A vibrant community

I just had a very faint memory of Saint-Jean-de-Luz that I visited briefly in the early 80’s when I was still working for Lange ski boots. That old French Atlantic seaport lays a stone throw away from the Spanish border to the south and the west of the Pyrenees Mountains. In spite of an unseasonably cold and rainy weather, they were lots of visitors from everywhere and particularly from Spain. Apart from its seaside location, its beautiful Basque architecture and great food, the city has a terrific pedestrian shopping street lined up with a true variety of small and original shops (still few international “big” chains like Benetton or Quiksilver) that give it its true character and make shopping quite enjoyable and a genuine process of discovery. This certainly helps realize the importance of true small businesses in shaping a town’s character and making it very unique. A true “must-see…”

Climbing Pyla

Today, we climbed Pyla without oxygen, almost died half-way up, but finally managed to reach the windswept top of the giant sand dune that stands south of Bordeaux, France. This formation is really huge and certainly worth the sight. In an otherwise very flat oceanic region, its 340 feet elevation definitely stands out and makes it a legitimate tourist attraction that can easily get everyone’s attention. I heard that skiers have descended that huge dune and found the way to scribe a few turns in its ever moving sand. Evelyne and I just took up the stairs and after a successful ascent and a vertiginous descent ended up with pounds of sand in our shoes…

The French wine way

Today we visited the Laroze winery near St. Emillion, in the Bordeaux region. After seeing the Robert Mondavi winery in Napa, this is the second place of that kind we’ve visited. We learned a lot from that excellent guided tour and, with the knowledge acquired during our earlier Californian visit, we now understand better how wines are made and also why they’re not created equal. Arcane rules, extra handcrafting and extensive blending seems to set the Bordeaux wine-makers apart from their Californian counterparts, while at the same time handicapping them in the way they’re marketing their product against those of the “new world.” They seem to be both obsessed by them as well as upset about them. It would seem to me that in the end, what should be the ultimate test is how the wine tastes, period. The wine we tested yesterday was outstanding among its Bordeaux brethren.

In praise of patience

As we’re getting on the road today for Europe, we know that there’s a lot of waiting included in this particular package involving a significant need for patience. Patience is a subject I want to develop in future blogs because it’s charged with important meaning and has such a strong impact upon our lives. Patience seems to be one of these qualities that flourish with age, when less issues are at stake and when it’s easier to be more relaxed in the way we look at life. In addition, waiting patiently is a quality that generally pays off handsomely, unless of course one happens to be in a building in fire, but outside of extreme situations like this, patience gives us the necessary window of time to grow ideas, discover extra options and provide our creativity enough time to accomplish some productive work. Depending on how we look at it, life is both short and long and while it’s hard to dismiss the speed at which time goes by, it’s also amazing to watch the various elements that we’ve been able to grow to astonishingly huge proportion over the years and with the right dosage of patience; it just works just like compounded interests; if you don’t watch them too much, they’ll become enormous!

Why Bush doesn’t need secret service protection?

Very easy; simply because of Dick Cheney; our neighbor from Jackson Hole is George Bush’s best security. If something very bad were to happen to our President, Mr. Cheney would step in and become our commander-in-chief, and I can guaranty you that no breathing mammal, friend or foe, that has a normally functioning brain would want that nightmare to become a reality. So from today on, and until the end of his term, Mr. Bush could save us lots of dollars by doing without the expensive secret service protection and still enjoy a maximum level of security. Now, if you're looking for beefed-up personal security, and are considering getting a pit-bull, a rottweiler, a Kalashnikov, or just some pepper spray, you might want to ask President Bush to let you use Mr. Cheney when he's done with him; but hurry, a waiting list is already forming!

Bonjour Paris!

Very early this morning (at least for us in Park City) flight 171, a Boeing 767-300 ER, carrying nearly 200 passengers took off from Paris to make history, in-route for Salt Lake City, 5,100 air miles away, where it will land at about 1:50 pm. The flight operated in cooperation with Air France will be the only nonstop service by a U.S. carrier between the western United States and Paris. A Delta’s spokesman said that they’ll start with an 80 percent-plus load factor (percentage of available seats filled by paying passengers.) The Salt Lake-Paris jet is configured with 36 "business elite" seats and 175 coach seats. Delta is also very optimistic that it can make a profit on that flight with oil in the $120 to $130 per-barrel range. If the Paris route proves successful, it may lay the groundwork for opening other routes from Salt Lake to international destinations; for instance, Delta is now very hopeful that when it gets the right airplanes it might connect Tokyo to Salt Lake as early as the spring of 2011…

Different gods for different religions?

If an after-life were to exist, I’ve always wondered how the various religions offered around the world would be guiding their faithful to the various areas assigned to their specific beliefs and put them in the presence of the god of their choice, or if instead, everyone would get funneled into a big, happy family where God would be a multi-faceted creature, sort of a “one-size fits all” that would satisfy Muslims, Hindus, and Christians to cite just a few. That precisely is the problem with religions and God if there’s one. If he (or she) really existed, he would have inspired his many prophets a long time ago to unify all faiths into one, instead of splitting them into more and more factions, most of them full of hatred and bloodthirsty. So in the absence of that unifying figure, I’m afraid that believers will have to settle for a ragged army of deities and a huge variety of ”reward programs…”