I'm not rich, but I am lucky. Recently, each summer my extended family gets the opportunity to go on a group vacation together. Numbering from between 14 and 28 on a given year, we venture to a location outside the realm of our day-to-day lives, to renew bonds, to forget our work lives, to remember the familial ties we shared in our youths, and still have, though we may not notice them every day anymore.

For many years the tradition was to gather at Brown Island, a small wooded island of no more than 40 houses and as many boats and no cars, tucked into a bay called Friday Harbor, in the island of San Juan in the far northwest of Washington State. Our trips would coincide with the Jazz festival held annually in the colsing week of July.

Unlike those Jazz festivals in Sacramento and other cities that have recently been gaining popularity mirroring Jazz and Swing resurgences in my own age group, the San Juan Jazz Festival has for nearly three decades attracted a more mature, more 'authentic' crowd, if you can apply the term to those who lived through Jazz music'soriginal heyday and keep the flame alive within themselves, both as players and listeners.

Sadly, as such a tradition must, the San Juan festival had to migrate its interest base to the younger generation, or see their flame grow smaller until it vanishes in a thin trail of smoke, reminding people of what was, and will not be again. When in 1998 it took that latter and sadder route, the Fox family chartered a new path. Instead of migrating to a brief home for the Summer and flying back home, we took to more exploratory adventures, first with seven days travelling the breadth of Morocco, next exploring the inside passage of Alaska on a weeklong cruise (with a three day homage to Brown Island, to remenice and to clense our mental palates).

This July sees the Foxes on a journey I have secretly hoped for since my first trip across the Atlantic 18 years ago. For two weeks we take to the Mediterranian, 26 strong (on a ship with another 2174 people for good measure). The ports of call read like a litany of old-world history: Barcelona, Rome, Venice, Athens, Istanbul, and afew others. With only a single day in port for each city except Barcelona, our starting point, and Venice, this cruise is a sampler, giving us each ten hours of each city's best to entice us to return as soon as possible.

To better remember this two-week feast of hors d'ovores, and to share them with my friends and readers, I have made a point of taking ample pictures along the way. As mentioned earlier on the weblog, I'm doing little if any winnowing of the pictures at this point. There are many great sites to visit if your goal is to see the places I'm visiting or the ship we're sailing on. The purpose of my photo galleries is to augment my memory, and relation to you, of my journey. At some point I'm sure I'll make a small book with only a few dozen of the best or most meaningful images, but for now I'm taking advantage of the thrift of electronic media and the linear nature these galleries will hopefully provide.

When time on the journey permits I'll conjoin the galleries with journals of the days events, and should I have more time than I ought to, I'll try to go through and correlate some pictures to events in the weblog entry itself. We'll just have to see.

On a final note, though the first of these entries won't end up being posted until our journey is nearly halfway complete, should you have any advice or experiences that you would like to share about the ports we have yet to see, please do write me. Though we will often have pre-arranged schedules, all information is good information,and I'd love to read about your experiences as you read about mine.