2024 in Review

2024 is officially in the rearview mirror, and 2025 has left the station—hopefully, we’re all aboard for the ride. Travel metaphors might not be perfect for reflecting on the past year or looking ahead, but they suit my love of adventure, so I’m sticking with them. What follows is a snapshot of the highlights from the past year. It’s not exactly a route map, nor does it offer tracks to glimpse the future—it’s just a collection of moments loosely organized by topic. Oh, and there are a few pictures, too. That’s all, folks!

A Few Road Trips

Since inheriting a home in Sedona, we have been figuring out what to do with it. It’s an emotional place for us; Fran helped her sister Ruthie set up her Yoga Teacher training center over 20 years ago, around the time we first met. After spending so much time there myself, we both have a strong connection to the land and the delightfully odd community that makes their home between the vortexes, the pink jeeps crawling through the red rocks full of happy tourists, and the real estate developers. We have been making the trek by EV, which adds a degree of challenge and excitement. So far, we have discovered an interesting variety of routes down and back. Our favorite is the two-lane route down US 20 and 95, which includes stopovers in Burns, Oregon, and Tonopah, Nevada,

A Trip to Afghanistan with Friends

In March, I traveled to Afghanistan with several of Fran’s close friends, Mike, Lisa, and Dolph. The trip was made at the invitation of Fran’s sister, Marnie, who has lived there for the past twenty years as the Executive Director of an NGO called PARSA. For those who don’t know, Fran and her sisters spent almost five years there in the late 1960s when their father was a teacher at the American School in Kabul. Fran could not make the trip, but I was her emissary.

Hanging out with Lisa, Mike, Dolph, and Marnie was the year's highlight. It was a chance to see Afghanistan after the return of the Taliban regime and to witness the explosive growth of neighborhood and family home schools in response to the closing of schools for girls over the age of 12. We were also encouraged by the continued vitality of the International Scouts program, which is managed through PARSA. It was so much fun to be travel buddies with these four global veterans, for whom the complexities and risks of visiting third-world countries are an accepted and joyous part of their work. Gallery here: A Visit to Afghanistan.

A Celebration of Becky’s 70th

It was intended to be a secret, but that didn’t last long. The entire “Michael" side of the clan showed up, and with Ian and Kim’s help, we organized a crawfish boil at our Air B&B. There are lots of pictures here. For the record and for future usage, Becky’s birthday is May 28th!

18th Year In Vietnam

I’ve now been working in Vietnam longer than I ever did in China or Japan - since 2007 - though I still can’t speak the language. We have two offices there employing over 60 people. My design company, Qamera, is a centrally located co-working space we created to share with other digital nomads and tech companies. It includes a cute little coffee shop - the Qafe - in the front. Since Covid, we have dropped the commute from bi-monthly to bi-annually, for about two weeks each visit, but we always stay at the same residence hotel where we start each morning with Vietnamese Caphe sua da.

Honestly, with AI disrupting everything and distracting everyone, I’m not sure how much longer we can keep going without some fairly drastic changes - but 17 years has been a pretty good ride. We’ll see what 2025 brings.

Labor Day at the Telluride Film Festival

Every few years, we go back to Telluride to tune out and drop in to my favorite festival anywhere, the Telluride Film Festival. This year, Katherine and I road tripped down and stayed with my old friends Marti and Dave at their incomparably beautiful, hand-and-love-built cabin in a hidden piece of paradise, the location of which I will not reveal other than to say it sits next to a huge waterfall! More pictures here.

A Meal at the Emerald City Supper Club

Mona has done an amazing job with this project. In its fourth year, every September, 100 people get together and pay $100 each for a wonderful evening of food, drink, and entertainment. Then at the end, they all vote on which charity to donate the proceeds to, complete with $10,000 check. This is so awesome. Plus, we get to see the extended family and friends… Lots more photos here

Sport

I’m still enjoying photographing sports. Or anything that moves, for that matter. For high school, I donate proceeds to sports charities. A gallery about Sport, here.

A Presidential Election

Feeling: Sad. Anxious. Fearful.

He’s the first incoming President to be convicted and sentenced for felony crimes - in a court of law, by a jury of his peers.

“Donald, this is not the Soviet Union. You can't change the truth, and you cannot silence us. Remember all your lies about the voting machines, the election workers, and your countless allegations of fraud that never happened? Many of your lawyers have been sanctioned, disciplined or disbarred, the courts ruled against you, and dozens of your own White House, administration, and campaign aides testified against you." - Liz Cheney, Conservative

Photo is not fake.

A Visit to Louisiana with My Sister

It was great to be back in New Orleans for a few days. I walked from Audubon Park down to the French Quarter, where many streets were completely torn up and undergoing renovations. I guess now I understand it is for the Super Bowl. I'm so sad about what happened just a few weeks later. We also visited the farm, and I rode on a cane harvester. The technology is pretty cool; some use GPS, but the one I rode on simply had a lane-sensing system, not too different from what cars have, that sensed the furrows and kept the harvester in a straight line. Humans are still required. Gallery: Down South

A Year-end Visit to Europe

We hadn’t spent a proper holiday with Will & Lucy since before COVID-19, so we arranged two weeks with them in France and Spain. ‘Them’ included Olive, who is prominently featured in many of the pictures. We spent the first week visiting Christmas markets in Colmar, Strasbourg, and Paris and the second week in San Sebastian, where they have a tiny but very efficient apartment with excellent access to the surfing beach (Olive calls it the Dog Beach) and Pintxo bars, and hiking trails. What more could you ask?

Galleries

Last But Not Least - 20, Yes 20

At some point in August, Fran and I celebrated twenty years together. My, how time flies when you’re having fun!

Passages

In January, we lost Fran’s mother. She passed at the apex of the Wolf Moon, the same moon that marked the passing of Fran’s sister Ruth two years previous. With both of these losses, we just wanted to stand still and mourn. But the world kept turning. In 2024, we also continued to remember and mourn the passages of other close ones, including Fran’s father, Frank, my sister’s husband, Jonny, my children’s brother Taiga, our cousin Vicki Ries, Ildako and Rama from our spiritual community, and Lionheart, the temple cat of 7Centers.

At the end of May, we also lost our faithful fellow traveler and my personal copilot, Jackson, who Ruthie had bequeathed to us in 2022. With his departure, Ruthie herself also slipped a bit further away from our grasp.

Looking into 2025

I’m not sure what to make of this upcoming year. I have mixed feelings about change. I know that change is good and change is inevitable, but I’m becoming less convinced about both the pace and the purpose of change in recent years because, so far, all I’m seeing is that the faster things change, the more people get left behind and the more divided we become. And that, quite simply, is not sustainable.

In the meantime, Keep curious. See the World, Save the Planet. And stay healthy. With or without cold plunges.

Lagniappe

We came across this weird artist community in Paris (I know, right? Paris?), where we found this lone person, presumably an artist, literally scaling the window. At first I thought they were practicing climbing, but then it occurred to me that they might be trying to escape? Thoughts?