Friday, July 6, 2007

From David Finkelstein...

Hey, George, great photo of you. Looks as if Florida life is very much agreeing with you.

After a long (and happy) period of not traveling--air travel being so unpleasant these days we're revolted even by the thought of squeezing on to an always overcrowded plane--we're off for a month in Iceland to fish for Arctic char and Atlantic salmon, pick blueberries, and just to do our thing, living in the vicarage of a Protestant minister friend of ours we met there on a previous assignment. Can you imagine, two atheists in a vicarage?! If you hear of terrific lightning strikes in that part of the world you'll know why. Initially, we had decided to go just as a frolic of our own, then got two magazine assignments, so now we're being comp'd by the airline and tourist office, which makes it that much nicer. As we haven't been there in about 15 years it'll be fun to get back. Perfectly clean air, pristine rivers, a mere 250,000 inhabitants, most of them extremely cultured, and no crime. An idyllic place, I suppose, if it weren't for the weather. And it's only a 4-hour flight away, a far cry from the 13-hours it took us to get to Glacier Bay in Alaska, where we were house-sitting the past two summers.

In October, after a 10-year absence, we've also decided to go back to India for three months, primarily to visit friends from north to south, from the Himalayan wilderness to the jungles of Kerala. Again, we were able to get some article assignments out of the trip, so we could put the touch on Air India for the tickets.

Your on line virtual dojo sound fascinating. I've noticed recently that guitarists are even teaching flamenco on line these days, so why not karate?

Evelyn joins me in sending you warmest regards and wishing you and Susan a wonderful summer.

All the best,

Dave

2 comments:

George said...

Hi David and Evelyn:
Wow, what a life!

You two continue to be my idols and what I want to be when I grow up!

Best,
George

George said...

Dear George:

You're too much!! You should have been my agent and publicist from the get-go. For even at the height of my "literary career" I never had as many readers as I do now, thanks entirely to your blogging.

And talk about idols, quite apart from your ground-breaking activities at the forefront of martial arts, where you changed more lives (for the immeasurably better), and brought together more people in enduring friendships than it's possible to imagine, in my eyes you were also the incredibly foresighted computer trailblazer, doing remarkably heady things eons before I even gathered the courage to learn how to turn the bloody thing on.

In any case, let's never grow up.

All the best,

Dave