The weather was darn near perfect.
I decided to see if I could get a few decent shots of the gondola operation there in Alamitos Bay.
The other one is in Sunset Gondola's fleet.
the official website of the festival is:
http://www.littleitalyfestival.org/index.html
to learn more about the town, see:
http://greaterclintonchamber.org/
Many of you who read this blog either know Chris Harrison or know of him.
He is my Senior Gondolier in Irving, Texas.
He is a dear friend and a great guy.
Chris has also done some expedition rowing, serving as one of the six rowers in the Hudson River Expedition of 2007 and rowing with me last April down the Buffalo Bayou and back up again in the Houston Gondola Expedition.
Going down the bayou was easy, heading back up- not so much. We had heavy rain the night before which turned a slow-moving bayou into a real-live river.
Rowing up that river was even more challenging when the wind, which we'd always expected to blow up-river, decided to switch on us.
We ended up rowing against both wind and current.
All this was difficult, but nothing compared to what Chris has gone through lately.
In March of this year, Chris was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma (cancer), and shortly after that he began chemotherapy treatment to defeat it.
Yesterday, Chris underwent his twelfth and final treatment.
It was a hard road, and at least one of the twelve landed him in the hospital.
But now it's over.
I spoke with Chris this evening and he sounded really positive.
He feels good and actually looks forward to the radiation that will follow.
You may have read my post from May 9th titled "Chris Harrison takes matters into his own hands". In that post, Chris shaved his mane (stopping first, of course, to briefly sport a Mohawk).
Well, his hair is back - it's only about an inch long, but it's hair!
this September 12th, Chris and I will take part in another one-day expedition, this time in Oklahoma City. A separate blog has been set up for the event: http://gondolaexpeditions.blogspot.com/
Chris is doing well, and he is looking forward to the row.
Welcome back Chris.
Welcome back to the land of the living!
Thanks go out to Maria Torffield for this link.
It’s a nice concise grouping of webcams in Venice.
http://www.veniceword.com/webcam.html
Let me know if you see anything interesting.
On launch day, the 25’ Curtis-built mahogany beauty with a highly varnished maple prow was extracted ever-so-carefully from the truck she’d arrived in, and placed on jack-stands. It was a grand event; a few news crews were on hand and we took a bunch of photos of our own.
In a short time we had strapped and hoisted the “Elisa Marie” (named after my wife), and were ready for the official christening.
The crowd gathered around, Elisa and I, (dressed in our best) stepped up near the front of the gondola, and readied ourselves with a few well-rehearsed words and a sacrificial bottle of champagne.
As the cameras were rolling, I delivered the speech I’d prepared and my wife tightened her grip on that bottle of champagne and took a good swing at the boat.
Thunk!
Everybody looked and tried not to laugh.
Thunk!
A few people couldn’t help but laugh.
THUNK!
This time everybody laughed.
It wasn’t working.
I thought maybe Elisa just needed to swing a little harder.
I took the bottle of champagne in my hands and swung it hard at the front end of the gondola.
THUNK!
Everybody laughed again, but this time they were laughing at me!
I swung harder.
THUNK!
I realized we were systematically damaging the perfect finish of our new gondola.
A few more swings and I couldn’t bear to add another ding to the small collection we’d been accumulating on the varnished maple prow.
I unwrapped the top, asked my wife to join me in holding the bottle, and we popped the cork.
As you can imagine, after all that whacking, the champagne was quite well-shaken and ready to spray.
As the champagne was sprayed onto the boat – a tradition was born.
Since then, we have christened more than twenty of our gondolas in the same shake-and-spray manner.
I’ll tell you my friends, it’s a lot easier to wash champagne off the boat instead of repairing and repainting.
After the boat was launched, we were caught up in carrying out all of those plans we’d made, and we didn’t think much about the christening until we saw it on the news that night.
To tell you the truth, we were pretty sure that what we had provided the news was worthless, and we were surprised to hear that there would be anything mentioned or shown.
We hadn’t ever considered that our news item might fall under “sports” but that’s where it ended up…in the “bloopers” department!
The local sportscaster and his editing crew, spliced it all together so the clip, which lasted about 20 seconds, was a fast-cut repeat of Elisa and I trying to break that dang bottle. It was hilarious. All of our friends called us and said “hey, we saw you guys on the news”.
Then something else happened: the blooper, our blooper, ended up on his “best of” reel, which meant that every month or two for the next few years, our friends would call again and say “hey we saw you on the news again trying to whack that boat”.
I must say that beating the heck out of the bow of that gondola proved to be some of the best advertisement we ever had.
Since that day, we have always christened our gondolas by spraying champagne on them rather than breaking a bottle, and now you know why.
Prepare yourselves, my friends.
Prepare to be jealous.
Our friend Nick Birch, who operates his gondola on the Avon River in Stratford, England (that's Shakespeare country), has just sent me a link to a "little job" he did in Paris.
His colleague, Richard Winkler, a Frenchman who keeps a gondola on the Seine was asked to do a job for a French dating agency on the river, but they wanted two gondolas, so Nick brought his over from the UK.
Nick tells me that the whole thing was "great fun" but they had to do it early (8am to 9:30am) because the tourist boats start operating at 10am and the river authorities didn't want them on the water at the same time.
About the boats, Nick remarked:
"Just as well, as they put out huge wakes which are reflected off the stone quays and produce horrible confused water - just like the Bacino di San Marco!"
As for the route, Nick said:
"We rowed from close to the Bastille, downstream past Ilse St Louis and Ile de la Cite, with a stop next to the Louvre to drop off one group of passengers, and to pick up another. We then continued down to the quayside near to Place de la Concorde, where they had erected a mock palazzo-style cafe, serving coffee, pastries and gelati."
Richard Winkler keeps a gondola and a sandolo at Sevres, on the western edge of Paris. He rows in the Vogalonga every year, and he met Nick Birch there.
Are you ready for the link?