1 April – It is already midnight local time where we are, so Happy Birthday to my brother Chris and nephew Rick … and Happy April Fool’s Day!
Voyage and visit to Doha, Qatar
It should have been expected that QA720 would take off on a great-circle route northbound from SeaTac and assume a heading north by northeast given Qatar’s situation well southeast of central Europe. Instead, it came as a surprise as was the fly-by immediately east of Mt Shuksan and Mt Baker. Very cool as were views of snow coated Canadian Rockies that followed.
The 777 was largely empty, and passengers used most of the four-seat center sections to snooze on.
I used this unique occasion to at last finish Paul Kildea’s Chopin’s Piano, a thoughtful Christmas gift from daughter Mary. CP is a copiously detailed account of the life of Frederick Chopin and, later, Wanda Landowska who, respectively, initiated the Romantic era of music with his Twenty Four Preludes for piano written on Majorca and championed those preludes and other Romantic scores in France and, at the onset of war, the United States framed within an intriguing history of a particularly unique piano. The piano is likely lost to antiquity courtesy of winds borne of an especially virulent form of progressivism that sparked WWII. The music endures, and one day soon I will endeavor to play more of it.
We have enjoyed getting to know Garrett’s girl-friend Mikki Seagren, a medical assistant on our trek – her first to EBC also.
Stewart Travels 