This morning at 2:13 a.m. (PDT) was the summer solstice, when the sun tired of it's northward journey, and began trudging back south. In Seattle, the sun rose at 5:11 a.m., and set at 9:10 p.m., although I note that the first glimmer of daylight was visible even through my closed blinds at 4 a.m., and still lingers past 10 p.m.
On Facebook, I noted -- only half facetiously -- that it doesn't get any better from this point on, and that "until the first flowers of February, it's all downhill." By this point, as a kid, I was already fretting about how fast summer vacation was passing, and by July 4 I was wailing that "the summer's half over." My mother would calmly suggest that looking at the calendar more carefully might provide a needed attitude correction.
Today, for many kids, vacation ends in August, but for us, the first day or two after Labor Day marked the start of our nine-month incarceration under supervision of the school authorities. In my mind, Labor Day still marks the end of summer, although in the Pacific Northwest, September is often one of our most enjoyable summer months.
But I digress. This year, rather than September's arrival looming with the childhood horror of school, or marking the dwindling of daylight and of decent weather, as the damp chill of winter approaches, my summer will end with a bang.
On August 27, I fly to Glasgow to meet my friends Jim and Dorothy, where we begin our nine-day walk from a suburb of Glasgow to Fort William -- some 95 miles. For me, this duplicates a hike I did in 2011, one of the best walks I've done in Britain.
After a night in Fort William, we return by train to Glasgow. Dorothy, who will have arrived in Scotland a week before me, to visit family near Glasgow, will return to their home in Indiana, but Jim and I will fly on September 9 from Glasgow to Milan.
In Milan, we will meet Jim's brother and sister, and their spouses -- with whom I hiked together in 2018 (the Great Glen Way, Scotland) -- and spend the night at a hotel near Milan's central railway station. The next morning, we will walk to the station, where -- if all goes as planned -- we will be joined by Jim's son Graham, who is arriving from the States early that morning. We proceed by train to Como city, on the southern tip of Lake Como, and hop on a ferry to Menaggio, where we will proceed to the same house my sister, cousin, and I rented last September.
The seven of us will enjoy a week at Lake Como. My friends will then depart, leaving me to be joined for the rental's second week by a varied group of friends and relatives -- including my sister, and a couple of friends with their four-year-old son and one-year-old daughter..
Will two weeks at Lake Como be too much? Will I be bored? Such questions can be asked only by someone who has never visited the Italian Lakes.
Finally, on September 24, we surrender our rental and return to Milan. My sister -- having been deprived of Lake Como during my first week there -- will make up for it by traveling south for a visit to Puglia and Sicily. I'll spend two nights in Milan, and then fly home to Seattle on September 26.
By the time of my return to Seattle, trees will be changing and autumn will be well underway, although some Indian summer may yet remain. But though another summer will be gone, it will have ended while I was happily engaged elsewhere, and I can settle cheerfully into a season of arranging my photos and planning future travels.
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