Recollections of a Vagabonde

Well, I have to be truthful - the above photo is not a picture of my garden – it is a vintage postcard from the turn of last century – but if I had placed a picture of my garden instead – I would not have many visitors come to this post because it is certainly not as colorful. We do not have a garden.We have a wooded lot and some potted plants. As I mentioned in earlier posts, we are in the middle of our little rain forest. This is what one can see from the road – with more trees on both sides. (Please click on the photos to enlarge them as they look so much better.) When we bought the house there were less trees in the front yard. I planted a rose garden – I had 150 rose bushes then. The trees grew and with more and more shade the roses did not last. We bought the lot next to ours and it is covered with trees. The other problem is that the soil is mostly red clay and rocks. We planted a couple of new rose bushes last year in a spot with a little morning sun. Just t...

In my post of Saturday July 27, 2012, I mentioned that I was sad that the Tour de France had ended. I had written the post the night before and published it at 1:00 am on Saturday morning. When I turned the TV on later than morning I was surprised to see some cycling event – I thought it was a Tour de France rerun, truly. Then I realized that the background did not look like some French country village and noticed a pub – it was a biking event for the Olympic Games! I kept watching and was very happy when Alexander Vinokourov of Kazakhstan came ahead of all the others and won the gold medal. Here he is below at the Tour de France 2012 ( photo Wikimedia Creative Commons. ) Vino, as he is called, started bicycling when he was 11 years old. He was in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games as an amateur and finished 53rd. I saw him in many Tours de France, wearing the Kazakhstan’s colors of turquoise and gold. Last year I was watching the Tour de France live on TV when Vino plun...

Several of my posts have been about St Pierre and Miquelon, the French islands south of Newfoundland’s Burin Peninsula in Canada. My last post mentioning them was on January 19, 2012 in my post about selecting travel destinations, click here to see it. As I explained in that post, I had wished to visit these islands since childhood, the last remaining French territory in North America, and finally visited them in 2008. I had stamps from these islands in my collection and was intrigued by them – because as it says on the top stamp on the left below, it was France in North America. The posts on St Pierre and Miquelon can be found by clicking on the index on my blog on the right under that name. On August 22, 2010 I wrote a Blog Intermission post entitled An Island – une île , with a poem and photos of various islands, click here to see it. I had included the photo of the Grand Bank lighthouse taken later on an afternoon and which is now at the top of this post. Below is t...