Author Archives: 3jmann
Europe 1984 – The Big Trip, Part Three
We set off sometime before noon planning to arrive in Siena later in the afternoon. During the preceding days I’d sold our little group on the campground where we would be staying, just outside Siena’s city walls. Sitting on a hillside, its terraced campsites overlooked a very nice swimming pool, one we would surely enjoy […]
Europe 1984 – The Big Trip, Part Two
We set out from Paris on July 25th to spend about a week traveling and camping along the Normandy coast. Our first stop was Rouen, famous as the place where Joan of Arc was executed in 1431. After two nights we drove south paralleling the coast, with the top down, through Dieppe, Le Havre, Honfleur, […]
Europe 1984 – The Big Trip, Part One
By the end of 1983 we had started planning for a big trip, one that would take us on a grand adventure. This was primarily the result of a couple of unrelated factors, each equally important in pushing us to commit to a plan where we would leave our jobs and travel for multiple months. […]
Europe 1982 – Our Shared Adventure Begins
Upon my return to Los Angeles in early April, I set about looking for a new job. This search would lead me to UCLA, the place where I would end up spending the bulk of my career. The job itself was as a low-level supervisor, but it put me on campus and introduced me to […]
Europe 1981 – Living the Parisian Life
Settled back into life in Los Angeles, I found work with a food broker and rented a two-bedroom apartment with my brother Chuck on Ocean Park Blvd in Santa Monica. In the same building as Rendy, it would be home for a couple of years. Joanna and I started dating (she and my sister Beverly […]
Europe 1979 – The Adventure Continues
I returned briefly to Los Angeles in late 1977 and would then join Doug Hoggatt for nine months in Hemet (a time truly to be remembered), then six months living in the Sierra Nevada gold rush country (Murphy’s and Angels Camp) working for the State of California harvesting pine cones with Norm Benson, a gig […]
Bittersweet the Leaving
The last 2-3 weeks have presented a peek at what the future will bring for us in the next couple of years, as we separate from the security of our day-to-day work lives and adopt a lifestyle not necessarily dependent upon a fixed schedule. The first glimpse was during the Thanksgiving Holiday weekend, when for […]
A Funny Thing Happened Friday Night
A funny thing happened to me last Friday night. A colleague from work, Kemet, had won a pair of tickets to the Charlotte Bobcats basketball game and invited me to join him. I picked him up prior to the game and we made it into downtown (Uptown) Charlotte easily enough, found parking in the dirt […]
Where Did that Energy Go?
During this countdown to whatever it is we’re going to call our status after we depart for Europe in May (retirement, no longer working full time, in-between jobs?) I’m encountering a phenomenon I knew would occur, but really only surfaces from time to time. This is the “That’s the last time I’ll do that” syndrome. […]
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