WALKING ON THIN ICE

2 days ago, kathy suggested we go to morocco after our upcoming 3 months in barcelona spain. i said fine. this morning, she asked if i would mind if we skipped barcelona and went straight to morocco before it gets too hot in the summer months. answered her with my ever present effervescent “why not.” so now, the first week of april we’ll train to madrid spain and fly from there to marrakesh morocco where we’ll spend 3 months traveling around.

after that, not even the shadow knows.

all this is wryly amusing - our original plan was to leave the u.s.a. last september for barcelona spain, where we’d live cheaply long term outside the city and write. kathy then decided it would behoove us to attend the annual european rainbow gathering in northern england, so we left a month early. we ended up freezing in a sheep field full of dried (and not so dried) sheep feces - so that scheduled 12 days of camping turned into one night of hyperthermia. spent the next week in the charming english village of burley-on-wharfdale, then 3 weeks in london, followed by a week in amsterdam. we were headed to prague, but too many czechs tried to scam us over the internet, so we went to krakow poland for 7 weeks instead, and then liznjan croatia for 3 months. after croatia we were going to hit slovenia or prague or barcelona, but that changed when we came here to the south of france. after two months here, it was to be barcelona again - then maybe germany or greece followed by thailand which changed to nepal - all of that collapsed into morocco this morning. we have our tickets, so morocco it is.

i’m glad she chose morocco - it ups the ante of strangeness, puts our journey into a whole new genre, elevates the level of adventure, of otherness.

i was looking forward to spending 3 months with the liberal spanish grass laws, but i spose i should be able to score in morocco - although their drug laws seem to have an edge of danger.

i’ll at least get to see barcelona through the train windows enroute to madrid. madrid’s supposed to have a fine modern art museum - we spend 3 days there. we just finished our 7th month on the road, and barcelona was always one stop away.

this is the oddest, free-form travel journey imaginable - which is fair, because we are odd, free-form folk.

our self-fulfilling excerpt from Marrakesh Express by Crosby, Stills & Nash (a magic song from my youth) - “Sweeping cobwebs from the edges of my mind / Had to get away to see what we could find / Looking at the world through the sunset in your eyes / Traveling the train through clear Moroccan skies.”