Break on Through to the Other Side

Voilà! Doors from Italy and Ireland. We were struck, especially in Tuscany, by how much effort people put into the way their front door looked. In those tiny ancient towns, there's no room for a garden or a lawn, so I guess a front door is all you've got. If you're on a slow connection, either skip this one or start it up and go get a cup of coffee while it loads.

I don't know what that little iron house is but it is so cool--the lock? a mailbox?

Doors of the Duomo in Florence

Side door of St. Peter's in Rome, with conveniently located brightly-uniformed Swiss Guard

Front Door (one of several) at St. Peter's. This one is blocked shut and won't reopen
until the next jubilee year which I think is 2025??

#7 Eccles Street, the address where Leopold and Molly Bloom lived
(characters from Ulysses). The door was rescued when the building was converted to a
business and it now resides at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin.

Door into Newgrange, an ancient tomb located about 40 minutes outside Dublin

looking ahead

Hi, gentle readers. You can't possibly know how much your loyalty and support have meant to me over the past few years. It's not much of a stretch to say that having this space to talk about what I'm thinking has saved my life a time or two. I'm more grateful than I can say.

But for the past several months, I've had the distinct feeling that I'm done with this blog. I'd be on the verge of shutting it down, then some more post ideas would occur to me, and I'd keep going. But that "done" feeling never went away.

I could still do that. I could still write the post about things I've learned about travel over the years, or what we saw in Italy, or how being in Dublin made me practically vibrate with resonances with Ulysses, or the books I read this summer (Me Before You, thumbs up, The Rosie Project, thumbs up, A Thousand Days in Venice, meh, plus a few others). But I'm pretty sure the bottom line is: we're done here.

I can't imagine that I'm done blogging, because I enjoy it too much. Maybe I just need a break. I'll post the doors pictures from our trip after this, and then we'll see what happens. Probably in a few months I'll start up a new blog, maybe over on WordPress so I can have a bit more flexibility in how it's set up. I'll post here and let you know when I get it figured out.

Love and hugs and thanks for hanging with me on my journey.

Blecch. It's making me practically nauseated to post this. But I know it's the right thing, so I can move on to the next thing.