To Float on the Wayward Wind

I wasn't sure if I would have time to get to Versailles because it is a bit of a trip outside of Paris (though very doable in half a day, I was told and discovered). I was really excited to go, however, for a variety of reasons. The absolutist period, the culture of the period, and the music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Jean-Philippe Rameau, which I studied in a course at Lawrence University titled, "Music and Power in the Reign of the Sun King." This course focused on how Louis XIV, who loved dance (as one of the best dancers of the time, himself), built Versailles with music, spectacle, and dance in mind. We discussed how music accompanied him where he went and how the gardens of Versailles, particularly, were the set for magical performances involving music. Like the Eiffel Tower, this is place that still left me in awe today, meaning I can't imagine how people viewed it when it was built. It's amazing it was completed (even if not in the...

My trip to the Scottish Highlands started off on a somewhat gray, drizzly, but pretty morning from Edinburgh up into the fog-shrouded, more drizzly northern regions of Scotland. It began uneventfully with plenty of opportunities for beautiful scenery, and it ended up as a wild adventure! The first major stop was at Glen Coe, a spectacular, legendary place. It is supposed to be beautiful in more clement conditions but as it was it had a sense of mystery to it with the low-hanging clouds and slight fogginess. This is where (or near where) the Campbell clan executed (literally) their famous massacre of the other clans as power shifted at the upper echelons of kings and lords in England and Scotland and their allegiances shifted, too. The history is haunting, and the place reflects it. Though the name of the Coe river predates the massacre and even the language, it is often said to be called the "Glen of Weeping" because of all the rivers that run sinuously down it, someti...