Oh, the Places You'll Go!!

As I was working on my Christmas list this year, I decided to make a picture album for two couples who are our best friends.  We have been traveling together for the past twenty years and have made memories all over the world.

Some of our favorites are the "man-on-the-street" interviews that Charlie and Jim have done from Rome to Hawaii, to Cape Cod and all over the world.  These are all spur-of-the-moment, funny interview on where we are and what we are doing.

There are so many memories - like the "I, Snorkel Bob" incident in Hawaii when the David, Charlie and Jim convinced a store clerk that they were from a television station in Chicago and wanted to interview Snorkel Bob, a Hawaiian icon.  We got out of Dodge before Snorkel Bob could get to the store. 

There are memories of the train trip through Italy where the trains went on strike three times in the ten days we were there.  And, we all will never forget our getting on the wrong train that we thought would take us to Florence, but we ended up in Naples.  Needless to say, our (Charlie's) Italian needed some work.

So, I made an album of our trips over the years.  You can see it by clicking here..  To say that we have had fun over the years is putting it mildly.  I guess what we cherish the most is the lifelong friendship that we have with these folks.  Thanks for the memories, David and Linda B and Jim and Linda T.  To quote Dr. Seuss, "Oh, the places you'll go!"

Some of the best things that happen are accidents

You've probably made some of those vacation videos.  You know the ones - the voice over describing things that you know should be interesting and you want your friends to be jealous that you've been there, but as hard as you try to dress it up, it's dry and it's bo-ring.  That was pretty much the case when the Brentwood Six went to Italy on a "free" vacation built around a 14-day Eurail pass (that's another story and there's another two or three blogs from that one trip yet to come), and we found ourselves in Rome.

There we were at the Spanish Steps, and I was panning around the square at the foot of the steps and describing the shops, the architecture, the ..., and that's when I panned around and there, full frame, stood my buddy Jim Tidwell.  Who knows why, but I blurted out "Excuse me sir, are you an American tourist?" to which he replied in his own inimitable accent "Why, yes I am!"  A bit of banter about what brought him to Rome ("an airplane") led to a discourse on what he had seen while in the Eternal City.  He assured me that he had seen every "church" and every "picture museum" that was ever built.  And his wife, Linda, had dragged him to every shoe store in the country, whereupon he confided "You know she'll buy shoes just to keep another woman from gettin' 'em.  And another thing - gun control.  You know I ain't seen a single gun since we got here!  But ever'body's got a knife.  'Cept me.  And I really wanted a knife, and they was two or three stores I saw that had them, but could I go in and look at 'em?  Nooooooooo.  I had to go look at shoes." 

We discovered that day that we all but read each other's minds, Jim taking my questions and improvising hilarious replies that led to other questions that fed the fire like gasoline on a barbecue grill.  The interviews became the "Man on the Street" series that we did all over Europe, Hawaii, Alaska, Canada, and the Caribbean.  Like the time The Six went to one of I, Snorkel Bob's dive gear stores in Maui and. totally improvised and spontaneous, became a crew from WGN, channel 20 in Chicago, doing a story on famous icons in Hawaii.  Or the time we were in the South of France and shot fifteen minutes at a junk pile that Jim insisted had come from his wife Linda's suitcase.  Sometimes the dialog would drift off on a tangent that would have squeezed a PG13 rating, but the bits were always really funny and made many good memories.

We've compiled about two hours of video that maybe someday I'll get really adventurous and convert to digital and upload to You Tube.