Going West #64

Last week I visited a bit of the Far West, the country of cow boys and Indians as in the movies I had watched during my teens.

In Santa Fe the historic Route 66 is a good starting point..

After having passed the Chaco Canyon, I reached a town lost in nowhere land which came by the name of Farmington, scary and only one brewery which was a burger joint actually to get some dinner. But next day after having gone by Ship rock and the Mexican hat, I was seeing this ..

Welcome to Monument Valley..
Yes it is like in "Stagecoach" , the good are coming from the right of the screen, the bad and the Indians from the left and the stagecoach goes sraight ahead on that very road.

The landscape is breathtaking, this is yous truly standing at the spot where John Ford

had been shooting his western movies.

Everywhere around me the mesas are displaying their majestic highness. Colours are changing as the sun goes down. The variety of reds and yellows seem to be infinite.

Look at this magic sunset, the sky is irridiating a crimson dough which eats the greyness of the clouds like some surrealistic reversed oven,

This is Navajo country and apart from selling nice bracelets and necklaces made of silver and turquoise they do very good food like this Navajo taco.

The last Romantic #63

Lord Byron was maybe the last romantic,
he died for an ideal of free and democratic Greece,
he had left England for an endless Grand Tour full of vivid sensations,
of odes to beautiful mistresses,
plus the revelation of the Serenissima Republic, Venezia...

I tried to walk in some of Byron's steps, modestly nearby Genova
in the North of Italy in that magic area called the Cinque Terre,
the five lands...

In Porto Venere, Byron used to swim extensively,

the unfriendly seaside there appealed to him more than
the smooth sandbeach
which was located on the other side of the hill.

Nowadays it is called Byron's cave see by yourself...

From there he used to cross the bay to reach
that other opposite village

called Terenzo

where lived Mary and Percy B. Shelley.

Another ultimate romantic English poet and his gothique noir inspired wife.

Their house can still be seen, my pilgrimage brought me there ...

But it looks like they inspired also some other kinds of stars..

When Percy sailed away that morning he did not know that death

would be dating him, he was already doomed due to his phtisic state..

Byron prepared funerals to his friends according to the ancient Greeks,

having the body burnt on the beach after having removed the heart

which was brought back to Albion.

Mary could finish in grief the book which would make her famous

and inspire the New York Dolls, Frankenstein.