Trail To Broken Dreams

Trail To Broken Dreams

I’m back on the road on my way to Paris but not without visiting with a few friends I met in Pai, Thailand and one I met in Sumatra, Indonesia chasing Orangutans. We have remained friends and in touch over the passed years living in or near Liverpool, United Kingdom, France or London.

I’ve seen things around the world that I don’t understand and yet Liverpool has become a recent high light I really enjoyed. I’ve had more fun in this town going to the Cavern where the Beatles started, the Crazy House with trainers on and some interesting old pubs where the locals still share a pint and a few laughs. One pub in particular is the Excelsior. This isn't a picture of it but it shows you the prices of listening to Karaoke and drinking with the locals which I might have smilingly painfully did.

I took the time to see an entertaining theatrical interpretation of ‘The Hudsuckers Proxy’ at the Playhouse. An observation, lots of the venues of the Beatles era have either disappeared or been renovated into dance halls. Besides museums and art exhibitions there’s a serious shipping history that remains while the face of Liverpool disappointingly evolves with the times.

I took the train one exceptionally hung over morning after missing my pre-paid ticket for 30 pound and had to pay an additional to travel the day of for 80 pound to move on. I landed back in London and again seeing more friends from Thailand and another I met in Sumatra, Alaska, Thailand, and Sumatra, for her it’s four continents and counting. It’s a cool thing to see friends in different places doing interesting jobs with creative minds; some are DJ’s, artists, marketing consultants, and more. The best part is their friends become my friends and the ties grow globally. I had prearranged a hotel in Earls Court only worth mentioning because it was really weird. You pay for a room but with no shower on your floor and breakfast is included but that means tea and toast. Well I can go to what one friend calls the paparazzi of coffee, (Starbucks) and get that. Oh yeah, it’s around the corner in every country I’ve ever been in I think and I wouldn’t step foot in there unless there was a shift in the earths crust. That’s just me, my opinion.

London is really expensive and to give you a clue a pint of Guinness costs around 5 pound but if you step outside city limits it drops to around 3 pound. Now consider rent or letting an apartment, I’d say it’s about the same as letting an apartment in San Francisco or New York and forget about LA.

Anyway, my dear friends called me out for a night on the far side of London and off I went. I entered what I would consider an up coming area that I won’t mention because it only adds to the stress of the place but I met all walks of life that were working hard to make a life and the last thing they need is to be gentrified by the masses. It’s already happening like it did in the town, Mill Valley, where I grew up just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. I can’t support it.

We had dinner at a great pizza place called Sodo, that’ll give it away. We returned home and had beers and listened to music until the wee hours. It was great. The following day was not much less fun meeting another friend and heading to Camden where when I was in Uni in London this place was trouble. Today its packed full of fun shops, great restaurants, and some shisha bars for the afternoon shade. The horse stables of yesterday are now shops of many designs. If you want something you go there and you’ll find it.

I’m a big fan of beer gardens and London caught on awhile back. If it’s sunny in London, you use it to your advantage and sit in it with an ice cold water, tea, beer, or Campari. Londoners are so much more fun when they have some vitamin D in their system. It makes them smile a lot which in some cases can be rare. I love the Londoners, they’re just really hard to find. It’s like fishing and sometimes you just get lucky.

Still blazing a trail I bolted for Paris by train the following day. My morning was some other peoples mid-day. I faired better than those who had to wake up early. Sorry about that. I left London around 11 without a hitch and showed up in Paris around 330 pm including taxi to my destination near the Arch de Triumph on Charles de Gaulle Boulevard.

The trail gets a little messy here and I’d just as soon let it rot for awhile until it straightens itself out so your going to have to give me a little slack for a couple weeks. The trail doesn’t end it just goes untold until further notice. See you in a couple weeks. Sorry for the delay.

On the positive side the book has past the edits and is now somewhere between text block and cover art. I’ll keep you posted.

www.davidcdagley.com

Cavan, Ireland

Cavan, Ireland

I took the bus from Dublin to Cavan to meet with friends. I really didn’t know what to expect after hearing some funny jokes about Cavan and it’s people. There was a three day music festival in Donegall and so many buses were diverted to assist in getting all the people in the right direction including my bus to Cavan. The bus was packed with college aged people carrying sleeping bags and pillows on their way to Cavan to transfer to another bus heading further north. The scenery is every variety of green in the spectrum. I was picked up at the bus station and off we went to a friends house for a weekend painting class. I’m not a painter but if that’s what my friend was going to do then so am I.

What I didn’t expect is to be reintroduced to a sense of family. I was a guest in someone’s house, a mother, father, son and daughter and a boyfriend on the way. One sister was missing but ever present in her art on the walls, family photos, and included in many conversations. I found out she was at the BECK concert in Dublin like I was but of course we didn’t cross paths. The painting class was made up of mostly women from mothers to college grads hoping for doctorates and when the ladies got rolling in a conversation the laughter contagiously spilled over.

 The class was as much about friendship as it was painting and Caroline being an inspiring artist herself has a way of working with people allowing them to come to their own conclusions and technics. Lunch was an especially fine time with great food and of course more laughter.

A quick tour through town drew us into a local pub where Caroline went when she was living in Cavan and so did her mother back in her school days. The Blessings Bar is old and has a spot for bands to play both inside and a ‘beer garden out back with a small stage. One of the owners hired Caroline to paint in different murals on the walls, man on a bike and a guitar player were among them. For the most part we stayed around the house over looking a lake with swans batting at the water’s surface as they moved across the water or took flight. From my room I could hear swans honk, a donkey hee-hawing and an odd dog that howled softly to nothing. I felt an odd healing underway.

After the painting course was over we had some down time where a birthday cake was being made for another friend and I sat with Rob and played music that we thought we’d both like that maybe the other hadn’t heard. There was lots of music and a neighbor came over to help with the art on the cake and have a laugh. Check.

What happens to a wanderer can be epic or it can be quite soothing. My time in Cavan was a break from a very long road. I realized I hadn’t had a home cooked meal since I left my friend Terry’s house in Alaska and I hadn’t observed a loving family and friends in considerably longer. Thank you.

There will be one more blog about Caroline Fay Art in the near future. She is running art classes in different parts of Europe at different times. There's one coming up in France, another in Cavan and possibly one up in Donegal if all works out. She's getting it all together and trying to share her skill as an artist and reach out to others that might be interested in the future. I'm going to help her let you know because I think she's worth it.

www.davidcdagley.com