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Our annual trip to a US city, where Sharon attends the MLA conference, and Chris gets to go explore a new city.

Friday

fly to Austin, get settled in hotel

starving, get late lunch at touristy “dive bar” on 6th street

walk around, back to hotel, then back out

hang out on Congress Ave bridge waiting for bats, eventually a few appear

dinner at Guero’s Taco Bar, big operation, kind of touristy but good food

Saturday

South Congress Ave: Uncommon Objects, Lucy in Disguise with Diamonds, Tesoros Trading Company, lunch at Lucky Robot Japanese Kitchen

Umlauf Sculpture Garden

Barton Springs Pool (just walked through, intending to comeback later in the trip, but then it got flooded by the freak rains and closed)

Zilker Botanical Garden

taxis suck, we have finally relented and use Uber

MLA opening reception (Sharon), Chris crashes it, free food and alcohol!

by sheer coincidence, Roller Derby bout next door! Pizza and some godawful canned margarita

Sunday

Sharon to MLA conference, Chris free to wander

Austin “B-Cycle” bicycle share to West End neighborhood and lunch and wandering

Segway tour of downtown, like in Pittsburgh!

self-guided tour of Capitol building, belly of the beast, strangely accessible to public

back to hotel and joining up with Sharon

dinner at Z’Tejas, good food

lots of time spent in BookPeople, great bookstore

2nd try at Congress Ave bridge bat viewing, later in evening, different vantage point, much more successful!

Monday

B-cycle to west side of downtown to set up Car2Go account

short test drive up to Capitol area, lunch at Thundercloud Subs (thanks Nisa!)

Bullock State museum, great exhibits although excessively fawning about Texas

B-cycle aaaaalllll over UT Austin campus

biked across town to Austin Jones Contemporary art gallery, closed to public today, fuckers

back to hotel, dip in the pool!

dinner with Sharon and Emily at Bangers beer garden on Rainey Street (Mega Mutt Monday event)

late night visit to Red 7 club to see Quintron and Miss Pussycat, who I knew of but really could not care less about but I figured I need to go to at least one show while here. Opening bands was The Nots, who were AWFUL. But the crowd loved ’em. Kids are stupid.

Tuesday

Grab Car2Go, head for the hills! (Hill Country west of Austin)

driving down RedBud Trail, fancy neighborhood, felt like Hollywood Hills or Riviera

Bee Caves Road to Cuernavaca neighborhood, Commons Ford park, Laura Bush liberry

Oasis restaurant at Lake Travis, terribly campy tourist trap but great view of the lake

back into town and to the Blanton art museum, great stuff if you skip most of the “European masters”

relaxing back at hotel, still have the car on the meter …

back to UT Austin campus for the incredible daily sunset event at the James Turrell Skyspace (thanks Scott W.!)

drove out to the Broken Spoke on S. Lamar for some pretty amazing honky tonking

Wednesday

were going to get another Car2Go car and see a few more things in the last two hours we had to spare, but then there was some screwup with my Car2Go account, so scratch that

taxi ride down E. Cesar Chavez through East Austin

Salt Lick BBQ at airport

Bye Austin!

éminence grise: 1: a confidential agent; especially : one exercising unsuspected or unofficial power 2: a respected authority; specifically : elder statesman (from Merriam-Webster)

Last Saturday was the annual Atlanta Open Orthographic Meet (aka spelling bee), held at Manuel’s Tavern every year on the first Saturday after Valentine’s Day. It’s an adult competition (e.g. beer is consumed) and the room is packed every year. Here’s the short radio story that WABE’s Kate Sweeney did for last year’s event.

Every year, the Bee Committee picks a particularly timely word to start the competition, the first word in Round 1. Typically it’s related to major news stories of the past year, wars and political campaigns and so forth, but this year was special. For decades, Ed Martin had been an active member of the group that runs the group, and had passed away just last month (see my previous entry here). He sometimes referred to himself as an “eminence grise”, and that was what the Committee chose for this year’s word, honoring him with a short speech before the competition got properly underway. Pardon me, there’s something in my eye …

This year, the first several words in the first round were very difficult, and I took perverse delight in watching a nearby table of excited newbies rapidly deflate as they realized that they weren’t as smart as they though they were. That annual rite of mass ego correction usually doesn’t happen until Round 2. In the end, though, the later words in Round 1 eased up and it all turned out to be about average — you could make a couple errors and still advance. This year I didn’t actually make any “stupid” mistakes in Round 1, rather my two errors (“just deserts” and “gazump”) were simply words that I didn’t know how to spell right.

So, despite my typical two mistakes I managed to make it to the second round, which I have about a 50/50 chance of achieving in any given year. All a Round 1 win does really is postpone when I can relax and start drinking harder. Round 2 did send me packing as it usually does.

Nedda and Keith joined us at our table again — Nedda’s been doing quite well at this since we introduced her to it in 2013, and she appears to be a lifer now. Former winner (of the whole damn thing!) Ed Hall also showed up, and made it to the final round! Alas, Ed came in second, along with perennial bridesmaid Fred Roberts. That poor guy (Fred), he always comes in second …

Here’s a sampling of this year’s words:

Round 1: spatchcock, seraphim, cashew, viscount, croissant

Round 2: plimsoll, abscissa, corniche

Round 3: corymb, limen, phenolphthalein, wherry

Round 4: ceorl, uintjie, lotte

(As I type this, the spellchecker is upset with nearly every word beyond Round 1, and indeed doesn’t even recognize Round 1’s spatchcock.)

In addition to the lead-off term that paid tribute to Ed’s passing, the one word that will be particularly memorable to me this year was towhee in Round 2, because I knew it but inexplicably screwed up the spelling. So I know what word I’ll be obsessed with in 2015 …

I’ve written about this annual event before — click to see the 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 and 2007 writeups.

R. I. P., Ed.

Ed Martin has passed away.

I first encountered Ed in the late 1990’s, I think, although maybe earlier. I had been a DJ on WREK for many years, and Ed Martin would call in frequently. Perhaps it was to comment on something I had just talked about on air — I would often do things like describe the album cover, mention the record label, anything I could think of, basically liven up the place. Or perhaps I was giving away tickets to a show — he got into lots of shows around town via winning passes from WREK. I know he went to a lot of those shows, but I think he also knew that a lot of those giveaways result in ZERO calls, and he was just relieving us of the embarrassment.

After a hiatus from WREK, I returned to essentially rebuild the place, taking a behind-the-scenes engineering role rather than on-air. Around then is when I actually met Ed in person. He had enrolled in some city planning coursework at Georgia Tech, and had decided to come by WREK and see what he could do to help. Although he and I joked that he had only enrolled at GT so that he could get to work at WREK — which wasn’t that unreasonable, that’s how awesome WREK was. At the time, I was on the warpath to restore the radio station following years of neglect, and I quickly learned that Ed was just about the most supportive and reliable friend you could have. One of the things I was doing at WREK was understanding every niche of the operation and documenting it for future students, and Ed helped me understand the sports production side.

Ah, yes, Ed and sports. His favorite sport was women’s volleyball, one of the sports at Georgia Tech that was big enough to warrant radio coverage, but not big enough for the Big Bucks commercial radio. Ed was a natural, of course, providing play-by-play and color commentary as the situation dictated. He certainly had a deep knowledge of the game, but that didn’t stop me from endlessly ribbing him about him doing women’s volleyball so he would get to hang around those lanky Amazonians in short shorts.

By 2002, two other guys and I had successfully rebuilt WREK to the point where we had a pretty decent digital audio system up and running, and Ed promptly got to work in it, filling it with music. His specialty is 20th century composition, and so he ended up taking care of the morning classical music programming for a while. But he was really in his element producing “IDs”. An ID is a short, 20 to 30 second bit of music identifying the radio station — we had to have a selection of these in the recorded archive so that the automated music system could play them at the top of the hour, when the FCC requires us to say “WREK Atlanta” on the air. You can surround it with whatever nonsense you want, but the station call latter and city of license need to be spoken. And Ed made THE BEST IDs. OH my god, they were so good. They ARE so good — they can still be heard today! Next time you hear some kooky ID with a deep southern voice, it’s Ed.

“WREK Atlanta. Because one never knows, do one?”

(over a ragtime piano bit)

“WREK Atlanta. We’ve been bringing boogie to the world for 35 years and we’re not tired yet.”

(over a blues boogie track)

“And you can ‘get happy’ with WREK Atlanta.”

(over an old “get happy” blues tune)

“Stay in touch with your inner college student with WREK Atlanta”

(over some manic indie rock mess)

“WREK Atlanta. It’s what college radio was meant to be.”

(over a raucous cover of Wild Thing)

Another one of my favorites has Ed simply stating the ID over a craaaaazy Spike Jones soundtrack.

If you’d like to hear some of these, and you are reading this before January 28th, Jon Kincaid played them on his radio show. Go to the Personality Crisis page on WREK’s website and click “last show” to start listening via WREK’s running archive. The first ID plays about 45 minutes in, and Jon provides his own remembrances. He plays a whole raft of them near the end of the 2-hour show. The show playlist is here.

Outside of WREK, Ed turned me on to the annual Atlanta Orthographic Meet, aka the adult spelling bee, or just “The Bee” as Ed would call it. Held at Manuel’s Tavern every year, this is fantastic annual event allows adults of all stripes to come down and informally discover that they don’t know squat about spelling. It’s a truly humbling experience. Ed had won it a couple times, and made his way onto the committee of people that run the event every year. Seriously, if you win this event, you are way smarter than nearly everyone in town, and in ways that the rest of us can’t even imagine (linguistics, law, medecine, etc.). I suspect that at some point Ed and I were hanging out at the WREK studio and I probably pontificated about some spelling matter, and Ed slyly told me about “The Bee”. I’m sure he knew that the experience would correct my ego a few notches. But I’m a lifer there now, and have been to every one since 2004 or so. It’s always held on the Saturday after Valentines Day, so Feb 21st this year — come on out!

Constitution Day parade, 2004, Lady Bird unknown

About 10 or so years ago, Ed moved out to California, specifically Nevada City CA, where he’d spent some time in the past, and took up some civic duties there. I honestly don’t know what he did, but occasionally he’d put up a profile picture of him working duty at a polling station or scolding the county government or something, so clearly he was busy out there. Thing is,when you talked to Ed, you can try to get him to talk about himself, but he’d turn it right around, and you’d end up not knowing about all the crazy great stuff he was doing.

He helped out at Nevada City’s KMVR for a while (“Music of the world, voice of the community” says my t-shirt) but apparently got annoyed with them and transitioned over to helping out the kids at nearby UC Davis and KDVS. Naturally, the kids there took to him, even more than we had at WREK, and he dubbed himself the radio station’s “senior mascot” (click for a great profile of Ed).

A few years ago, I started getting into electric cars and pretty much became a full-time nutjob on the topic. Well, Ed latched right on, and interviewed me for the KDVS zine. I’m not really sure what this was doing in a college radio zine, but Ed was so incredibly supportive, and I was certainly happy to go on and on for what turned out to be four pages.

For years he had a show on alternating Saturday’s called “Cactus Corners”, and thanks to KDVS’s fantastic online archive, you can still listen to much of it, or even download it. Even if 20th century composed music (aka avant garde classical) isn’t your thing, just wait until Ed got on mic, as it was always fascinating. His reliable use of the “royal we” always cracked me up.

I did some internet spelunking and dug up these links:

https://www.facebook.com/cactuscorners

http://cactuscornerskdvs.blogspot.com/ — posts from Dec 2010 to Oct 2013

http://169.237.101.62/shows/past/show_id/1146/ (2010 show playlists, no audio)

Here’s just the last six months of the show:

http://library.kdvs.org/archive/view/show_id/2982 (show audio, Mar-Jun 2014)

http://169.237.101.62/shows/past/show_id/2982/ (show playlists, Mar-Jun 2014)

http://library.kdvs.org/archive/view/show_id/2822 (show audio, Jan-Mar 2014)

http://169.237.101.62/shows/past/show_id/2822/ (show playlists, Jan-Mar 2014)

I’ve taken his last two shows (extracted from the pages above) and linked them up for you in the table below. Ed’s voice is just a click away …

date	description	stream	download
10-May-2014	playlist and notes	audio stream	audio download
07-Jun-2014	playlist and notes	audio stream	audio download

That last show above, for June 7th, aired just before Ed headed out to the mountains. Over the years, he had done some fire watch duty. A friend had a regular gig that Ed would substitute for, as needed. Read this excellent New York Times article about the lookout duty, and check out the photo archive. Can you imagine?

Click on Ed’s Facebook profile to see the outpouring there. The man was well loved by so, so many people.

I’ll leave you with this wonderful little video that the KDVS folks produced a couple years ago.

Carry on, Dude.

Yours, Chris

Departure day!

Andreas and Wolfgang were escorting me in the taxi to the TGV train station, so I said goodbye to Andi and Nora.

On the way to the train station, Andreas had the taxi take a circuituitous route that passed a few landmarks, including the Catholic cathedral we saw from the water. But this was literally a 5 minute tour of the city, and I was just firing the camera out the window as we sped by.

Once at the train station, I said my goodbyes to Andreas and Wolfgang, and thanked Andreas once again for his generosity. I’d been talking about doing this for so many years!

At 9am, I boarded the TGV train and headed for Paris.

The train took me straight from Marseilles to the Charles De Gaulle airport on the outskirts of Paris. I would arrive three hours before my flight, so with plenty of time to spare, which was good because I got off the train at the wrong stop. Of all places, I got off at the stop for Disneyland Paris, which is just before the airport stop — nooo, I definitely don’t want to go there! As we pulled into the station, I think they probably announced that CDG was coming up at the next stop after that, but with their impenetrable English and bad P.A. sound system, I probably just recognized “Charles de Gaulle” and bolted off the train.

Finally, the flight from Paris to Atlanta.

Whew!

Thank you Uncle Andreas!

Last day of sailing! For me at least. We’d be sailing for Marseilles, and the following morning I’d be catching a train out to Paris and then a flight back to Atlanta.

We departed Porquerolles, and promptly got a chance at some more diagonal sailing. Here’s an action shot, screenshotted from Wolfgang’s video for the day. We’re about to execute a turn, from having the wind coming at us from the right / starboard, to having the wind coming at us from the left / port. Nora is at far left, ready to crank the winch that will tighten up the main sail, and I’m collecting the thick rope (“sheet”) coming off that winch and keeping it taughtly wound on the winch so that the winch will grab it. Andreas’s striped shirt is barely visible at lower right, as he is going to pull over the mainsail anchor, along a rail out of view below the video frame. Finally, Andi is at the helm, having just called the turn (“Wende”, the German word for “change”). At this instant, I’m watching the bow waiting for when it starts veering right across the horizon, into the wind and then through the turn to put the wind on the other side of the boat.

These “tack” turns happen very quickly, in about 10-15 seconds, and everybody has a job to do. Most of the time, if a mistake was made, it was me making it! On this one, I had my foot on a rope and was thus preventing Andreas from being able to do his job. I was focused on my own job 🙂 Well, next time will be another chance to do it right!

I don’t remember if we did any “jibe” turns. Those are turns where you are still moving from having the wind on one side, to having the wind on the other side, but done when the wind goes behind the boat during the turn. This causes the mainsail to violently whip across the boat, and is super dangerous to be around — as in, get whacked on the head, unconscious or worse, and possibly go overboard.

We sailed by a freaky … military base? Billionarie’s lair? CIA hideout? Who knows.

Andreas napping in his favorite spot.

We sailed into a little cove. People were hiking in the hills, jumping from outcrops into the water, generally enjoying the day. A small ferry passed by with tourists gawking at us eating lunch. It was probably a lot easier to get to the tiny town at the end of the cove by sea than by land.

We passed the bare white cliffs of the Massif des Calanque (“inlet”) mountains.

Just mile after mile of incredible coastline.

As we approached the port of Marseilles, we dropped our sails and proceeded under engine power, to preserve full maneuverability. There were huge ships passing nearby and you don’t mess with them or you get flattened. In fact, in this shot you see a harbor pilot boat heading straight for us to make sure we know damn well which way to go.

Another ferry colossus. No sudden movements …

Overlooking the harbor is the Palais du Pharo, built in the 1800s for Napoleon, and in front of that is the Monument to the Heroes and Victims of the Sea.

On the other side of the water looms the Cathedrale de la Major. I need to see that up close someday.

Right at the marina entrance, the Fort Saint-Jean. What an amazing, historic city.

Just as we approached the marina entrance, we encountered some young men (perhaps the Euro equivalent of frat boys) whose sailboat was stranded with a dead engine. Andreas quickly threw a rope over to them and towed them in, literally dropping them off at a pier as we motored by it.

Finally, we had one last dinner together at the restaurant in the “Capitanerie” at the marina.

Before we left Saint-Maxime, we ooh’d and aah’d over a neighbor. It was another, much larger sailing vessel (I hesitate to call it a boat) made by the same company (Amel) that made Andreas’ sailboat. It was a marvel of wood and fiberglass.

We departed Sainte-Maxime, got out into the open water, and picked up a pretty good wind which had us leaned over pretty hard.

The impossibly gorgeous and surely violently dangerous rocks of the Cap des Medes, and the ancient fortress (Batterie basse des Medes) perched atop the hills nearby.

We like Porquerolles so much on the way out that we decided to spend the night there again on the way back.

Steak tartare!

A great picture of our group, on our second to last night together.

We left the Bay of Agay and headed for the famed resort city of Saint-Tropez. Here’s a typical view along the way out of Agay.

At some point early in the day, we stopped near the shore and got another swim in, another ersatz shower. Andi and Nora jumped into the water from the roof of the boat’s cabin. I was too chickenshit to do that and just refereed the whole enterprise.

I don’t recall what I was doing here, but clearly I was messing with Nora.

Here’s a view of my accommodations for the week, the “room” in the bow. This photo is taken from the doorway looking in, and the very tip of the boat is behind my head. I had all my stuff on the left (including in the two small cabinets) and slept on the right. The big bag at center was my sleeping companion: the huge spinnaker (actually gennaker) sail that was shown in an earlier update here, packed up and ready for deployment next time. Andreas and Wolfgang had the main cabin (the main room inside the boat, holding the kitchen and radio and main table), and Andi and Nora had the rear cabin, only slightly larger than mine.

Andreas radio’d into the Saint-Tropez marina as we approached and they reported that they were full, so Andreas punted over to Saint-Maxime and we found a berth there. Sainte-Maxime is on the north side of the Gulf of Tropez, across from Saint-Tropez.

Later in the day, after we had settled in, the three “young” ones took the ferry from St. Maxime over to Saint-Tropez, while Andreas and Wolfgang stayed back. Wolfgang video’d us boarding the ferry, which was RIGHT next to our little boat, and we enjoyed watching Andreas slaving away scrubbing the deck.

In Saint-Tropez, men playing bocce ball (actually boule) in the town square.

Hiked up to a hilltop to get a good view of Saint-Tropez

Beauty shot of Andi and Nora during the golden hour.

We took the ferry back to Sainte-Maxime and turned in for the night.

In the morning,we went back into town, within the old city walls, to do some more exploring and shopping. We found a Provencal street market where I was able to buy a big bag of the Camargue salt that Sharon loves to use for cooking. Actually, I bought a big bag and a small bag, so I could give her the small one and then surprise her with even more (ha ha, I’m a comedy genius).

You can barely make out our party, having a late breakfast, dead center in this photo.

We climbed up and down all over the old town. Note here the swimmers in the water near the rocks.

Just a random street scene from a residential neighborhood.

Mandatory addition to the collection of cats spotted on vacation trips.

Finally we made our way back out through the old city walls and to the marina.

Gerhard showed us his smaller sailboat, recently outfitted with a new interior. Cozy!

From there, I went out on my own and visited the old fortress that looked over the harbor.

A tour guide led us around and gave us the history, and we were treated to the gorgeous views of the harbor and old city beyond.

Finally after lunchtime we set sail again, passing the oil baron yachts again on the way out. Antibes was as far east as we would sail along the French coast. The next stop would have been Nice, which is a practically a metropolis (and which I’d visited briefly as a teenager). Monaco was beyond that. They are all fabulously glamorous destinations, I’m sure, but probably a bit of a pain to deal with in a little sailboat, and a stretch for us if we wanted to get back to Marseilles in time for my train out, and so we were now going to head back to the west.

We put up the sails and made good time, which was a good thing because we had a pretty long way to go to make it to Andreas’ desired stop for the evening.

Along the way, a French destroyer passed us.

Here’s a view of the instrumentation at the captain’s position. The map display at right shows (with a small red X) our intended destination for the day. The black lever at bottom is the engine control, shown here set to neutral / off.

As we approached our destination, we passed the rusty cliffs and outcrops of the Estérel mountain range, illuminated by the setting sun.

After a long afternoon of sailing, we arrived in the Bay of Agay just in time to watch the sun set over the hills across the bay. We dropped anchor out in the water, not docked, rather just anchored out in the water among a lot of other small sailboats.

Since we were in a sheltered area, but not right inside a marina, this gave us a chance to do some swimming, which would stand in for showers at this stop. The water was very clear, and about 10-12 feet deep, and you could dive down and barely touch the seaweed growing on the bottom.

[At this point, the updates will get a more sparse. The daily updates up to now were posted within a couple days. Starting with this one, the update here was written looooong after the trip, and my memory was hazy. I had pictures though …]

In the morning, Andreas’ friend Wolfgang arrived in Frejus by train and joined us on the sailboat. So now we were five.

Wolfgang had a video camera and was videoing a lot, which I found annoying at the time, but for which I am now thankful, because it documented where we went for the rest of the trip. I had kept notes about where we had gone and what we did up to this point, which resulted in the blog posts that preceded this one, but I fell behind starting with this leg of the trip. Wolfgang’s videos (which he provided to us later) were crucial in helping me remember the details, and I thank him for running that annoying camera!

We sailed out of Frejus and headed towards Antibes.

Antibes is a historic destination on the French Mediterranean coast. I suppose that if you approached on land, you’d be driving through the amazing Provencal landscapes. But entering via the harbor, your introduction to the town is the massive yachts of the Middle Eastern oil barons — yachts that are the size of small military ships. They have to get moored at the outer edge of the harbor, since they are far too big to navigate closer in. They are typically fully staffed at all times, kept cleaned and stocked with supplies, and ready at any time to depart if the owner decides he wants to move on. That is, if the owner is even in Antibes …

Even among the regular motorboats, we looked modest. But this sailboat is a serious machine, built for the open ocean.

Andreas has an old friend who had retired to Antibes, and he brought us into the old city and took us out to dinner, a true fine dining experience that was representative of the local cuisine. It really was one of the most beautiful towns I’ve ever seen, and I hope someday to return with Sharon.

Porquerolles was a nice town: good shower facilities (once you figured out the coin-op system), nice restaurants, a grocery store, scenic location, everything. We’d be back later.

First, we had to talk about the long term plan. Andreas did not like the sound of the transmission when it was in reverse, and he suspected that something was wrong in there. Our original plan had us making a 100-mile leap across the Mediterranean from the French coast to the island of Corsica. But typically a good bit of that would be under engine power if the winds weren’t cooperating, and we’d definitely need the engine if we got caught in a storm. We certainly would need it when navigating in close quarters in harbors. All said, Andreas decided (“Du, Andy”) it was too risky to do that leg, and decided it was better for us to stay near the French coastline. Andy and Nora were disappointed, as they had expected to see Corsica on this trip, but it’s a tough life, right? I didn’t care, I hadn’t seen ANY of these places before and it was all great.

After a slow morning we finally pulled in our ropes and set forth out of the Porquerolles harbor. Immediately we spotted a huge three-masted sailing ship heading towards us. It was named the Signora del Vento and flew the Italian flag; all of the sails were furled but it was still an impressive sight.

Before we left the island completely behind, we ducked into a cove, dropped anchor and went swimming! It was a beautiful little sheltered spot on the northeast coast of the island.

As we sailed away, we passed the ruins of a fort. We’d be back in a few days and I’d get some pictures of it then.

Out onto the open water with the gennaker!

Massive rock formations, massive yachts, another day on the Cote d’Azur.

After a particularly long day of sailing, we pulled into Port Frejus (the harbor part of the nearby town of Frejus), got sorely needed showers, got a typical fantastic French dinner (with surly waiter) at a waterfront restaurant, and turned in for the night.