Travels With Naked Girls - CHAPTER 16 - 17

Chapter 16.

The West Exposed.

Henriette came over to the U. S. again that year. Paradise Lakes gave me a second chance, so I got Henriette to fly to Florida and I met her at the airport.

This time the video went really well. Henriette is keen on sports, so she got into a volleyball game and was really popular. The men let me video the event, and tennis matches with her as well.

A young man volunteered to throw the frisbee with her, and play pool too. We easily got shots of Henriette in the restaurant and other facilities.

Two attractive young couples were happy to be videoed in the clothing shop (yes, nudists shop for clothing) and the hot tub where Bella had come to grief. It all went very well, so I used the footage as the opening section of Surrender To The Sun, Part 1.

The rest of Surrender To The Sun, Part 1, is about Uti on Santorini, the most popular of the Greek Islands. So everything came out fine in the end.

Indeed that's the way most of my video endeavours have turned out. Though conservative, nudists are generally very helpful. You have to be careful of how you present them, but if you get on the right side of them, they are very good about participating.

It makes me wonder why so few competent videos have been make about nudism. As far as I can see, my own are just about the only videos in the market. This seems curious, since they sell very well.

I admit, as I said above, that nudists are not very good at promoting themselves. But considering how attractive the subject is, you would think more video guys would make the effort.

Well, there is one more thing to be careful about, and that is pretty girls. Pretty girls are a dilemma for nudists.

Pretty girls sell magazines, and most of the nudist magazines, such as they are, feature pretty girls on the cover. Pretty girls also sell videos, so I had to feature them in my videos -- hence this story of Travels With Girls.

Some critics maintain that nudist resorts are basically places men go to in order to see pretty naked girls, dragging their wives along willy-nilly, if they can.

Nudists are naturally not very keen about this assertion. They talk at length about the health and social benefits of nudism. They never tire of saying how being naked out in the free air is good for you, people can relate in true equality by not having clothes to label them, etc.

For me the delicate balance was to feature naked girls without seeming to focus too much on them. It has been a careful and exhilarating challenge.

Besides making the video of Paradise Lakes, Henriette and I went to Epcot, Okeefenoke Swamp, and Cape Canaveral too. We went to Playalinda Beach, and Henriette went for a naked swim. It was the first time she ever swam in an ocean -- the North Sea didn't count, she said.

Then I got one of my bright ideas.   I invited her to come to Australia to live with me the next year. She could come to the U. S. and we would go out and travel around in the West for a few weeks. We could see the Grand Canyon and all the sights. Then she could come out and live with me in Australia for six months and learn how to edit my videos.

I even bought a huge new house in Byron Bay for us to live in. I only had a small apartment before that, which was very nice, because it was very near the beach, but it wasn't big enough for the two of us.

The trip through the West with Henriette was one of the high points of all my travels with girls.

We landed in San Francisco. We did the usual tourist gigs, such as riding the cable car and strolling along fisherman's wharf. Then we rented a car and headed south.

I wanted to show Henriette the wonderful highway that runs along California's coast. It is perched high over numerous beaches and bays, and looks down on offshore rock formations and seagulls flying far below.

We turned off and threaded our way down to one of the beaches, and strolled along the sand, sandles in one hand. It was too wild and chilly to swim, but the waves were dramatic to watch.

We found a cliff restaurant for lunch, with a view to a small bay far below. I had another of my epiphanies there, thinking how great it was to have a good meal with a spectacular view of waves and rocks, and a beautiful blond Dutch girl beside me.

It is something special to be happy, even more special to be aware you are happy.

What we talked about, though, was video. Henriette was on her way to Australia to be my editor, after all.

"How would you shoot this experience?" I asked.

"Well, I'd start with a close-up of the flowers."

"What flowers?"

"Here, on the table." She went on to say she would pan down to the rocks, with one of the most spectacular wave crashes, if possible.

"Good if you can do it," I said.

"Well, you would shoot it, of course. I'm only the editor."

OK, I would try. I told her tracing, too. Tracing is my name for following something moving in a shot.

"Like if you are shooting a mountain scene, and someone on a bicycle rides into the shot, you follow him with the camera, and panning with him looks natural."

"Or her."

"Well, yeah. Preferably her."

"You're so predictable."

"It's part of my charm," I admitted.

Henriette was fond of the difficult shot. We visited the spectacular redwood grove at Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, and she wanted me to do a shot looking straight up and turning. It was a dizzying effect. These were trees over 200 feet high, remember. It certainly made me dizzy.

"Video guys are not supposed to fall over," she observed.

"Or girls," I commented.

"I said, I'm only the editor."

So we went along the highway, enjoying the many vistas. It was great to be traveling south, so our lane was on the ocean side. We could see brilliantly even when driving, and there were lots of places to stop.

There was only one dark thread in our happiness. Henriette was having trouble walking. She said she had been diagnosed with early onset rheumatism. She was facing life in a wheel chair by the time she was 30.

We stopped at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, which has one of the very few waterfalls in the world which falls directly into the sea. You have to walk about 1000 feet along a boardwalk to see it, however. Henriette said she couldn't make it.

I walked along, and did video shots to show her. The falls are about 50 feet high, and fall into a lovely bay with a sandy beach. As I recall, you can't get to the beach, however, as the cliffs are too steep.

It was a beautiful sight, and I paused for 15 or 20 minutes to enjoy it, as I like to do. I've never had much sympathy for the "snap a photo and back to the bus" sort of tourism. But I missed Henriette.

I hoped we could do something about her health in Byron Bay.

Chapter 17.

Deeper Into The West.

We arrived in Los Angeles to visit a friend of mine named Jason. Jason was young, rich, handsome, and a real character. If there was a nefarious way of doing things, he would find it.

He made his money giving massages and treatments to celebrities, for 200, 300, 400 dollars an hour. He knew his way around the studios.

We went to Universal Studios, for example, and he talked our way in past the guard by telling him we were film guys doing some colour tests. Henriette was our model for the tests. Well, she could have been; she was pretty enough.

It helped that the car Jason drove was a four-wheel-drive Lexus worth $180,000.

Once inside the studios, we snuck through a crack in the fence and entered the Universal Studios theme park. We toured the exhibits and rode the King Kong ride, a high speed thrill ride. I still have the souvenir photo of Henriette looking thrilled and me looking breathless.

That night Jason and Henriette went out partying while I recovered. He took her to a deluxe hotel where they snuck into a disused ballroom and he played the grand piano for her for an hour. They got a free meal too; I forget how.

From then on, whenever Henriette and I thought of a clever way to do something, or to get something for nothing, we called it "doing a Jason." I wish I had a dime for all the schemes he thought up. It wouldn't make me rich, but it would make this book a lot longer.

From dizzy California we drove across the Hoover Dam to Las Vegas. Henriette loved it. To me it seemed garish and gauche, but as she said, the video opportunities were endless.

I did like the Belasco Fountain, which played streams of water high in the air in step with operatic music. It was fascinating, too, to see the throngs of people in the casinos diligently working the games and machines of chance.

It seemed strange to see people working at something which merely transferred money around, without creating wealth in any way. If they had worked so diligently at creating a useful product or valuable service, we would all soon be much better off. That didn't seem to occur to them.

I decided I would dedicate $100 to games of chance, and gave Henriette a like sum. I'm afraid I was no James Bond. "Am I having fun yet?" kept re-popping into my mind, as my $100 steadily evaporated.

Henriette was much better at these games than I was. By midnight I was lathered clean and ready for my stall, but Henriette was still going strong.

In fact, she didn't make it back to our hotel room til 3 am. She got three lucrative offers as she walked back. I felt rather insignificant compared to her. I was glad that at least I was the video maker and she was only the editor.

We went to Meteor Crater in Arizona. Henriette was very impressed with the blast crater. She wanted to run around naked in the bottom of the crater, but you aren't allowed to go down there.

We did better in the Valley of Fire in Nevada. Henriette walked around naked on the fiery rock formations which less than a century before had been the hide out of an Apache named Mouse.

Mouse refused to obey the white man's demands that he live on a reservation. That made him a "renegade" in the lingo of the times. He was a kindred spirit for us.

Henriette posed on the sinuous eroded rock formations in the fiery red light of late afternoon. She fit her body into small rounded holes in the rock, and climbed high up on striated faces. You can see the video footage in the second disc of the two-disc set Naked Fun.

We were working our way up to the Grand Canyon, and we finally made it on 29 October. Well, that is, we made it to a motel near the Grand Canyon. When we woke up, the world was a huge flurry of snow, which continued all day and trapped us in our room. There was no driving in such a storm.

The snow seemed very early to me until I remembered that the rim of the Grand Canyon is at 7000 feet. I wondered if we would ever see the Canyon at all. Even if we made it to the edge, we might see nothing but clouds.

We were stuck with not much to do, but Henriette saved the day with a dice game called Yahtzee which she had brought all this way with her.   We played lots of games and she beat me steadily as we both played happily.

After awhile we were able to go outside. Henriette ran around in the falling snow and I took lots of photos of her.

Not naked however. The Dutch are used to bad weather, she said, but there are limits.

Next day the snow had stopped and the roads were clear, so we made it to the Grand Canyon. As I feared, there was nothing to see but clouds.

It seemed such a pity for Henriette to come all this way and see nothing. She didn't complain at all, and I admired her for it.

So I persuaded her to walk along the Canyon rim for a couple of hundred yards -- her limit -- and I launched into a magical air dance. I guess the other tourists would have thought I was crazy. They say the gods love crazy people. It worked.

The clouds lifted and cleared, and there was the Grand Canyon. I won't try to describe it. You have to go see it.

I think this is where the trip started to get really magical.

The snow continued. We went to Mesa Verde, and that morning we woke up to more snow flurries and snow on the roads.

It really made me nervous, because the drive up onto Mesa Verde is full of nervous edges and sharp turns. I wondered if we would make it OK, but we started out anyway.

We made it as far as the trail head, and the sun came out. It started to dissipate my worries.

We took the path to the Anasazi ruins with an Indian guide named Clive Palmer.   He told us about the sacred rituals in the kivas. He pointed out the similarities to religions around the world. For example, the kiva was designed so that devotees were wafted in sacred smoke as they climbed down into it, a close parallel with the incense censers used in many other religions.

We spent quite a while walking around the ruins, which were in such good preservation that it seemed their owners were just out of touch, not 900 years away.

While we were there it started to snow, huge flakes drifting in the breeze around us that made us feel we were in a sacred world.

I often think of that day, when I wake up worried by something. Look how things can turn out, I tell myself.

Indeed, it seemed as if the magic would continue a long time. I looked forward to our stay in my big new house.

Henriette was lovely, and it would be a pleasure to have her around. I knew, with Byron Bay's delightful summer climate, she would spend most of her time around the house naked. She would model naked for me too, in the many beautiful natural locations I knew around Byron.

What could go wrong?