The Lure of Taste and Smell

 We all know what power our senses bring us.  I'm focusing right now on our sense of smell and taste and all the splendor and, yes, the disgust they can wring out of us.  From the beauty of flowers or a freshly baked pizza on the one hand, to a garbage bin or recently invaded bathroom on the other hand, our senses make us react across a broad range of emotions.  And, naturally, we are not alone in this.  Animals share these experiences as well.

I defer now to the world of dogs.  The experts tell us that a dog's sense of smell can be as much as 100,000 times more acute than us deficient humans!!  Every dog owner bears witness to this every day.  When we take our dogs on walks, most of these creatures like to stop what seems like every seven seconds to smell something whether it's a "pee mail" left by one of their neighboring four legged pals or anything else that is not remotely identifiable by us humans.  In my case, our totally endearing puppy, Cosmo, would, if she could, extend every twenty minute walk to four hours so she could stop and sniff every little microscopic item that lies on the ground or maybe did in recent weeks.  And, I confess this drives me nuts.  Just pee and poop, Cosmo, and let's get on with the rest of the day!  Having said this, I do try to be tolerant and permit more of what I perceive as a trivial pursuit than I would like, although not as much as Lady Cosmo would like.  As I often say, it's not like dogs watch movies or TV or read books or do puzzles.  Their joy is in pursuing whatever smells out there.  

In our daily routine, Cosmo and I head to the beach -- this time of year twice daily -- where Cosmo gets to run free and engage in her beloved pursuit of a tennis ball which I happily throw to her with my chuckit.  When we arrive at the beach, she anxiously awaits my releasing her and with an explosion of happiness chases the ball and returns it jumping all the while before taking off again.  Ahh, but then my less than best friend, Cosmo's sense of smell, kicks in.  As the experts have explained to us, the dogs smell everything.  In their world nothing is left unsniffed.  In our case at the beach, Cosmo will within minutes of our arrival take off in random directions in pursuit of I don't know what.  Largely, it's all the crap that people leave on the beach like doritos or apple cores or orange peels or an assortment of nuts.  I often refer to these leftbehinds as the salad bar or the buffet line that so attracts dogs the way these things attract humans in our experience.  But, let's not stop there.  Cosmo has also developed a passion for jellyfish, bird feathers and certain shells.  Not long ago I got home and told Lily that Cosmo had eaten a dollar and a half. She tilted her head and said, "what do you mean?"  I replied that Cosmo had eaten one and a half sand dollars.  

But then our lives took a turn.  I noticed that when our path would cross with friends Sue and Tom and their dog, India, Cosmo would get deliriously distracted by a ball they were using -- an orange squeaky thing.  Cosmo would drop everything and have a laser like focus on this ball.  She once ran about a half mile up the beach when she saw them and I realized it was solely because of her complete obsession with the ball India liked to retrieve.  What I learned is that this ball was bacon scented!  Perfect!  It didn't take me more than nine seconds after I got home to put in an order for these treasures.

And, this morning the new ball made its debut.  I am now tempted to buy stock in the company that makes these things.  Even on our walk to the beach, Cosmo was jumping with joy and staring constantly at me wanting desperately to get her mouth around the little tasty jewel sitting in the chuckit.  When we got to the beach, she went nuts.  For the next hour as we walked up the beach and back, she wanted nothing to do with anything on the beach but have that squeaky bacon-filled dream in her mouth.  She never delayed in bringing every throw back to me so she could experience this mini hunting expedition as many times as possible.  Well, okay, there was this one moment where she ferreted out a half eaten pizza slice that someone left behind, but that proved to be a very temporary distraction.

So, I believe I have now adapted a dog's powerful sense of smell and taste to an exercise that keeps both Cosmo and me happy.  Long live bacon!

How Not To Panic

 I'll make this brief.  How often have you heard the expression, "you never know how you're going to react in a panic"?  Well, I certainly don't.  Here we were, Lily and me, in Mexico City helping out Jesse and Laura with their almost five year old kids, twins Oliver and Charlie.  Jesse needed to be up in Washington as Laura was officially becoming a Foreign Service officer, and we were more than happy to fill in as guardians of these adorable and enormously non-stop hyperactive kids who know us as Meme and Poppy.  What an opportunity to further bond with these young ones while helping Jesse and Laura be together for this momentous occasion.  

So, one day we decided to take the kids to a nearby mall which had a lovely indoor playground which the kids love and which would enable us to drain some of Oliver and Charlie's effervescent energy.  After about an hour of constant climbing and rocketing down some steep slides surrounded by many other exuberant kids, Charlie came yelling to me that he needed to pee!  When Charlie does this, he normally gives about a 12 second notice of the the upcoming event.  This is not something Charlie likes to casually defer until it's convenient for his folks to help him take care of this task, or in this case Lily and me.  So, I knew action by me needed to be immediate and effective.  I mean, what we wanted to avoid at all costs was Charlie losing control and flooding his pants amidst a soundtrack of bellowing yells by the young man which would reasonably have drawn a fair amount of attention that Charlie would likely not enjoy.

So, I pushed the panic button!  I had no idea where the bathrooms might be and so I ran to anyone looking like a local employee and in my ever so rudimentary Spanish pleaded with the person to tell me where the "bano" was.  I was given what I thought were sort of vague directions judging by the casual response and relaxed waving of arms.  But, the directions were all in Spanish leaving me without a firm grip of where I should be headed.  I spotted a food court nearby and figured this area must be what I was being advised to direct myself to.  Charlie and I ran.  I knew time was running very short and no doubt I needlessly hyped the problem into a world shattering event.

At last I spotted a sign for the bathrooms and sprinted with Charlie to the much needed destination.  Seeing the door, we crashed in and got Charlie to a toilet just in time to avoid a very wet event.  I felt so relieved.  We had succeeded!  But then, as I waiting for Charlie to finish up, and as my panic dissipated I noticed that along the wall in the bathroom stood a woman looking at me quizzically.  Her head was sort of tilted with a message I could only interpret as "what the hell are you doing in here?!?"  Oops, I had failed to notice in my task of urgency that the sign on the door we crashed through said "mujeres," not a place gentlemen are supposed to be.  In that moment, I dearly wished my Spanish skills were more advanced, but instead I was left to invoke my best charades strategies to demonstrate  my sincere apologies and embarrassment.  I cringed and held my hands to my face and spoke my regrets in English hoping the lady would get a sense of the genuineness I was trying to communicate. I thought I detected a very slight grin on her part, or at least that's what I wanted to read into her gaze.  I sort of bowed, took Charlie's hand and backed out of the "bano por las mujeres."

So, I guess my advice here is when in panic mode don't forget to read the labels on the doors.  They're helpful.  Later when Oliver needed to pee I knew exactly where to go, and exactly where not to go.  As they say, lesson learned.

Burps, Farts, hiccups...and Total Bliss. Ahh, Travel!

 It strikes me that one of the greatest contradictions of the human experience is travel.  On the one hand, it offers sensations of adventure, discovery, culinary treats and memories we will cherish forever.  This is especially the case when we travel with family or long time beloved friends.  But, at the other end of the spectrum, travel offers up wonderful opportunities for stress, discomfort, anger and a host of other emotions and experiences we would just as soon avoid.  The dark side here often involves getting from one place to another.  

So it was  with our splendid group of eight following through on a long planned barge cruise in Southern France.  We had Maggie and Ellen starting off in New York, Vernon and Leslie from Washington D.C., Gordy and Janie from upstate South Carolina, and Lily and I from Charleston.  As you would expect, there had been much planning to coordinate our flights to arrive in Toulouse about the same time and all be ready to be picked up by our barge crew which had all the promise of a fabulous experience.

But then, our dear friend the travel monster made an appearance.  And, it came with a wide variety of pinpricks and back stabs.  First, Gordy and Janie's flight reservation was cancelled and the airline never even notified them of this decision!  Maggie and Ellen's flight out of New York was cancelled and when advised that they were booked on another airline, that airline said they had no record of it when they went to check in.  Vernon and Leslie got their initial flight to Brussels and got within a few hundred feet of the gate for their flight to Toulouse only to realize they were too late too make the connection.  Instead, they had to backtrack through London (!) to get to their final destination.  Lily and I made it to Brussels and got to a spot in the terminal where we could actually see the gate for our connecting flight to Toulouse only to realize  that there was a line in front of us of at least a hundred people all waiting to get through passport control where there were only two agents at work.  The line moved in a similar fashion to a severely impaired centipede.  94 percent of our thoughts were focused on whether we'd make it through the line to catch our flight or would we enjoy the same stress level as Vernon and Leslie by needing to find another flight through some other random country.  So relaxing!

But, we all made it...finally.  With all of us in Toulouse, we were bussed to the barge, Rosa, and met our incredible crew:  Julien, our captain, his wife Nicole, energy bunny Agatha, and Martha our chef who had just been flown in from Paris to replace a Covid infected chef originally assigned to this cruise.  And, then a day later, Ellen tested positive for Covid!  When does this craziness end?!?!  Well, happy to say it did end there.  Martha's work in the kitchen was spectacular and Ellen's illness subsided.  Let the fun begin!

And did it ever!  The Rosa is a 100 foot barge with four guest rooms each with a bathroom ensuite.  The crew's quarters were aft with a salon in the middle for inside dining and hanging out.  On top there was a beautiful deck with table and chairs providing a perfect spot for taking in the landscape.  And, a hot tub, of course.  Julien was exactly what you want in a captain: dedicated, helpful and gracious.  And, a wonderful teller of jokes.  Nicole was as close to a walking encyclopedia as I have ever met.  She pretty much knew everything about local history, wines and wine making, local cuisine, architecture, goats and pretty much everything else that would come up in our conversations.  Agatha was likely the most cheerful and energetic person we had ever met, constantly seeking to increase our comfort or asking if she could get us anything from the bar seemingly every nineteen seconds, or so it seemed.  The fact that all this food and drinks were included in the package provided a serious challenge to our common sense.  Clearly, the gods of moderation were nowhere to be seen.  And, Dominique and Martha were chefs who constantly gobsmacked us with the three crazily delicious meals they provided daily whether it was duck, veal, seafood, or something with a lip smacking puree or a creme brulee, a tiramisu, or a chocolate mousse or fondu.  At each meal, Martha would serve the food and patiently explain how she prepared each dish while we resisted every possible urge to dive in and start eating our culinary treasure before the tutorial was finished.  Seriously, in all our world travels I don't believe I ever had a better sense of what it feels like to be royalty.  Although when we finished our stay on the Rosa, each of us needed to put the "wide load" sign on since we were all taking up considerably more space than when we first boarded.

The daily routine was wonderfully predictable.  A multi-dish super breakfast followed by an off board outing to a range of places like a visit to a countess in her chateau where she could share her family's history with us.  Or, a trip to the distillery where Armagnac, a cognac-like "digestif" is made.  Or, a visit to a goat farm where amazing cheese is made.  Or, a stop at the one-time chateau of Henri IV for a history tutorial.  Or, a visit to a cork museum which explained to us how this area used to serve the wine industry.  Or, a separate boat trip up the Garonne River.  Or, a winery visit.  And, all this interspersed with sublimely relaxing barge rides down the Canal Garonne.  Sitting on the deck gazing at the verdant panorama framing the canal with our feet propped up gave us pretty much namaste moments.  Ommm!

Yes, this is the joy of travel; the shared experience with dear friends which will fill our memories forever.  And, now the trip home! May it be burp free!