The smoke monster had us trapped on the island
Toward the end of our honeymoon, the volcano at Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland was spewing out its ash cloud that closed up European airports. The UK airports were closed on the 15th, and we were supposed to leave on the 17th. We were stuck. We stayed in Edinburgh for several more days, where Bill worked remotely from the hotel while I wandered the city and drew some more.
Eventually the airports were reopening, and we managed, at about 10pm on the 21st, to switch to a flight out of Heathrow at 6pm on the 22nd. That was a very long day of train rides and plane rides and car rides but after 24 hours of awakeness, Linus was able to lick Bill's beard and everything was right in the world.
April 14-15, 2010
Freely available wifi is apparently not something that Scotland likes to do, and we were desperate to watch Lost, so we went to the first place we found, called the Haggis Cafe. We had some lunch while we (ahem) buffered an entire episode so we could watch it back at the hotel. The cafe had enclosed rooftop seating, and this gull stood outside the open door for at least half an hour, yelling loudly and trying to figure out how to get inside to steal food from all the people without them noticing.
April 10-11, 2010
This page has a lot of words. What's up with all the baked beans, England? I don't understand. But I love your mushrooms.
April 8-9, 2010
I got that Stan Rogers song stuck in my head when we saw the ravens that live at the Tower of London. I spent a bit of time writing the lyrics around the edge only to realize later that I got them wrong.
The travel sketchbook
Back in school, my department had little gift exchanges at the end of each semester. One time, my teacher pulled my name, and she got me a tiny handmade sketchbook. I use it exclusively as a travel notebook, just so I can keep a lot of really great memories all in one place, and it will take me a while to fill it.
April 7-8.
Click for big!
What It Is, part one.
I may have mentioned before how much I love Lynda Barry's recent book called What It Is. I purchased it a few months after its release in 2008, read the whole thing, and carried it around with me for a while. Now I am revisiting the instructional part with the intention of doing the exercises, instead of just thinking about it. So with the aid of a pad of paper bestowed upon me at a recent meeting, I am armed to engage.
The very first parts involved thinking about cars in your childhood, and having grown up on a car lot, making a list of ten was quite easy. From there you pick one, and move through some memory rendering, and so on. This is a seven-minute writing spree in the present tense about a trip in the Honeybee motorhome we took camping (click for big):
Rereading it a few days later made me feel sort of crazy.
Today I stopped at B&N for a silly purpose (and I know: little bookstores! but little bookstores might not have carried the silly thing I needed), and stopped in the cafe for a little while to sit and draw somewhere outside of my house. So I scrawled out the camper.
I haven't seen the thing - or even a picture of it - in several years (until I did a GIS). meeemmmorriiiieeeessss