Home

I apologize for the delay between posts. I’ve been hunkered down the past several months trying to write a book, “Time of Changes,” that will be published in the Czech Republic next year. I’m on a tight deadline and have until the end of February 2021 to finish. So far, I think (I hope) I’m on schedule. The book will have 12 chapters, plus a chapter-length introduction and epilogue. I’ve finished eight of the 12 chapters as well both front and back sections. That leaves four still to go. I’m planning to write a post at some point about the process of writing a book, but for the moment I’ve got to keep my nose to the grindstone.

That’s the plan at least. Unfortunately, my Google and Apple photo apps won’t leave me alone to focus on the book. Every day or two, I get notifications showing me photos of what I was doing exactly one year ago on that day. It’s a jarring reminder of life before COVID-19 and how much can change within the short span of a year. One year ago (Google tells me), at around this time, I was happily traveling around southern Bohemia, in the Czech Republic, researching a guidebook for Lonely Planet. I was too busy back then to write a blog post about that trip. I thought it might be fun, though, to time-travel back and relive that journey now. This is the story of an entirely ordinary research trip that, in retrospect, feels so extraordinary precisely because it happened at all.