the walk through the street markets and old town part of the sightseeing.

I've got to say, touring Casco Viejo was not particularly fun. Panama City is not a beautiful city to look at. Yes, when seen from a distance, such as from the window of an airplane, the city's many bank and residential skyscrapers create an impressive skyline. But down on the ground, the spaces between and beyond those skyscrapers look like shit. Even where our hotel is, in the banking district, the streets are a mess. You can't walk 10' without having to step over or around a massive pothole filled with water or someplace where a tile is missing. In the old town seemingly half the buildings are abandoned, their roofs collapsed and once-stylish balconies supporting by scaffolding so they don't collapse, too, and kill pedestrians on the street. It's a shame because many of these buildings show beautiful architectural details from the late 1800s/early 1900s but look like they've been left to rot for at least 50 years.

For lunch we found a humble-looking taco shop in one of the squares. It was next to a total tourist-trap looking restaurant, which we were not going to eat at. Unfortunately it was owned by the same people who run the tourist-trap-looking place. It was the catch-tourists-who-try-to-be-smarter trap. 😖 A plate of 3 small tacos cost $15, a bottle of domestic beer that I could buy at restaurants in El Valle for $2-3 cost $8, and service sucked. But Tripadvisor is full of superlative reviews raving about "best service" and "delicious food". I guess places like that poll well with White Midwesterners who normally travel with tour groups.

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #6
Lexington, VA - Sun, 1 Sep 2024. 10:30pm

My trips often take me to fairly anonymous looking hotels in office parks and small towns. For tonight and tomorrow night we're in a Hampton Inn... in a mansion built in 1827.



This is the Col Alto house in Lexington, VA. It was built for a US Congressman.

Of course, we're not in the historic mansion part of the building. Yes, rooms were available there, but they're a) old-timey and b) $$$. We're around back in what feels like the servants' quarters, on the ground floor. Except it's not really the servants' quarters because... think about it... 1827 in Virginia, a slave state. The servants were enslaved people. They probably slept 6 to a room in a wooden shack. Yes, there's literally a wooden shack outside our room! A historic marker proclaims "nobody knows what it was used for." 🙄 Our ground floor room may only have a single window that opens barely 4 inches for fresh air, but we have all the modern conveniences.

On Sunday this weekend we started off taking it easy. We were pretty wrecked— but in a good way— from our epic hike at Zim Zim Falls a day earlier. We spent the morning taking it easy, went out for lunch and to run a bunch of shopping errands, then came back home before deciding what to do next. "Spend the afternoon laying around the pool" was seriously entertained as an idea... but then we agreed getting out for a short hike in the area would be better. We could always come back to the pool afterward. 😂

"Where to go hiking?" was the next challenge. For that I suggested Alviso Marina County Park. It's nearby... almost deceptively so, because going to Alviso is almost like going to another planet.



First, Alviso is like the land that time and Silicon Valley forgot. It's an old time-y, down-on-its-luck little burg in the shadow of Silicon Valley. It was a bustling local port some 120 years ago. In the mid 20th century it was a heavy manufacturing town. Now all that remains of those industries are the empty shells of buildings that haven't actually been torn down. Ah, but there's something different I noticed compared to our previous visit here, in August 2023. There's no longer a wrecked ship in that grassy field in the scene above. It had only been there for, like, fifty years. For 50 years nobody cared to take it away, and nobody cared that nobody cared.

Alviso is also like a gateway to another world in its gateway to the great outdoors.



Go through these gates and it's not just rushes at the foot of the San Francisco Bay you're walking into. The South Bay is full of salt ponds.

What's so special about salt ponds?



This. This is what's special about salt ponds. It's like the surface of Mars, but it's water.



With a beach made entirely of salt.



Salt ponds here are a naturally occurring phenomenon. The Ohlone people native to this area harvest salt for centuries. When Americans settled here in the1800s they commercialized salt production. There's still parts of the South Bay shorelines that are used for the salt business, though this area was sold back to the public for restoration as a natural habitat. So this orange water and salt beach (and the salt islands in the photo above) are natural.

Today's St. Patrick's Day, a day when thoughts in the US— in the modern US— turn to supposedly very Irish things such as drinking whiskey and green beer and eating corned beef. Although I have Irish-American forebears and grew up celebrating St. Patrick's Day every year wearing green and visiting my (Irish-American) grandmother's house for a meal of corned beef and cabbage and potatoes, I'm not into that form of celebration anymore. I'm too pissed at how crass commercialism has reduced it all to stereotypes about drinking. Instead I've used St. Patrick's Day the past few years as a chance to take a moment and reflect on the experiences of Irish immigrants and their descendants in the US and what lessons we can learn from them.

The lesson I'm thinking about this year is immigration. Most of us in the US, not just those who trace ancestry back to Ireland, are descended from immigrants. But the Irish were one of the early groups that encountered a lot of politicized hatred. When waves of Irish started arriving in the 1840s and 1850s as refugees from the Great Potato Famine, politicians decried their lazy, uneducated, unclean ways, warning that they'd turn cities such as New York and Boston (where they arrived by ship) into cesspools of human sloth and waste. The language and sentiment behind it were eerily similar to what we hear from certain politicians in 2024.

But the Irish didn't destroy New York and Boston. Or Philadelphia. (Many Irish settled in eastern Pennsylvania, too.) Far from it. They went to work. They worked because they came here seeking better lives, via the opportunity to work. They worked hard jobs for low pay that other people didn't want to work. And the influx of their labor helped the US grow.

Many Americans— with no awareness of how they themselves were immigrants or had immigrant parents or grandparents— didn't even like the fact that Irish immigrants wanted to work. Up through the middle of the 20th century signs like "Irish need not apply" on businesses that were hiring were common sights.

The modern analogue to overt job discrimination against immigrants would seem to be immigration policy. Today immigrants who are granted temporary residency aren't allowed to work. Long ago, there weren't such policies. When Irish people started immigrating in large numbers there weren't even controls on immigration. They bought a ticket to New York, walked down the ramp into port, and began their new lives in the US. Ellis Island as an immigration station only opened in 1892. And while the first legislation that limited immigration from any country was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, it wasn't until the Immigration Act of 1924 that broad, per-country quotas on immigration (except northern European countries!) were enacted.

So, on this St. Patrick's Day, there are 3 lessons I wish everyone who celebrates Irish-American culture would recognize:

1) The hateful language against immigrants, including your forebears, has been the same for hundreds of years.

2) The claims the haters make about immigrants, including your forebears, harming this country have proven false generation after generation.

3) Immigration doesn't ruin the US, it makes it stronger.

Hawk and I have been slowly watching through episodes of the streaming TV series Timeless that originally aired in 2016-2018. We're not bingeing it; we're watching a couple of episodes a week. Though mostly that's because I've been so busy with work the past several weeks that when I wind down in the evenings I want to do something higher value than watch TV or feel I need to catch up on something else. We've actually watched the first six episodes at this point though my blog, as always is lagging behind— one of those things I'm perpetually trying to catch up on. Here are some thoughts about episode 2, "The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln".



The show is settling into a groove of the "Mission of the week" format. In this format each episode tells, and completes, an individual story. It's not completely episodic, though, like comedies that follow the similar "Funny thing that happens this week" format. There are clear, long running story arcs here about the main characters gradually puzzling out what their opponent is up to, gradually learning what their own sponsors are up to, and revealing bits about themselves.

In "The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln" the story-within-a-story, the mission of the week, has the characters time-porting back to April 14, 1865, the day when President Abraham Lincoln was murdered. Anyone who's taken an American history class knows the one-line summary: President Lincoln was shot while attending a play at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., by John Wilkes Booth, a marginal actor angry over the Confederacy's loss in the Civil War. The episode's plot is a cat-and-mouse game where the protagonists are trying to figure out what the villain is trying to change about history. ...And, to a lesser extent, though this one of the long story arcs, why.

Early in the episode I figured the story is about the villain trying to do one of three things:

1. Actually stop the assassination from happening, a surprise move that contradicts the heroes' assumptions and what the show has telegraphed so far, but would be an interesting twist revealing a far more complex set of goals on the part of the villain;


2. Ensure the assassination happens as we know it, for there's a role-reversal in which the heroes or some third party are actually wrecking history and the "villain" is trying to preserve it; or


3. Broaden the assassination by helping Booth and his murky conspirators kill other key government leaders, triggering a major governmental crisis and something akin to a coup.

Pretty much right off I discarded ideas 1 and 2 as too clever. The writers of this show are telegraphing so clearly it's like they're speaking to the camera. I don't expect big twists from them after they've already drawn so many straight lines.

( Episode spoiler. Tap to read... )

It's interesting how this show handles the Time Travel Paradox— how it resolves what happens to characters from/in the present day when the past is changed. I'll write more about this in a separate blog.

On a quick errand to CVS this weekend I saw an interesting display: a life-sized, Black Santa doll.



They also had a female Black Santa doll, though it wasn't 6 feet tall.



These got me thinking, what did Santa— the real Santa, aka Saint Nicholas— look like?

There was a real Saint Nicholas. He was a Christian bishop in the 3rd and 4th century CE, in the city of Myra, which is today Demre, Turkey. He was born to a Greek family, though possibly in another nearby city that's also part of modern-day Turkey.

I mention Nicholas's ancestry because as a Greek he probably wasn't Black. He probably wouldn't have been white, either, or at least not what is often thought of as white. The popularized modern images we have of Santa Claus were created in the 19th century in North America, drawing heavily from northern European yule traditions. The modern concept of Santa Claus is actually way more tied to Odin than a Greek guy born in Turkey.

So, what would a Greek guy born in Turkey have looked like? The oldest art piece I found in a search, a religious painting from the 11th century CE, depicts him as light brown. How accurate is that? It's 700 years later, so the artist was likely working from his understanding of what people from Turkey tend to look like combined with some amount of his own cultural norms.

Another painting I found from the 13th century shows Saint Nicholas a bit lighter but still about the color of cork. A few examples of non-Western art from the 14th through 18th centuries depict him as much darker. Some Western art from the 18th century depicts him as light skinned Greek.

Any of these could be accurate, though I imagine the first two, with a light brown or olive skin tone, are the best estimates. Other Western art as far back as the 14th century depicts Saint Nicholas with a pale, northern European complexion. That's almost certainly inaccurate.

West Virginia Travelog #9
Ansted, WV - Sun, 17 Sep 2023. 1:30pm

On the way to Cathedral Falls earlier today we saw signs for a Hawks Nest State Park. After a beautiful visit to Cathedral Falls we knew we'd have to take a detour on the way back out. How could we not stop at Hawks Nest State Park?



Alas there were no actual hawks at Hawks Nest. We asked the bored state park service employee working the combination information center/gift shop; he said nobody's seen hawks in the park recently, just lots of vultures. "But there's great views of the river," he assured us. "Oh," I asked, "Are there ospreys nesting by the river?" I then had to explain what an osprey is. Twice. We decided we were on our own on this one.



The main feature at the park is a lookout over the New River reached by a short walk. Here the river gorge is 585 feet deep. To the left in the photo is a railroad bridge. To the right is the Hawks Nest dam, which generates hydroelectric power.

Speaking of hydro power, a historical marker at the park notes the historically dark side of hydro power. In 1930-31 the local power company bored a 3 mile tunnel near here to divert water to increase power generation. The rock the miners dug through was heavy with silica dust. A huge number of the miners suffered acute silicosis and died. ...And not 20-30 years later like coal miners with "black lung" disease, but in as little as 1 year of work. Local officials admitted there were 109 such deaths out of 3,000 workers. A Congressional investigation in 1936 established the death toll at 476 (for the period of 1930-1935— again, a short period of time for lung disease). Workers and their families estimate up to 1,000 people out of the 3,000 died from silicosis. Whichever number you choose, it's considered the US's worst industrial accident.