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| Being with Charlie--our favorite Denver pasttime! |
These days Charlie is
learning to walk, so he wants to walk all the time, which means we walk. His usual modus operandi is: he comes up to you, pulls on one of your
fingers, wraps his little hand around it, and starts walking to where he wants
to go. This past weekend he took off walking solo and has been doing so ever
since with a huge grin and often giggling gleefully, sometimes so much so that
it makes him fall down.
Besides walking with Charlie, we try to take a daily walk
along the south Platte River or just along 16th Street in downtown
Denver.
So what does retirement mean for us? Some days we ask ourselves what did we do
before we retired, because there is not enough time to do everything we want to
do.
Both of us are trying to live a little healthier. One of our
friends (thanks Tom Fisher) told us about an App that monitors what you are
eating and the exercise you are getting: “My Net Diary”. Keeping a daily food diary is incredibly
revealing; until we did so, we didn’t realize how much we were eating and
sometimes how badly. We are also fortunate to have a very nice exercise center
here in our apartment building—it makes it easy to roll out of bed, dress
quickly, and take the elevator down to the center. Let’s hope that we can keep up
our resolve, once we are back on the road.
We are also enjoying the opportunity to see some theater here. The Denver Center for Performing Arts is just
one block away from our apartment building, so it is very easy and convenient
to take in a show. This month we have seen one Broadway Musical—“Jekyll and
Hyde” and two plays: Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” (thanks to Erin who gave
us a gift certificate for Christmas) and “Grace, or the Art of Climbing”, a new
play whose author we can’t remember. The
fun thing about “Grace” was that we met one of the actor’s who was staying in
our building. She got us complimentary
tickets and we loved feeling connected to her and also to the stage manager,
whom we had also met here.
Another entertainment treat for us was seeing a simulcast of
the Metropolitan Opera production of “Rigoletto”. We thought we would be among a very few in
attendance, but when we arrived a few minutes before the start, we found a full
theater with perhaps 400 or 500 people, so we had to sit up front in the third
row. This is a new production set in
1960 Las Vegas—it really worked well for Rigoletto, depicting the same sort of
decadence and duplicity as 17th century Italy. Seeing other Met simulcasts will be on our
agenda for the future and we highly recommend the experience.
We will be leaving
Denver at the end of the month and have plans to be in Europe for the next five
months. We have rented two separate
apartments in Tuscany: March in Siena and April in Greve (Chianti). We have also arranged to lease a car for our
entire stay as we want to be able to visit a lot of the small hill towns in
Tuscany and Umbria.
In May we will be going to Croatia and Austria, as we make
our way to Germany. We have been offered
the use of an apartment in Munich for the month of June. We hope to take some German language lessons
and visit with family in Munich and Western Germany. After that we will need to drive back to Rome
for our flight home on July 16th.
We have purposely rented two bedroom apartments in Italy
because we hope that some of you will be tempted to join us. We are already anticipating that one friend
will join us in late March and early April.
If you are tempted, here are the links for information on the two
apartments:
Apartment
in Siena: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/184208
Apartment
in Chianti: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/312849
Make those plans now: we would love to see you in Italy!
