On Wednesday, January 11th, I got on an airplane in Corpus Christi, Texas, enroute to St. Augustine, Florida, to visit my friends Tristan and Alex MacDonald. From there, Tristan, a friend, John Tresdorpf, and I planned to fly to Puerto Montt, Chile, and then proceed by bus to Bariloche, Argentina, to do some hiking in the region known as Patagonia.
The flight was uneventful - in fact, both the Corpus to Houston leg and the Houston to Jacksonville flights landed several minutes early. My luggage arrived with the flight, and I was picked up by Tristan and Alex in their new Jeep, the model with the bigger engine. We proceeded to the Raintree Restaurant in St. Augustine, which Tristan and Alex founded and retain an ownership interest in along with their daughter Lorna, who now is the primary manager of it. It's a lovely place, built in an historic building downtown, exquisitely remodeled when the restaurant was founded, and meticulously maintained. The menu in the restaurant is eclectic - see the web site for more information.
There we were joined by Brittany Fraser, the grandaughter of Tristan and Alex. Tristan, Brittany, her brother Zach, and I did a four day hike on the Continental Divide Trail in July of 2011. Brittany is now a law student at Depaul University in Chicago, and was home for the holidays. We had a delightful dinner, aided, perhaps, by a couple of bottles of excellent wine...
Then we went to Tristan and Alex's home on Anastasia Island, which should be featured in the pages of Architectual Digest. The house has a garage which conceals their 43-foot motorhome, in which I am staying during the visit. More opulent guest quarters are difficult to imagine.
The following day, Tristan and I spent an hour in his fitness club, and we did a number of chores related to his memoirs, the second of half of which I have had the privilege of transcribing from his handwritten manuscript. The process has been that Tristan got manuscript chapters to first Brittany, and later me. The chapters were entered into word processing software, then emailed to Tristan's sister Wendy, who printed and edited them. Then the printed chapters with Wendy's edits were snail-mailed back, and corrected on the computer. Finally, the chapters were emailed to Tristan for final editing.
In the evening, we went to dinner at the home of Lorna, Tristan and Alex's daughter, and her husband, Chris Cantabene, chef/owner of the Raintree. Their home, which they personally renovated, is absolutely lovely. It has a state-of-the-art networked entertainment system, which Chris engineered, allowing sound and video from multiple sources to be heard and/or viewed throughout the house, and beautiful wood floors which must be seen to be believed. The get-together served multiple purposes: a celebration, a couple of days late, of Zach's birthday, a farewell to Brittany, who headed back to law school the following day, and my introduction to some members of the family I had yet to meet.
Friday I did some more computer work. One of our potential navigation problems was a lack of good topographical maps for the area we will be hiking in, but I discovered that Google Earth has the ability to overlay a 1-kilometer Universal Transverse Mercator grid over the excellent high-resolution photos, which are good enough in some places to see the actual trail we will be walking on. There may be some problem with the areas of the photos which were covered in snow when the photos were taken, but I am sure we will cope.
Friday night we had dinner at the MacDonald home, where we were joined by Gaere MacDonald, the son of Tristan and Alex. The food was excellent, and the company superb. All of the MacDonald clan, and Lorna's husband, are intelligent, well-educated, and great conversationalists. We may not have solved many of the world's serious problems, but we had a wonderful time discussing them.
On Saturday, we actually completed entering and editing the text of Tristan's memoirs. Having the principals, Tristan, Wendy, Alex, and I, all in one place facilitated the process. What remains is photo editing, and, eventually, publication - but completion of the text is a major milestone.
Sunday we went to brunch at the Raintree, with Wendy Tyson, who grew up in Kenya. There was some potential for confusion at the table, with two Wendys and one Lindy, but we managed to cope. Later we went for a walk on the beautiful sand beach before dinner.
Patio at the Raintree Restaurant
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