Bentrovato. That’s the reply to the title of this post. When you return from a trip, people in your regular Italian life say: Bentornato, well return. The reply is: Bentrovato, well found. Obviously that’s a pretty literal translation, but I prefer the literal, in this case.

My bicycle trip down the Danube was gorgeous and adventurous and dramatic and touching. Both God and man were good to my and my friend. The weather was abnormally warm and clear for mid-October, and we had the path mostly to ourselves. Our various types of hosts along the way were gracious and kind and warm, everything was very clean and orderly and comfortable. It was a remarkable journey, with peaks and valleys and all the complex moments one finds on an adventure. Vienna was nothing short of spectacular and Venice was, as usual, dramatic and operatic, with clouds and rain and wine in damp, open-air cafes. So yeah, great trip. Bentrovato.

The model here was doing a photo shoot with a professional photographer right after a rain shower in Venice. She wasn’t too happy with me, for some reason. I wasn’t disturbing the shot, I was well out of range of the professional photographer. In fact, the professional should have been taking cues from me, moving around, trying different angles and scenes. But she just stood there, like an amateur, in one spot, while the model did her thing. I should have been the one getting paid!

I woke up with this Duran Duran song in my heart in Vienna and I haven’t been rid of it for weeks, so I knew I had to post it. The story of this song is that in 1993, I was riding in a car in Atlanta with a friend and the radio dj announced this as “a new song from Duran Duran”. I wasn’t ever really a fan of “Hungry Like a Wolf,” but of course I was curious. Ten years is a long time in pop life. Oh, and it was my birthday, in fact I think me and my friend were going to supper to celebrate. Perhaps that was why I fell in love with it, but I’m not alone. The Wikipedia page says that in October 2021, it was the eighth-most streamed song in the UK. The video sucks, though, so I chose my traditional commercial break instead.

It’s good to be back, I must admit. I am, however, facing a mountain of work with two very short deadlines on two complicated projects. So give me a bit of a break, as usual. I’ll try to post every other night, but I may fail. With my new post-vacay attitude, that’s okay, too. Bentornato.