On the Road Again

I am getting ready for another long trip. This time I will be going to Russia and Spain with a short amount of time in London and the Netherlands in between.

I am going to Russia to take part in two improvisation festivals. I will be teaching at the first one which takes place outside of Moscow. Then my friend Caroline Waters and I will fly to Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia, and travel south to the Altai Mountains where Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan all come together at the Russian border. We will participate in a second, more laid back, festival in the mountains and then will take the Transiberian Express to Lake Baikal (30 hours!) where we will unwind for a week. Then back on the train to Yakatineberg, principally known as the place where the Tsar's family were executed. Caroline will work on a project there and I will hang out for a few days and then I will go back to Moscow, fly to London, see friends, go to Arnhem in Holland, see another friend, and then south to St. Jean Pierre-de-Port in France where I will meet my friend Dennis Miles and we will walk on the pilgrim trail up across the Pyrenees and across the top of Spain to Santiago de Compestela. We hope to do this in about a month. I have 36 walking days at my disposal before I return to London and then Los Angeles.

Yesterday, the Fourth of July, Dennis and I walked about 7 miles west to Hollywood, up into the hills to Mulholland Drive and then back to Griffith Park Observatory (not a great picture, but you get the idea) to watch fireworks. This was a backpack test for me. I am wondering whether I will take my small netbook computer with me when I walk across Spain. The backpack with computer and everything I think I need in Spain weighs about 12 pounds. I walked with it to Dennis' house, about a mile, and decided to take out the computer for this test run. Without the computer (which weighs under 3 pounds), I was fine and with some training in Russia, I think I can do 12 pounds. We will see. We plan to walk about 16 miles a day. I can do without the computer, but what that means is that when I get home, I will transcribe the journal into the computer, a painful task. I just finished transcribing my last summer's journal.

People say to me, "A computer! On a pilgrimage?" People have been writing on pilgrimages since pilgrimages began. The number of journals written about the Santiago pilgrimage alone is staggering. If I prefer to write on a computer rather than a pen, I don't think St. James will mind. Pilgrims sometimes carry stones with them which they deposit at a cross along the way as an emblem of the sins they are expiating by their act of faith. My computer will be my stone although I will carry my sins back home with me. There is a story about the Ganges. A dip in the Ganges washes away all of your sins, but sins are like crows. They just wait until you get out of the river and dry yourself off and then they hop right back on again.

As Dennis and I were walking up Beechwood Canyon yesterday, we met a 19-year-old Brazilian who is spending a year traveling around the United States after his graduation from high school. He is a very mature young man and great fun to talk to as we wandered through Griffiith Park. He wants to make films so we talked a lot about Hollywood and movies in general. His favorite director is Bergman. My first Bergman film was Wild Strawberries which I probably saw in 1959 when I was twenty. It is strange when the currently young take up the passions of my youth. I felt the same way when my son as a young teenager became interested in the Beatles. It's my music. Find your own. And yet, it is also very nice to have a common topic that bridges the age difference. The young Brazilian was complaining that he couldn't find Fred Zinneman movies in Brazil. Does anyone else still know who Fred Zinneman was?

My son says my blogs can be no longer than 800 words or he won't read them, and I am at the limit. The next time I write, I will be writing from Moscow.

Luke