Friends, tomorrow I set out on another adventure: a tour in the Caucasus. Namely, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia.

I was away for three weeks in July, road-tripping and retreating, and it felt big, and this seems almost too soon in its wake, but I’d booked this trip quite some time ago, and now it’s here. Tomorrow, Vancouver to Frankfurt to Baku (the capital of Azerbaijan). Two weeks with a small group of ten with Adventures Abroad, and then, since one of my sons and his family is spending the school term in Nice, France, I’ll stop to visit them for a week on my way home. 

When I tell people I’m going to the Caucasus, the first question is often “Where’s that?” Between the Black and Caspian Seas, I say. The second question is often “Why?” It’s because of the postcards, I say.

My grandfather, Heinrich Harder, did his World War I service for the Russian Empire in the Caucasus. (The area was part of Russia then.) He was a medic tending the wounded on the trains that brought them from the front, where Russia was fighting the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey), to hospitals in Baku and Tbilisi and so on. When he and my grandmother later immigrated to Canada, they brought along an album of some 80 postcards, most of them collected during his time in the Caucasus. This album ended up in my possession and one Christmas I spent my holiday time exploring the places on these cards via the internet. (The coloured ones are not colour photography but tinted from black and white photos.)

As I read his letters to my grandmother during the war, as I researched and contemplated the cards, the desire built to see — more than a hundred years later — some of the places where he spent several formative years of his life. It’s not really a follow-in-his-footsteps, because of course I’m on the schedule of an organized tour. But I will be there, in the cities of Baku, Tbilisi, Gyumri, Yerevan, all places he was too. And apart from that, I’ll be in a fascinating and complex part of the world.

So, tomorrow. Nothing further to do but go, and receive what there is, what will be. Nothing to do but be curious and open.