Vera-Marie Landi asks about projects, and her excellent question has gotten me pondering about a big one on the horizon.
Last night, dead tired after a day of touring the Orkney Islands, each with a tumbler of Talisker Scottish whiskey in our room at Pentland House in Thurso, on the northernmost tip of the Scottish mainland, Rebecca and I talked about Ireland.
It was early, around 7 pm, and we were trying to stay awake to watch episode six of the Netflix series, The Vikings, about younger people pillaging both European nations starting in the 8th century.
This was day nine of our two-week train trip around Scotland. Instead of the peaceful modern Norwegians, we’re trying to stay ahead of Donald Trump, who occupied western Ireland over the weekend.
Our conversation wandered to 2019 and a trip we co-led to Ireland and Northern Ireland. In the first photo, that’s our group of 24 standing in front of the Northern Ireland Parliament Building, Stormont.
And here we’re bunched next to a Peace Wall between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods in Belfast.
I’m showing you and me two group pictures as a reminder of the double edge of the Viking travel sword. On the one hand, we loved our group of 24 in Ireland. No one was high-maintenance except me, and even then, it was just the occasional glitch in the itinerary.
But that was 2019, when Rebecca and I were in our upper sixties, spring chickens. Now, closer to 80, and asking: do we have a Scotland Luther College (my former employer) Alumni and Friends trip in us?
We wanted to do one in 2021, but COVID nixed it. Again in 2023, this time throttled by a college President who questioned its utility. Thankfully, the current president reinstated them, and that’s where our dilemma lies.
It’s likely our tour won’t happen until 2028, when we’ll be…older, though not the approximately 5000 years of the Stones of Stenness on Orkney.
No one, not even the greatest American baseball player, Willie Mays, can do something forever. I remember watching Willie stumble in the outfield playing center field for the New York Mets in the World Series at 42 in 1973. His iconic hat flew off as it had a million times before, this time showing a bald spot. The extraordinary Mays had aged out of baseball.
This also happens to ordinary men and women.
The trick is to know when.
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