Travel sketches

My new favorite blogger is Vivian Swift.(vivianswiftblog.com ) She has written a wonderful book called "When Wanderers Cease to Roam." It's her travel journal and it's full of her beautiful little watercolors. I bought it because of the watercolors but as I read it I realized I liked the writing as well as the paintings.  She's so inspirational and full of information on writing,  journaling and painting...and she's funny.  I found myself identifying with her so much that I've emailed her several times and she actually wrote back.

She's inspired me to start writing about my own travels. I've been looking through my sketchbooks to find things I've sketched while traveling. I've done a lot of traveling but surprisingly little sketching. I buy sketchbooks all the time and take them with me but when I look back at them they'll have one or two half finished sketches in them and lots of blank pages.

Nancy, Megan, and I went to Paris and London in 2002.  These are the only sketches I could find although I do remember doing some others.

When we got to our teeny- tiny hotel room in Paris there were three beds jammed together. We thought we could save money by all 3 of us sharing a room. We would have had to walk on the beds to get to the bathroom. So we splurged and I got a separate room. This is Nancy resting before we hit the streets. Nice socks!

We had a friend who lived in London who we hadn't seen in more than 20 years. We called him while in Paris and he insisted we come to London.  So we took the train through the Chunnel. It was a little disappointing because while going through the chunnel you obviously couldn't see a thing. I liked the ferry better.

Our friend, Jim Singer, was an Oriental art dealer. He had specialized in Tibetan art but said it was too picked over now and he had gone on to other Oriental art. His large apartment was full of paintings, prints, textiles and statues.  The one of the Buddha was almost life sized. The smaller one sat on his fireplace.

This was the view from his living room window. (not a very good sketch, but it helps to remember it.)

Jim came to visit us in California a couple of times when he moved from London to Tiburon, Ca.

And then he disappeared. Every time I called I got no answer and no answering machine.

So I googled him and, to my shock, he was dead.

We had just seen him about two weeks before this and he had talked about being depressed. It hadn't seemed that serious, though. He had been recently divorced, both his parents had died and his only sister had died years before.  So he had no family left.  We've never really found out what happened but we assume he committed suicide. Just when we found him after so long we lost him again.