return to devon

with a few weeks to go here, i revisited devon----where i was a few weeks into my trip [see my post here]...this created a nice symmetrical set of bookends around the inner meat of the sabbatical. time reveled in its circularity. instantly the rush of who i was, what i was thinking and how i was feeling when i embarked on this adventure six months ago came back to me very vividly!

not that such a neat, novelistic device was fully intentional...james and i had set up a meeting with the quarry with whom we hope to do business. it was close to devon. the rest is, as they say, history.

i needed to revisit the same beach i'd swum at six months ago, during warmer times. i took a picture of myself in front of the same rock:

the beach, this time during the winter, sported more human activity than when i had it to myself in the balmy, golden autumn. dogs happily ran, chasing anything thrown. families and their children cooked lunch over a bonfire. hikers trekked around the coastal footpath [which runs 420 miles west from that spot!] a lone, young teenage girl drew a heart on the sand [complete with keith harring lines] with her footsteps; presumably with her initials paired with those of a puppy-love beloved. i caught the scene on pixels before the incoming tide wiped it away. ahhhh, the existentialism of it all....

and, the much-anticipated meeting with the quarry? it didn't go as well as we'd, perhaps naively, hoped. we were expecting to hammer out a contract. in reality, the people we needed to talk to weren't there. the people who were there were rushing about answering the phones. a higher-up who wasn't very well-informed about who we were chatted to us about the road industry. plus we found out about a possible conflict of interest with some mystery man.

we reeled for about a day afterward from the disparity between our expectations and what had actually transpired. however, on a positive note, we learned that a handful of other quarries surround the one we visited. we need to keep digging!