You are going to relax, if you follow instructions sent in the red envelope.

We didn’t know your address and don’t need to – sinister…no!

This message is enough.

We want you to enjoy as many minutes, hours and days as you can.

Just wanted to deliver that simple, valuable and cherish-able message.

For all the good things you do.

Somewhere.

We look for the ideal place.

To live.

To stay.

To learn.

To sunbathe.

To dance.

To write.

To get away from it all.

Getting away from one to arrive at another.

If they offer tea or absinthe which should you accept?

It’s a trick question of course. The circumstances dear friend: who are they and what does it mean if you choose one over the other, and what’s at stake?

Diplomats have sometimes eaten strange foods and downed bizarre drinks to make connecting easier.

You think you have the right to expect a rural-galactic-no-nutrition-non-fat-neutered meal wherever you go!

Sadly food is often as much a speech or statement as it is something to eat.

Yes! It probably would be better if this were not so.

I still don’t know what it was that was chosen by my hosts at that mountain restaurant in a distant land years ago…I couldn’t recognize anything.

And yet I enjoyed it.

They gave me a dashboard, I was expecting a suitcase.

You see I like to travel, I travel often. Sometimes down the road, and a little less often across oceans.

We try to say a few words in a local language, sometimes there are several, everywhere we go.

I would never pretend to “live like a local” – it just isn’t what happens; I’m sipping coffee at a cafe when others are delivering beer kegs and machine parts!

The dash is good but the case is better.

Handed to you on a plate.

But where’s the plate? What’s it made of and whose is it?

And, why should you need it handed to you?!

We wandered down the twisting, hedge-encumbered lane, wondering about philosophy and what it was and what part it played in, what influence it had, over our lives.

All we could think of were jokes and hilarious moments.

We became friends then, and friends we still are.