Travels With Naked Girls - CHAPTER 36 - 37

Chapter 36.

After the party with the four English people including Kimberley, Elizabeth went back to study in England, and during the summer she came to Barcelona and modeled for me with Gwen. They walked a long way along the promenade at the Puerto Olimpico, and danced in a couple of the clubs. It was a dramatic shoot that you can see at the end of Naked & Proud 1.

Many years ago, long before my travels with girls, I visited Venice alone and was enchanted by the city. I had the dream then of visiting Venice again and bringing a beautiful girl to share it with me.

That dream finally came true with Elizabeth in 2011. We roamed around the city and visited its great restaurants, and relaxed at cafes in the great central square as bands played the evenings away.

Rob was there with us, and he found a couple of interesting art exhibits as he roamed around the city. One of these was videos, very static shots such as an owl and a snowbound cityscape. Suddenly a puff of orange smoke would drift across the static shot. That was all that happened. I thought it was very artistic.

I invited Elizabeth over to the U. S. for a visit in 2012. This was another of my travels with girls that did not involve modeling. I did this once before, with Shannon and Bella in Mexico in 2005.

We visited Starwood together, just as I had done five years earlier with Lily. The gathering had split into two, unfortunately, and we were at the half with no place to swim. There was almost no nakedness, except for Elizabeth, who never wears clothes if she can help it. Rob came along too, but he left the next day. That was a big disappointment.

The problem was Rob's wife. Somehow wives never seem to get along with beautiful girls like Elizabeth. Rob visited me on his own in Byron Bay the next year, and once again his wife intervened. She called him on the phone. The visit only lasted one day.

It made me realize that if you are going to take advantage of the wonderful possibilities of travels with girls, you are going to have to ditch any wives you have first. Wives just don't seem to fit into the picture.

Here's something I read in a book once:

"His wife was watching the sight that upsets a wife more than anything else: she was watching her husband having fun."

I never forgot it. In fact I never saw Rob again.

Elizabeth loved back roads, so we drove leisurely from Starwood to Connecticut, winding through the back country. We stopped at Fallingwater (pretentious) and Bushkill Falls (wonderful). We hiked all around the trails near my cottage.

It was relaxing not to have to worry about making video. I realized that travels with girls does not have to have a pretext or a financial motive. All you have to do is be really fond of each other, and enjoy each other's company. Just be friends. With nearly fifty years between our ages, the whirlwind of romance was kept safely out at sea.

Elizabeth came out to Australia in early 2013 and visited me for a couple of weeks. We went on bike rides, enjoyed meals in town, and walked and swam at the beach a lot. Elizabeth is a dedicated naked swimmer.

We took a lot of photos, and Elizabeth made me a calendar at the end of the year with one of our photos for each month, and an assignment for the month. Just something fun to do, like "Do something you've never done before, and write a report about it." The assignment for October 2014 read

Write a short autobiograpy. What were the high and low points, what made you who you are today?

That was the origen of this book.

I also got acquainted with couchsurfing.com about this time. Couchsurfing is a website for meeting travelers who might like to stay at your home. It works very well. Since Byron Bay is a popular spot for young travelers, I soon had lots of people writing to be my guests.

Most of them were young women, for some reason. You will understand that this was fine with me, unless I've been writing this book totally in vain. But why were all my applicants young women? Was it some sort of karma?

I didn't worry. This is how I met Vicki from Germany in 2013. We got along really well, and spent a week together in Byron Bay, visiting the beach, rainforest, lighthouse track, and restaurants. Vicki was 21 and beautiful.

It was with Vicki that we met some guys hang-gliding from their launch platform on the lighthouse track. I mentioned that I was the guy who brought Abby in 2003 to do naked hang-gliding for Decent Exposure. They remembered the event. They said they still talk about it sometimes. They asked when could I bring another flyer.

I visited Vicki in Bonn after I did a Rhine River cruise later in the year. That cruise was a significant experience for me. It brought home what a great deal it was to travel with naked girls.

The cruise cost nearly $4000. A friend of mine named Sandy and I sailed from Basel to Amsterdam in a long flat boat carrying 180 passengers. We had conducted tours each day to the Black Forest, Strassbourg, Cologne, a Medival castle, etc. We all sat down to great meals each evening.   The boat usually traveled at night, but we could watch the shore go by on some occasions.

We got introduced to all the boat's workers on one occasion, and there were more than 60 of them. That was because we all sat down to meals at once, so a lot of service and cooks were needed. They cleaned the rooms and remade all the beds each day too. That helped to explain why the 7 days of the trip cost around $4000.

During the 10 days previous to the cruise, I stayed in Barcelona with two models (Gwen and Dominika) in a two-bedroom apartment (with two bathrooms, a necessity when models are around) which I rented from a short-term rental agency.

The apartment had a kitchen, where the girls made meals for us all. We ate out sometimes too. The girls modeled in nightclubs, parks, and the streets. Dominika modeled in a series of cupitos bars, where the drinks were made with fire displays, great for video! It was a wonderful time.

The whole thing, including apartment rental, model fees, airplane tickets for the girls to come from the Czech Republic, and the services of my guide and good friend Jose Baca, cost around $3500. And that was for 10 days, not just 7.

Travels with girls are not just for the wealthy. They may even be cheaper than the kind of travels that travel agencies try to lure you into.

After the cruise, as I said, I visited Vicki in Bonn. She showed me around the city, home to Beethoven and one of Germany's premier universities. We had dinner on a floating Chinese restaurant on the Rhine, a magical experience as the sun set over the city on the other side of the river.

It was a great two days, and we both loved it. The cruise had been OK, but this was wonderful.

Vicki came to visit me in the U. S. the next year, 2014. It was even more magical.

She flew into New York, where I had found a room at a very reasonable price in the Row Hotel, right near Times Square, with two beds and a good view of Eighth Avenue.

We walked around New York that evening, up Eighth Avenue to Central Park, where we wandered around for an hour among the roller bladers and the squirrels. I showed her the statue of Audrey Munson in front of the Plaza Hotel.

Audrey made herself immortal by posing nude for many sculptors in the early 1900's when monumental statues were the vogue. She was only 15 when she started modeling nude, so she must have been very brave and very unconventional. There are statues of her nude all over New York and other cities.

She is also the first woman ever to appear naked on film, so naturally she is something of an icon to me.

There's a strange story about Audrey. A woman decided to write a book about her in 1990.   She interviewed her family, and felt they were reticent about something. Finally they admitted that Audrey was still alive. She had lived in a mental home since she was 40, but she lived to be 104.

Vicki and I set off to explore New York early the next morning. It was her first trip to the city, and she had dreamed of coming there for much of her young life. She was thrilled by everything.

We went up in the Rockefeller Tower and enjoyed the views for an hour or more, and then visited the Museum of Modern Art, which was started by Mrs. R. We walked down Fifth Avenue looking at the shops, and had lunch in a charming little cafe over in Ninth Avenue.

We rode tourist buses, and went to see a Broadway play, and found lots of good restaurants, and looked at the Statue of Liberty from the Battery, and toured Wall Street and the charming old buildings nearby.

Vicki came with me to my cottage, and we spent two happy weeks traveling around the area, going to places like Boston and the huge casino at Ledyard.   We visited the shops in the charming nearby town of Putnam, and did exercises in a gym there too. We walked the trails in the woods. Vicki loved everything. It was a magical time.

I spent time in Barcelona in 2014 too. Gwen walked naked around the Plaza Espana during a gay street festival, entertaining huge crowds and bemusing many crowd control officials in yellow shirts who did not trouble about her at all. We went to three nightclubs, and she walked around the beachfront celebrators on St John's Eve, which is the midsummer night's festival, and she even walked into the refrigerated section of Ice Bar Celona, naked and barefoot, three times!

You can see all these shoots in a set of two DVDs all about Gwen (with a few other models) called Gwen Forever 1 & 2.

I went to Mallorca, to visit a couchsurfing.com friend named Pedro. Pedro is doing a new website for Synetech, so people can download the videos instead of having to buy them through the mail on DVD.

Gwen and Dominika came to Pedro's place, and he found a sailboat to rent at a very reasonable price, and we went out for a naked day excursion to several beaches, which made a wonderful opening segment for Free & Wild 15: Sailing Free.

We shot at Can Galliana, a magnificent house Pedro's family owns, for Free & Wild 16: Running and Shining.

Elizabeth came to Mallorca. She and I rented a car and we drove to the northeast tip of the island, which is mountainous and scenic and rather scary to drive in a rented car. Another day we went to a different part of the mountains and walked for an hour on a ancient trail next to tiny rock-walled terraces that looked as if they might have been made in the time of the Romans.

We found a beautiful monastery. We ate ice cream and coffee at a outdoor cafe in the largest square of the monastery grounds. It was very peaceful and rather magical.

We went to a beach on our last day where Elizabeth indulged her passion for swimming and sunbaking, while I sat at a hillside cafe with another ice cream and another coffee, thinking how great it all was, how lucky we are.

We went to eat in great seaside restaurants, and made meals with Pedro, and walked all around Porto Cristo, Pedro's home town, and Elizabeth swam in the day and the night, and altogether it was magical, magical.

Chapter 37.

Travels with girls has given me a treasure trove of memories.

Roshelle shows up at the airport, and we go together to France, and have a wonderful evening in Chartes. I watch her as she sleeps in our big bed in the inn, while the great cathedral stands lighted on its hill outside our window.

We stop that morning and have a leisurely cup of coffee in a street cafe, and in a very real sense I am still there, for once you have a memory it is with you forever.

We go on to La Sabliere, and then I am with Uti in Greece, watching her beautiful dance on Red Beach with a blue scarf she brought just for the video.

All the days with Henriette, and Shannon, and Lily, and many others. They were magic.

Magic comes in many forms.  When you hear a certain piece of music and feel a burst of exaltation, as if everything were possible -- that’s magic.  When you lie gazing at a cloudy sky, and suddenly a bird races across your field of view -- that’s magic.

Love is magic, for a little while anyway.  You see a glint of her hair, or feel a pang of his affection for you, and suddenly all life seems full of purpose.  Sex can be magic too, though it isn’t always.

Every person has his or her own magic.  You can tell what kind of person you are by what things are magic for you.  It’s worthwhile asking yourself, right now, what is magic for you.

Sometimes magic is something you earn.  If you work hard, and save money, til finally you can buy your own home, the first afternoon you spend in it is magic.  This kind of magic comes to people who win a great sporting event, or finish a degree at university, or just manage to climb out of debt.

Other times, magic is a gift.   If you’re trying to do something new on your computer, and suddenly it works properly and simply, that’s magic.  If you win a prize in a lottery, or chance to meet a friend you haven’t seen for a
long time, or find a wilderness unspoiled by humans, that’s magic.

Pretty girls can bring this kind of magic.  They come into the room and light up the world for everyone.  They enjoy everything, and are thrilled by the pageant of the world going by, a pageant which is put on, it seems, largely for them.  If they choose you, and want to be with you, magic is all around.

Pretty girls can be both kinds of magic.  They will constantly surprise you with new twists and turns of their being.  When Shannon took off her coat and danced to the Dixieland jazz band on the Charles Bridge, that was
magic.   When Uti danced naked with the white cloth on the balcony of our Paros hotel, showing herself to the surprised strollers below -- that was magic.

The long years of video making, the doubts, the decisions, the missteps and blunders, the hard work, that all led to the first moment when Roshelle stepped off the plane and appeared before me -- that was magic too.

Magic has its own laws. You cannot force magic. Magic can be dangerous if you try.

Magic can come from stimulants. You can go for a ride on a hang-glider, or sky dive, or simply roll down a hill, as children do. Movies can be magic too. Some kinds of religion are magic, or used to be -- nowadays the only magic of most religious services is when it's finally over and you get to leave.

Humanity is lucky to have so many forms of stimulants. You can drink alcohol in its many tasty forms. You can take drugs. You can enjoy sex, or other forms of gambling. Or music. There's music for everybody that can take them right over the clouds.

Above all, magic has an element of mystery.  Things happen, and you can’t explain them.  The magician throws a handful of confetti in the air, and it comes down as flowers.  He puts a playing card in the ashtray, burns it, then finds it again in your inner vest pocket, where you haven’t looked for years.

Pretty girls can be this kind of magic too.  You never know what they’re going to say.  People have been saying for years that women are a mystery, and it’s true -- even to themselves.

Einstein said, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the source of all true science." 

I think it’s more than that.  The mysterious is just one source of the magic and meaning in life.

People are party animals. We constantly want magic. The common sense approach is to live your life placidly, and rejoice in magic when it comes. But common sense is very uncommon.

If you pursue magic too hard, you get addiction.  You keep going back to the same drug, the same person, the same place, again and again for the magic it first gave you, and the magic ebbs away. You are addicted and unhappy.

People try to defy this law, and defy themselves instead.  It seems depressing. 

Yet magic is eternally recurring.  Robert Frost lived in the bleak winter of life and wrote "Nature’s first green is gold / Her hardest hue to hold . . . Nothing gold can stay."  The magic of the first green-gold leaves of spring cannot last very long.  But Wallace Stevens answered "There is no green endures / As April’s green endures."  The green-gold of spring disappears, but it comes again and again.

There is nothing you can rely on so completely as magic.  Magic recurs again and again in our lives, as long as we don’t force it, as long as we wait for it and accept it.

I decided long ago that my magic was in travelling and in naked girls.  I think most people feel the lure of far countries.  Travel can be scary, and despite that, or perhaps because of that, travel gives us magic.

I remember my first visit to Paris, in 1966, long ago.  It was before most Americans had the chance to visit Europe, and I didn’t know anyone who’d ever been there.  It was August, and Paris was a kind of a ghost town in August in those days, because most Parisians went on their summer holidays.  I remember all the dull and desolate shops with "Fermeture Annuelle" in their
empty windows.

But when I walked down the empty streets, and turned a corner, there was Notre Dame, or the Place de la Concorde, or some other monument that I had seen in books, and there it was, real and right before me.  Flashes of magic all around.

I remember my travels in England long ago, bicycling along tiny empty country roads, for there wasn’t much traffic in England in those days.  I laboured up a long hill to a castle one afternoon, and the castle was shut, and then it began to rain.  And I headed down, down along a long road slanting down the hill, and I let the bicycle have its head, and we sizzled along on the wet road, me yellow in a portable mac, flashing along in a sudden burst of excitement and speed, all the long way down that long road to the valley.  That was magic too.

Magic is fleeting, but in a wonderful way it lasts forever.  It comes again and again, and lingers in the memory.  In a sense it never goes away.  It’s still there, hidden in our minds, a part of us forever.

There is a part of me that still feels the magic of the days Roshelle and I shared in France. I feel the pleasure of videoing Roshelle, and having meals with her, and telling jokes together, even though those days are long gone.

Part of me walks across the hills of Santorini with Uti to Oia, the artist community where we had lunch at a taverna perched high over the enormous bay.  We go to the Red Rocks Beach again, and Uti models with the blue cloth, and I do a pratfall on the sloping shingle at the water’s edge.  We have drinks together at the small bar in Paros, and she buys a tablecloth for her sister and is given the white cloth, and she allures me again with her wonderful body in the hotel.

I drive across the great American West with Henriette, and we climb the red rocks of the Valley of Fire, and see the small pool where Mouse the "renegade" Indian lived and defied the whites, only a long lifetime ago.  Jet and I sneak into the motel spa and slip in naked, wondering if we’ll be sprung, and escaping together.  She comes with me all the way to Australia, and for awhile graces my new home.

I remember Shannon, Bella, and Katrina, and our evenings at the happy hour of the bar in Ibiza, and our visits to the beaches and the clubs, and the slingshot frenzy of their ride in the Bungee Space Ball.  Shannon goes for a long walk with me in the rain at the Czech valley near our cottage, and we don’t get lost, but find our way across the vivid green countryside.   She dances forever in my memory in the exhilaration of the Bird Cage Club.

I go to Starwood with Lily, and she dances happily in the light of a huge bonfire. Shannon poses for an artist in the Plaza Pi, and dances naked all night in the Club Otto Zutz. Gwen poses in the same artists' market for dozens of artists. We make Barcelona tremble with the exuberence of naked girls.

Elizabeth smiles in the glow of a dozen places and memories. Vicki smiles to me, and we head off down the happy streets of New York.

These memories, and the magic of them, fill me with anticipation and delight.    They make all the struggle and frustration of video-making worthwhile.  They live in my memory and in the videos, my shining treasury of travels with naked girls.