hudebnik

Took a train to Ghent, of which we had fond memories from our previous trip to Belgium (15 years ago?). Google Maps showed something called the "Gravenstein Castle", which we didn't remember seeing on the previous trip, and which looked promising from the photos on the Web. So that was our first stop (after lunch at a sandwich shop with awesome frites).

Gravenstein Castle, under various names, was the seat of the Counts of Flanders for almost a thousand years. It started as a 9th-century wooden fort, then became a stone motte-and-bailey castle in the 12th century, was expanded into something more luxurious in the 14th and 15th centuries, was sold and repurposed as a textile factory in the 18th-19th centuries, then was sold to the City of Ghent to be "restored to its medieval glory". Which of course doesn't identify any particular point in time to restore it to, but they aimed for 14th-15th-century. So a lot of the current castle is a c1900 reconstruction, but a decent job for the time.


Anyway, we walked from there towards St. Bavo's Cathedral, the home of the city's top tourist attraction, the Ghent Altarpiece by the van Eycks. We didn't have reserved tickets, but things looked fairly un-crowded, so I went to ask whether we could get in any time soon. And it turned out that the Altarpiece isn't actually there at the moment: it's being restored, and has been temporarily replaced with high-resolution photos of it. So since we saw the real thing on our previous trip, we skipped that. Instead, we went up the nearby Belfort and got the panoramic view of the city.

Back to Brussels, got take-out Thai food to eat in the room, and started packing for our trip home tomorrow.

Saturday we had reserved tickets to the M museum in Leuven, to make double-sure we didn’t miss the Leuven Chansonnier exhibit. So we took a train to Leuven (a 20-30 minute ride) and walked to the museum.

We needn’t have worried: the museum wasn’t crowded. M Museum is all about juxtaposing old and new: every room seemed to have Renaissance art alongside 20th or 21st century art on the same theme, or commenting on the Renaissance works. The first floor was given over to permanent collections (an impressive collection of Renaissance stuff, and I have no idea how impressive the modern collection was), while part of the second was “The Pursuit of Knowledge”, an exhibition about the 600-year history of KU Leuven that includes the Chansonnier.

I was uncertain how the museum would go about presenting the Leuven Chansonnier, which is after all a single object the size of a large wallet. The installation, entitled "Forty-Nine", set up a darkened room, with speakers on all sides and The Book partly open in a lit display case in the center, and played a recording of piece 49 from the Chansonnier (one of its 12 unica, pieces not known from any other source). On the front wall, five spots of light became the five performers on the recording — two singers, two lutes, and a vielle — with various digital manipulations done on their images. Effective.

Anyway, we saw a bunch of other stuff from the University’s collections -- fossils, 19th-century lab equipment, etc. -- before leaving the museum.

Stopped at the nearby Sintpieterskeerk, which houses Dietrich Bouts's famous and influential Last Supper, as well as a couple of other Bouts pieces.


Obligatory visit to the modern statue of a student having knowledge poured into its head, then walked back to the station for the train to Brussels. Got take-out Thai food and ate it in the room.

Packed up and checked out of our postage-stamp studio apartment (the whole place, including bathroom, was about 12 foot-lengths square), hauled our suitcases on the subway to the Gare du Nord, and (after going around in circles for a while trying to find the right hall of tracks) found our TGV train to Lille. The ride went smoothly, but there was a babe-in-arms in the facing seat to mine, and after about the halfway point of the hour-long ride he started getting increasingly fussy and noisy.

Anyway, we got to Lille, got off, and realized that we needed to get from the "Lille Europe" station (for long-distance trains) to the "Lille Flandres" station (for local and regional trains). It's a 10-minute walk, or one stop on the Metro (which we didn't know how to use), or one stop on the Tram (ditto, but I had thought it might be gratis). Found the tram track, which had a ticket machine nearby, so I tried to buy tickets in a hurry before the tram arrived. Bought two tickets, it only printed one, we got on anyway, it went one stop to the other station, and nobody ever checked the tickets. Got off, bought some pre-made, just-microwaved burritos as a quick, portable lunch, found our track, and finished lunch while waiting for the train to arrive.

Got off in Tournai (in a different nation, but they don't make a big fuss about that here), walked 15 minutes to our hotel, checked in and collapsed for a few minutes. But just around the corner from the hotel is the office de tourisme, and across the street from that is the impressive Cathedral de Tournai. So we visited those. The office de tourisme boasts of its "medieval cellar", which does indeed have some medieval pillars and stone walls, and is currently housing an art exhibition called "TournAI", a collection of surrealistic photos and short videos, created by AI, starring implausible, Dr. Seuss-esque architecture.


The Cathedral's nave was built first in Romanesque style, with more and more Gothic features incorporated at the altar-and-choir end. The whole building is roughly the same size as Notre Dame de Paris (slightly larger in some dimensions, slightly smaller in others), and largely covered with scaffolding as various parts of it are repaired and restored.

In fact, if you stand in the center of the nave and look towards the altar, what you see behind the altar are photographs of what was actually there before they started renovating (note the shadow of the cross on the photograph behind it). What's actually behind the altar looks more like...

We paid a few euros to visit the Treasury, which houses a variety of reliquaries made from the 7th-19th centuries, and allegedly the cope of St. Thomas a Becket (there was a lengthy explanation, which I didn't translate successfully, of how it got to Tournai).

Then moved on to the Place Grande, the central square of the town. Looming over one end of the square is the Beffroi, the town bell tower (the town had been specifically granted the right to a secular bell tower, as distinct from a church bell tower, in 1183). We walked almost 360° around the tower, over and around road construction,

to get to the entrance, climbed the tower and got some good views of the city,

then came down with tired legs and sat down with a Belgian waffle (pretty good) and some chocolat chaud (meh).

Visited another church, the Romanesque Sintkventinkerk, which was badly damaged by German bombing in 1940, and largely repaired (and some of the Gothic add-ons reverted to Romanesque) in the 1990's and 2000's.


shalmestere was in a mood for carbonnade flamande, and the first brasserie we stopped at on the central square had it on the menu, so she ordered some, I ordered pâte carbonara, and they were both delicious but so rich we couldn't finish them. Back to the hotel room to decompress.

Tournai has a Musée des Tapisseries, which is "temporarily closed", and a Musée Archéologique, which is "temporarily closed", and a couple of other museums that might be interesting if they were open but they're not. So tomorrow we'll take a morning train to Brussels, check into the hotel there, and probably visit a museum or two in the afternoon.

I had read in the guidebooks about the "medieval town" of Provins, its Medieval Faire every summer, its shows of jousting, siege engines, and falconry, its restaurants providing medieval costumes and strolling minstrels... all in all it sounded like a RenFaire-style tourist trap, so I had some misgivings. But it also seemed that all this medievaloid tourism was built atop a good supply of actual medieval survivals, so we got on a train to Provins yesterday morning.

Provins is classed as "Paris suburbs" (l'Île de France), analogous to taking a commuter train like the LIRR, Metro North, or NJ Transit rather than Amtrak. And the governing body for l'Île de France has evidently decided to treat the whole area as a single transit zone, so we didn't need to buy tickets at all, just wave our Paris Metro passes in front of a reader and walk through a gate. That said, there were a bunch of stops, one of which was a spur where the train had to reverse direction, so it took about 1:20 each way. A pleasant and restful train ride through the countryside.

Half a dozen of the Provins medieval attractions are all covered by a "Pass Provins", which one is supposed to buy at the Office de Tourisme, so that seemed like a logical first stop. Unfortunately, somebody in the Provins town government thought it a good idea to put the Office de Tourisme and the train station at exactly opposite ends of town. Fortunately, there's a city bus that runs between the two. Unfortunately, the attractions nearest the Office de Tourisme and farthest from the train station were the ones I thought best to visit last. Fortunately, Google maps showed an Office de Tourisme annexe just outside the train station. Unfortunately, it was fermé. Fortunately, there were clear signs pointing past it to Office de Tourisme, so we (and a dozen other tourists) followed those signs, hoping there was another on the near side of town. (Spoiler: there wasn't.)

The town really is wonderfully picturesque, with lots of charming half-timbered houses, and the weather was perfect. We stopped at the 12th-century church of St. Ayoul, a young monk who, on an expedition to transport some precious relics from another abbey to his own, was set upon by brigands (or monks from a rival sect? I wasn't sure of the translation), his tongue cut out, his eyes pierced, and his head cut off. He's now a patron saint of eye problems, as well as of the town of Provins. The facade of his church is decorated in the same style as Chartres, with large figures wearing bliauts backed up by a chorus of angels, some of them playing psalteries or vielles. But it's much smaller than Chartres, so these figures are only a few feet over the visitor's head, easier to see. The interior is largely 17th-18th-century, but had some interesting pictures and historical plaques.

A block away was the 14th-century (I guess) Tour de Notre Dame and its clock, forming an arch over a narrow street; the clock wasn't quite that old, but it and its street were pretty.

We continued following signs to Office de Tourisme and Cité medievale, along the main commercial street of town. We walked around the outside of another 12th/13th-century church (on the Rue des Oignons), closed for extensive repairs, then we stopped at one shop for chocolates and another for a delicious sit-down lunch. Then passed the Hôtel-Dieu founded by Count Thibaut the Great in the 11th century and headed up a steep hill towards the Lycée Saint-Thibaut, the Eglise Collegiale de Saint-Quiriace, and the remains of the castle of the Counts of Champaign.


In the 11th-14th centuries, the nearly-autonomous Counts of Champaign gave their protection to six annual merchant fairs: two in Provins, two in Troyes, one in Lagny-sur-Marne, and one in Bar-sur-Aube, spaced throughout the year and each lasting six weeks, so a majority of the year there was a fair in one town or another. These were wholesale, to-the-trade fairs, with apparently legal limits on what could be sold in smaller quantities. The fairs provided a lot of revenue and wordfame, while the Counts reciprocated with legal protection and safe passage for the merchants coming from all over Europe and beyond.

The Eglise Collegiale is a large, imposing structure near the highest point of town, started in the 12th century, but with the decline of the Fairs in the 14th century, it ran out of money, so the "nave" end (towards the right in the first three photos below) is actually shorter than the "altar" end. The fourth photo below is taken from what should have been part of the nave. We walked around inside the church for a while, then went on with the walk.
Musée de Provins et du Provinois, which allegedly has a bunch of interesting archaeological finds, was a block or two farther along the road. Unfortunately, it had no public bathroom, and indeed had a sign at the desk saying the nearest public toilettes were at the Place du Châtel, another two or three blocks down the road, so we went on, promising to come back to the museum.

The Place du Châtel appears to be Ground Zero for RenFaire-style tourism (especially restaurants), and we saw a troop of elementary-school children parading around the square in their newly-borrowed costumes. After visiting les toilettes, we saw a sign advertising a biscuiterie medieval and walked another block down the road to see what it was about. It did indeed sell a variety of cookies and cakes based on medieval recipes (including Hildegarde's "cakes of joy", presumably adapted to modern tastes by adding sweetening), as well as a hot-chocolate mix "d'une recette du XIVeme siecle" (I pointed out to shalmestere that, in fairness, it didn't say a European recipe from the 14th century, which would be startling). And indeed, the chalkboard behind the counter described it as Chocolat chaud Azteque, so shalmestere ordered a cup. It was thick, dark, dairy-free, and unsweetened (albeit served with a couple of packets of sugar); no chili peppers, as the Aztecs would have included. Not particularly flavorful, perhaps because the dark chocolate was diluted by the corn starch thickening.


Next stop: the Tithe Barn, a large 12th-century building originally used for storing either merchants' wares or merchants themselves. We still hadn't acquired a Pass Provins, so we paid for this a la carte -- 5 euros apiece. The ground and basement floors are filled with life-sized dioramas of various kinds of merchants and craftsmen, in sometimes-dubious costumes, with an audio guide in your favorite language interviewing each one in turn about his or her business. It was a little hokey, but they managed to get across a fair amount of information. The upper floor is apparently open only to group tours: we saw the troop of elementary-school children heading up there.

Turned around and headed back towards the museum and the adjacent castle keep (the "Caesar Tower"). We randomly chose to visit the keep first, for another 5 euros apiece. This was impressive, and provided panoramic views of the town and countryside from the top. Also, for the engineering geeks in my audience, pictures of the roof infrastructure and support system for bronze bells. And we got a lot of stair-climbing exercise.


The next stop was to be the museum, but it was now 5:30, the museum's closing time, which we decided was OK -- we'd gotten our money's worth from the town. In fact, the paid attractions we'd actually visited had cost less a la carte than the Pass Provins would have cost. Sat on a bench for a few minutes enjoying the breeze (and resting our legs after all the stairs in the keep), then headed down the hill,

through a tower in the city walls, towards the Office de Tourisme (which we were finally somewhat near) to catch a bus back to the train station. That went smoothly, we caught the next train back to Paris, grabbed some take-out to reheat in the room, and collapsed.

Today, mercredi: the Louvre.

Tomorrow, jeudi: we take a couple of trains to Tournai, just over the Belgian border. One night in Tournai.

Vendredi: from Tournai to Bruxelles, where we check into a hotel for a few more nights.

Samedi: day-trip to Leuven for an exhibition that includes the Leuven Chansonnier, discovered only fifteen or twenty years ago (we got an early glimpse at its contents through our Early Notation teacher, and we have a facsimile of the whole book at home).

Dimanche, lundi: day-trips to Mechelen and/or Ghent.

Mercredi: train from Brussels to the Amsterdam airport, then fly to New York. Assuming there are air traffic controllers in the US to guide our plane in. No idea what customs will be like: they've dropped the de minimis exemption, so we may be asked the value of every item we've bought, in which country, so they can calculate how much import tariff to charge on it. All of which will happen at 2 AM Paris time, so we presumably won't be at a peak of cognitive efficiency.

On our previous trip to France, in 2002, we ended up eating almost every meal at an outdoor table, even if it was windy or rainy, because indoors was full of cigarette smoke, and outdoors there was at least a chance that the wind would blow it away so we could taste our food.

I think the laws have changed since then: there are ashtrays on the outdoor tables, but not indoors, so we're eating indoors even when the weather is gorgeous, in order to avoid the cigarette smoke and taste our food. It's an improvement, I guess.

On our previous trip I noted that "water and soda, by volume, are almost as expensive as wine." Presumably because of the number of American tourists, every place we've eaten has been willing to serve us plain water, usually chilled, usually in a carafe or large bottle, and usually gratis. We usually order Orangina or Fanta or the like as well, so they're still making some money on drinks.

Another odd daily-life thing I noticed: we've had high temperatures in the 60's Fahrenheit basically every day, and we've been wearing long-sleeved shirts, sometimes a light sweater, while the locals are all wearing coats, fleece jackets, down jackets, etc.

Following up on this entry...

We talked to several third-party ticket-sellers, one of whom said "yes, our package ticket includes entry to the Tres Riches Heures exhibition," so we bought some tickets. I was skeptical, since the Chateau had made very clear that all its tickets for the remaining three days of the exhibition were sold out, but we figured there was a chance we'd get in, and if not, we'd see a 15th/19th-century palace full of artwork, including some other books of hours.

So we took the train to Chantilly this morning, went straight to the exhibition (in a separate building a few hundred meters from the Chateau proper), and asked (a) whether our tickets included entry to the exhibition (no), and (b) whether there was a way to get on stand-by in case of cancellations (also no). So, in hope of making the day not a total waste, we went back into the Chateau and visited "Un Autre Historie des Livres des Heures," a display of other books of hours in the permanent collection that were not part of the Tres Riches Heures exhibition. Mostly 16th and 17th century, an aesthetic that doesn't really appeal to either of us, but there were a few 12th, 13th, 14th, and 15th-century Heures.

The building did indeed start as a 15th-century castle. In the 16th or 17th century, some owner added an extra building as an entrance hall. Then during the French Revolution, the original building was completely destroyed, leaving only the entrance hall. In the late 19th century, the Duc d'Aumale rebuilt the original castle, to late-19th-century standards, and filled it with a collection of art said to be second within France only to the Louvre's.


Anyway, we went on to explore the rest of the late Duke's art collection. Everything was organized according to the standards of the late 19th century, and according to the Duke's will, it has to stay that way, so one would find a lot of boring 18th- and 19th-century portraiture on the same wall with
a Holbein, a Memling, and a couple of anonymous 14th- and 15th-century pieces. At one point the Duke came across a couple of cut-out leaves from another 15th-century Book of Hours (the Heures du Chevalier Etienne, IIRC), bought them, and went on a personal quest to find as many as possible of the remaining leaves, which are now all separately mounted in a small, darkened room called "le Sanctuarie", along with two Raphaels and some other things I don't remember. Of course, all of this was in a late-19th-century prince's palace, which (as shalmestere put it) "feels like being in Donald Trump's home": lots of gold, lots of fancy/tacky ornaments, really not our style. But it was sorta interesting finding the occasional piece of pre-1500 art amid the rest.

By this time we were tired and hungry. We went back to the exhibition hall and asked again whether we could get in, and were told "no, but if you come back at 4:00, we might be able to get you in." It was about 1:30, so we walked down the street towards centre-ville looking for lunch. One or two places were way more expensive than what we wanted to spend on lunch, and most others were "complete" and about to stop serving for a couple of hours between lunch and dinner. The tenth place we stopped, "The English Place", didn't look very promising, but it was open, and we were starving. And in fact it wasn't very good, but at least we had something in our stomachs before walking back to the exhibition hall to see whether the 4:00 plan would work. We asked somebody at the door, and he said "Perhaps at 4:30," and then added "But you could just buy a ticket at the shop."

"Wait, what? Vraiement? Mais n'est pas complete?"

"No, not now."

So we went to the exhibition gift shop, prepared to get yet another contradictory story, but shalmestere went to the counter and said "Deux adultes, s'il vous plais", as though it were no big deal, and they handed her two tickets to the Tres Riches Heures exhibition, valid for the rest of today, for 3 euros apiece. The day was looking up.

And five minutes later we were in the exhibition hall. Or rather, standing in line behind lots of other people trying to get into the exhibition hall, most of whom were listening to a tour-guide rather than moving. I could understand why they're so careful about not letting too many people into the hall at once. Anyway, before we'd gotten anywhere near the Books of Hours, we heard the tour-guide saying something about the "Codex Chantilly, un manuscrit de musique medieval," and our ears perked up. We're familiar with the Chantilly Codex -- we have a facsimile of it at home, and have often played music from it -- and had been idly wondering whether we'd be able to see it too along with the Books of Hours, and here it was, open to a page of Solage.

Oh, and in the next cabinet was the marriage contract of Jean and Jeanne, Duc et Duchesse de Berry, complete with wax seal on the strings threaded through the bottom margin. No, they weren't fingerloop-braided.



Also the personal seal of the Duc de Berry, with a bear and a swan. The day was decidedly looking up.




The exhibition would have been impressive enough if it had only included the 26 unbound calendar pages from Jean Duc de Berry's Tres Riches Heures, mounted in windows so people could see both sides. More impressive, they had also borrowed (or already had in the permanent collection) the Grandes Heures, the Belles Heures, the Petits Heures, the Tres Belles Heures de Notre Dame, the Psalter, and a couple of other related books, all of which Duc Jean had also commissioned and owned. As the wall caption points out, it's probably the first time all of these Heures have been in the same room since Jean died in 1416. But to fill things out, they supported this with probably fifty other illustrated books from the same era, showing the artists who had influenced the Limbourg Brothers, the artists who were influenced by the Limbourg Brothers, the artists who finished the Limbourg Brothers' unfinished work, etc. Wow.


We stopped again at the exhibition shop to get an exhibition catalogue (which alas is not available in English), then walked hurriedly to the train station to catch a train back to Paris. There was only one ticket kiosk in the station, and it wasn't working, so there was an enormous line in front of the desk of the one ticket-selling agent. The train arrived before we were anywhere near the front of the line, and the next one was two hours later, so we boarded without tickets and figured we would pay whatever extra charge there was on-board. But nobody ever came to check our tickets, so we got off in Paris without paying, took the subway to our neighborhood, got some dinner (much better and more substantial than lunch!), got some groceries, and returned to our tiny AirBnB.

Set alarm for 5 AM Tuesday, in an attempt to get a head-start on jet-lag, but woke up at 3 AM to go to the bathroom, and was unable to get back to sleep. So I checked in for our flight, scanned in our passports, etc. then did some gainful-employment stuff.

Took three hours out of the middle of the day to drive the dogs to the dog-sitter's home near Newark, eat lunch, and drive home. More gainful-employment stuff. Packed bags.

After dinner, car service took us to JFK to fly to Paris. Flight left on time (a few hours ahead of the government shutdown).

Some time in the middle of the night, somewhere over the Atlantic, I woke up feeling extremely ill, and drenched in a cold sweat, with my wife shaking me and saying "Are you alright?" She reports that I had keeled over into the (vacant) seat to my left, my hands were twitching, and she tried to wake me up without success until I sat up on my own, staring straight ahead and breathing through my mouth. A flight attendant or two also came to help, offering water, "moist towelettes", etc. Eventually I got up to go to the bathroom: standing up and walking seemed to help clear my head. But it was at least another hour before I felt mostly normal.

Once we landed in Paris on Wednesday morning, passed passport control, and retrieved our luggage, we stopped at the urgent-care clinic in the airport. They took my temperature, BP, and pulse-oxygen, and took an EKG, none of which showed anything interesting. Since I was feeling OK by this time (aside from jet-lag), I opted to go on with our vacation plans (at least until it happens again, which it hasn't yet).


We checked into our reserved studio apartment (which is literally the size of our bathroom at home) and crashed for a while.

The building, in an apparently gay-leaning part of the Marais, is decorated in interesting ways. Every room is named after a different fashion designer (we were in Dior). And every room has a different original wall-painting: here’s the Avengers wall painting revealed when we folded down the Murphy bed to sleep on it. In fact, you're looking at basically the entire apartment. Including the bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, and sitting-room, it's about 12 hudebnik-feet square. (You can see both the bathroom sink and the kitchen stove in the mirror.)

Using the wifi in the room, I e-mailed my doctor in NYC, who thinks investigating the seizurey-thing can probably wait until we get home.

Tomorrow, as we continue trying to get over jet-lag, we're visiting three museums in Paris. One opens at 8 AM, and another closes at 9 PM, and we think two of the three don't have a lot of stuff up our alley, so we might actually do justice to three museums in a day. If not, one of them will fall off the list and that's OK.

The next day, probably, a day-trip to Chantilly for the Limbourg Brothers exhibit (among other things).

This was the weekend of Military Through the Ages, a large timeline living-history show held at Historic Jamestowne, just outside Williamsburg, VA. Our group, La Belle Compagnie, has participated in it every year for something like thirty years, although we didn't join La Belle ourselves until 1998 (and one or two shows were cancelled due to COVID).

NYC to Williamsburg is a fairly long drive, with unpredictable traffic delays on many segments of the route. So this year I took Friday and Monday as vacation days to make sure we had time to get there and back. We dropped the dogs at the boarding kennel Thursday around 5:30 PM, started packing the car, hit the road at 8:00, and stopped for the night at a hotel in Maryland around 11:30, then drove the rest of the way on Friday to set up our pavilion in the afternoon before driving a few minutes to the hotel where La Belle Compagnie had reserved several adjacent suites of rooms, where we had dinner and long geeky conversation with Labellies.

Up to alarm at 6:00, grabbed breakfast at McDonald's, and got to the site by 7:30 to unload musical instruments, put their modern-looking cases back into the car, and open to the public at 9:00 AM.

This year La Belle Compagnie had over twenty people, running ten different "stations": the fighting field where one of our HEMA experts demonstrated techniques of fighting with various weapons; the arming pavilion where a fully-armored knight showed off armor and weapons; the archers' hovel where several commons-born archers showed off their cheaper and plainer armor and weapons; the musicians' tent where shalmestere and I showed off musical instruments and played and sang a variety of 14th-15th-century music; the hall (the group's biggest pavilion) where the Lady of the house, her exchequer, and one of her attendant women showed off and demonstrated various things (I didn't get in there much so I don't know exactly what); the surgeon's station where a guy in a blood-spattered leather apron showed off surgical tools and urinals and talked about medical technology; the cooks' station where two women displayed a variety of herbs, spices, breads, pies, sausages, etc. that we ate for lunch; the armorer's station where a guy who makes armor acted as a merchant selling it, and invited guests to try on helmets, greaves, vambraces, etc.; and the fripperer's station, where another merchant talked about clothing, acting as a reseller of used clothing, and invited guests to try things on.

Saturday was quite busy: the Historic Jamestowne organizers reported nearly 4000 guests coming through the gates in one day, the second highest daily attendance the show has ever had, and we must have talked to a large fraction of them. shalmestere and I brought our fancy circular pavilion and set up two tables therein to hold musical instruments: various kinds of recorders, tabor-pipes, a tabor, a fydel/vielle, a citole, a harp, a shawm, two bombards (aka "alto shawm"), and a doucaine (aka "still shawm", which I explained as "the shawm's indoor voice"). The fiddle suffered an explosive trauma early Saturday: the gut holding the tailpiece to the button snapped, the tailpiece flew up to the fingerboard, the bridge and the nut went flying, and we were unable to play the instrument all that day. But Saturday evening, back at the hotel, I was able to cut a replacement piece of heavy gut and get things working again. We had a number of visitors who had lots of questions about music and instruments, and almost everybody wanted to see and hear the shawms (the most unusual-looking instruments we have), so we earned our keep for the day.

Sunday dawned warmer and drier, but with rain forecast for the afternoon, and the event organizers agreed to start kicking out the public around 1 PM so the re-enactors could get things packed up before the rain hit. La Belle had completely struck camp by about 2:30, and most of us went to a Chinese buffet for lupper (watching the rain start around 3:00) before hitting the road for home.

There were substantial traffic delays in Virginia and Maryland, and shalmestere and I weren't sure how far we would get before being too sleepy to drive, but when we stopped for a bathroom break, refueling, and driver-switch around 8:00, Google Maps said it was only another 3 hours to home, so we decided to try to push on. And indeed we got home before 11:30, and had the car unpacked by 11:45, so we could sleep in our own bed.

On the schedule for today: clean things, put things away, retrieve the dogs from the boarding kennel, buy groceries, maybe see a movie.

We were reminded of several projects to work on. Finish building a case for the harp: we have a fleece sleeve that more-or-less fits the harp, but it needs a flap that closes over the top, and it needs a more protective outer layer (of leather or heavy fabric). Make some hanging walls, perhaps block-printed with animal-minstrel patterns, so the inside of the tent doesn't look quite so Spartan. And as always, learn and memorize more musical pieces. It would be nice to have some written music in appropriate notation and construction, but I think to be plausible it would have to be at least a small book (not loose sheets), so that sounds like a big project -- and it might need to be somewhat different for a 1418 scenario than for a 1382 scenario (just as the men-at-arms have different armor for different time periods).

Just spent most of a week at Shawm Camp, aka the Early Double Reed and Sackbut Workshop, at a church retreat center outside Bloomington, Indiana. This entailed flying to Indianapolis and renting a car. The car they gave us was all-electric, which was a novel experience for both of us. It seems to work well, although it doesn't seem to understand the idea of "coasting": when you take your foot off the accelerator, it slows down substantially and immediately.

Anyway, we stopped at Trader Joe's for snacks, then drove to Bloomington, where we visited the "Future Birthplace of Captain Janeway" statue, then went to the IU Music Library, which was inexplicably closed in the middle of the day on a Wednesday. Walked around town for a while, shared a pork-loin sandwich for dinner, and drove to the retreat center. Spent three full days playing shawms, plus a night at each end.

Sunday morning we packed the car, left camp around 10 AM, and spent some time trying to find an EV charging station (Google Maps was convinced that there's one in the middle of a derelict shopping mall). Eventually found one in-use, told the driver I'd never charged an EV before, and asked how long it takes. She was extremely helpful: she had about five minutes to go on her charge, and it would probably take us 20-30 minutes to get up to 80% (much longer to get to 100%, if we chose to do that), and we would need to download the EV Connect app to use this particular charging station. So I searched for EV Connect, found their app named EV Go, downloaded it, and went through their new-account registration process while waiting for the other driver to finish charging. Then it got to the "locate nearest charging station" screen and for some reason couldn't find the charging station I was standing three feet away from, or any other charging station within hundreds of miles. Used the QR code on the charging station, and it started downloading the app again, which seemed silly... until I realized that EV Connect is a different app from EV Go, and apparently a different company. With EV Connect I was able to identify the charging station, and eventually to plug in and start charging (after some difficulty getting the door of the charging port on the car open).

After half an hour charging, we drove to the parking lot near the Music Library, parked, walked to Mother Bear's for lunch (nummy Divine Swine pizza), walked to the Music Library (which was open this time), found several pieces we'd been looking for (the computerized catalogue is frustratingly available only with a University ID, but we knew we wanted the M2's, so we just found that aisle and scanned the shelves), then drove back to the Indianapolis airport. We checked in, a little less than two hours before our 4:00 flight, but it's a fairly small and intimate airport, and wasn't particularly crowded at the time, so we got through security and to our gate in plenty of time.

The flight was full, and at least a third of the passengers were from the "Elite Youth Basketball League", many of them well over six feet tall and trying to fold themselves into economy-class airline seats. But we took off on time without problems, landed on time without problems, and got to baggage claim (through the newly-rebuilt Terminal B, which is remarkably attractive and pleasant, and has won a bunch of international awards like "best new airport terminal in the world") without problems. shalmestere retrieved our suitcases while I found the oversized-luggage area and waited for the heavy-duty, TSA-locked case that contained all our shawms. One golf bag came out in the oversized-luggage area, but nothing else seemed forthcoming, so I checked "Find My" for the tag we had attached to the instrument case. Sure enough, it was still at the Indianapolis airport. We talked to Baggage Services, who had no idea why it hadn't gotten on the same plane we did, but assured us it would be on the next flight to New York, and they would deliver it to the house the next day. shalmestere found that unsatisfactory, and asked whether they would call us as soon as it arrived so we could come and get it. They said "sure", and marked it "Hold For Pickup", while we found the taxi stand and loaded our remaining bags into a taxi. I got in, started telling the driver our address, and he started moving before shalmestere had finished getting into the car (the door was still open!), so she cussed him out for a moment, got into her seat, and we rode the rest of the way home uneventfully.

The house was still standing. Some flowers in the front yard had finished blooming while others had started (with three rose bushes in the latter category), and after we'd spent so much of the previous few weeks pulling up maple seedlings, there were now a number of oak seedlings. So we pulled weeds for a few minutes and collapsed on the couch to watch the last two episodes of "Young Sheldon".

Around 8:30 I checked "Find My", and it said the instrument case was "last seen near Indianapolis Airport", but at 6:30, so I figured it was in transit. Fifteen minutes later "Find My" said it was at La Guardia, so we got into the car to retrieve it. shalmestere went into the baggage claim area while I stayed with the car, jockeying through a dense, viscous mass of other cars waiting to pick people up, she came out with the case before I'd managed to travel fifty feet, and we got back to the house fairly efficiently. The instrument case had been opened for inspection, but nothing seemed missing or damaged, so we put away instruments and dirty laundry and went to bed. Never did get a phone call from the airline to tell us our bag had arrived, but it all turned out in the end.

Landed at JFK a bit before noon Sunday after three weeks in Spain. Caught a cab home. House still standing; different flowers blooming in front yard than before we left.


Unpacked suitcases. Repacked suitcases. Drove 4+ hours north to friends' house. Slept a lot. With five friends and two other cars, drove north another hour or so into the path of totality, found parking place near a restaurant/resort and gas station, and sat around for a few hours waiting for an eclipse.

We were worried that there would be too much cloud cover, but as it turned out there were only a few high, thin clouds. We viewed the increasing amount of eclipse variously through eclipse glasses, in a camera obscura, by projecting through binoculars onto a white piece of foamcore, and by projecting through a kitchen colander ditto. A breeze sprang up, the air got chilly, the light got weird, and then in a matter of seconds the last sliver of sun projected on the foamcore disappeared, the sky turned midnight-blue, and a cheer went up from the crowd. We could see the eclipsed sun perfectly, with a fair amount of corona and one persistent red flare. We could also see Venus nicely, maybe ten degrees away from the sun and moon; I gather some other planets were supposed to be visible too but I didn't spot them. Anyway, after two minutes or so, several more flares or Bailly's-beads or something appeared next to the first one, then merged into a blaze of white and totality was over.

Within seconds, cars started moving, jockeying to get out of the parking lot and onto the road. We waited for the majority of them to leave before getting in the car ourselves. One of our friends had picked out a restaurant a few miles to the south where we could get dinner, gave us its name, and we all hit the road in our various cars... except that we couldn't get any cell phone service (it's a remote area, and there were suddenly thousands of cell phones trying to use one tower). So after crawling along the interstate for half an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic, shalmestere and I took the relevant exit and stopped at a gas station to ask where the restaurant was. The lady behind the counter gave clear directions, and we got back on the road. In another heavy traffic jam, presumably people trying to avoid the heavy traffic jam on the interstate. It took another half hour or so to crawl a few miles to the restaurant, where we found we couldn't get a table for seven and started looking for someplace else to eat.

Most restaurants in this part of upstate New York exist to serve weekenders and summer people, so since this was neither a weekend nor summer, they were closed. After a bunch of walking up and down the road, and continuing trouble getting cell signal, we found a place where we could at least sit near one another, and had dinner while waiting for (hopefully) the worst of the traffic to subside.

Left the restaurant just before 7 PM. Traffic was indeed less bad than before, but in the first two hours (mostly on interstate) we travelled 63 miles. Including stops for gas and driver-switching, we got home at the stroke of 1:00 AM, thoroughly fried. Fall down go boom, in own bed for the first time since March 13-14. Both have to work in the morning, but at least we don't have to physically go to our respective offices.