For me, 2025 was the year for bucket-list adventures, sad losses, wonderful celebrations, hate-fuelled encounters, and above all, the love and support of family and friends. It went like this:

January—SCOTLAND (click for One Storm To Rule Them All)

Travelling the 4060 miles back from Seattle to Glasgow was a piece of cake compared to the three days and numerous cancellations in taking the ferry over to Arran. But if you’ve decided to live on an island off the coast of Scotland, you have to expect trouble in the middle of winter. (Score? Storm Éowyn: 2 house roofs. Barb & The Hub: 0)

Even with storms, ferry delays, and the occasional missing roof, Arran in winter is stunning.

February—INDIA: (click for Sorry India: We Just Did It Again)

We met at the University of Chicago over fifty years ago. Half a century of friendship and a decade of travels later, we’re still happy to share hotel rooms in exotic places for a month every year.

After ten years of touring India, we planned our entire trip around the legendary Khajuraho Dance Festival. With the temples themselves as a light-drenched backdrop, we saw hours of the most stunning classical dance and music of India.
And on our tour of the temples the next day, we saw THOSE carvings, the famously explicit depictions of every possible aspect of… um… court life. Like the rest of the tourists, we marveled at the detail even while we were each secretly counting limbs to figure out just who was doing what (and where) to whom. Contrary to popular belief, our guide told us, less than 5% of the thousands of carved figures depict erotic acts. (But those that did were certainly educational.)

March—AND MORE INDIA (click for: Kickass Queens, Mona Lisa Smiles, and the Oldest Zero. 

“Nobody gets sick from swimming in the Ganges,” the Hub said. So even though I have PTSD flashbacks to my stay in an Indian hospital (that time I rinsed my mouth with our hotel’s water after brushing my teeth) — I did it.  I went for a dip in the world’s most sacred (and arguably filthiest) river — along with 660 million(!) of our best friends.

Kumbh Mela: This Hindu pilgrimage marks the completion of the 12-year progression of Jupiter around the sun. But every 144 years, there is a special configuration of Jupiter, the sun, and the moon. And in 2025, from 13 January to 26 February, this was celebrated in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, India. More than 660 million people came from all over the world to swim in the Ganges during the 2025 Kumbh Mela. For comparison, that’s as if the entire continent of North America (including the US, Canada, and Mexico), or perhaps the entire EU plus the UK, popped over to India to take a dip in the Ganges. The government rerouted the river and built a vast temporary city on the exposed riverbed to house the pilgrims, along with temporary streets, sanitary facilities, food halls, and over 200 pontoon bridges. 40,000 police and emergency personnel helped out, and epic amounts of food and supplies were donated, cooked, and served. 

My two old friends, Janine and Jaya, woke me at 3:30AM in our Varanasi hotel room to head out to the site of Kumbh Mela. We were rowed out to a platform in the river. We were helped into the water, where we repeated a prayer Jaya taught us, and then ducked underwater. Three times. After heroic efforts by generous strangers to hoist my tuchus back onto that slippery platform, we got back into the rowboat for the return trip.

We did not get sick. I know it’s probably just a coincidence, but my knee (which was so damaged I’ve been looking at replacement surgery and walking with a cane) has been steadily improving since my Ganges dip. Indeed, most days my walking stick lives at home in the umbrella holder, while I walk longer and faster without it. Coincidence? My knee is not so sure.

April — SEATTLE (click for We Remember Even As We Say Goodbye )

After almost a century of a fully-lived life, our last parent left a space too big to ever be filled. We gathered to say goodbye.

May — Paris

For reasons we can only guess at, the family of French music  superstar Henri Salvador rented us his entire fabulous 2-story flat on Place Vendôme in Paris, just above the Dior store.

It was as if Henri Salvador just stepped out for a cigarette—all his papers and pens on his desk, his records and even his drinks bar were still in place. I’ve never felt so cool and sophisticated. 

My sister was along for her first trip to France, so we took that as permission do all the best tourist stuff again. And it was even better this time around, from old favorites like the Eiffel Tower, Luxembourg Gardens, and Shakespeare & Co Books, to the stunningly renovated Notre Dame Cathedral and the Paris Ballet under a ceiling painted by Chagall. We toured Versailles, took a sunset cruise on the Seine, and visited the new Hockney retrospective in the spectacular Fondation Louis Vuitton building designed by Frank Gehry. And, most of all, we walked and ate our way across Paris.

June — USA (Washington DC & Seattle), UK (Glasgow & Arran), ITALY (Verona)

So this happened in June: my feet turned blackish purple. (I have pictures, but you haven’t done anything terrible enough to deserve them.) My friend Janine was upset, and ordered me to visit her medical group for every test known to man. While I waited for the next round of needles, I popped over to Seattle to pack up our storage unit. My feet gave up their zombie-apocalypse pretense and returned to a color closer to human. The doctors didn’t have any theories, so I came home and packed for our Italy trip.

I was in Verona, and passed by the house that’s been labeled Juliet’s house (from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.) It was over 40 degrees Celsius (or for us Farenheit types, 104°F) and incredibly humid. But there were hundreds of visitors obediently lined up in snake queues to visit, snap pictures of the “…wherefore art thou?” balcony, and rub the breast of the Juliet statue. As I passed by, I heard one of the tourists marvel, “How did they figure out this was Juliet’s house?” I wanted to ask her opinion of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, but in the interests of preserving what little international-relations credibility I possess, I held my tongue.

Fact: over three million tourists visited Juliet’s House in Verona, Italy last year to rub the boob on a statue of a 13-year-old girl who had the worst luck ever. For good luck.
Fun fact: so many tourists eagerly perved on the Juliet statue that they wore a hole in it and had to make a new one. How lucky.

I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to be as cool as Italians, but we tried. Our hotel room had a motorcycle, the fountain had little bridges for the turtles, and the opera was in a 2000+-year-old Roman amphitheatre.

July — ITALY (Naples & Ischia) & ARRAN. (Click for Hate. And More Hate.)

From Verona, we headed to Naples. The best pizza and worst drivers on the planet.

And my newest fear… Italians who queue for the ferry to Ischia. Old ladies and mothers with babes in arms were knocked aside. Nobody even pretended to line up as every Italian had one goal — get on that boat before every other Italian.

“Your residing here is unjustified.” We returned to Arran to find a hate-fuelled letter buried under hundreds of messages of love and support.

August — ARRAN (Click for Ahoy Vey! )

Want to see your language deteriorate at speed? Buy a boat.

September — ARRAN Farewell to Summer party! 

It was supposed to be a garden party to celebrate summer. Instead, as the storm raged outside, we moved indoors and made our own fun.

October — ARRAN: a quiet island

October is a great month for rainbows, and Arran produces champions. 

November — New Anthology Released (click for Amazon orders. You know you want it!)

https://mybook.to/ArranWriters

December: VIENNA

We escaped to Vienna, where I toured Christmas markets, ate my body weight in pastries, and topped it with three fantastic concerts—in Vienna’s spectacular Musikverein (the “Golden Hall”),  in St. Peter’s church crypt, and in the Vienna Opera.