The blogger has not been lazy. Really, he hasn’t. Rather he has been otherwise occupied. Since you last heard from him, he has spent a week divided between seeing to the needs of an older relative with a broken leg and preparing talks for a speaking engagement, another week traveling and delivering said talks, and a third week on vacation. All right, so he was being lazy for a third of the time—but only a third.

The speaking engagement was at the annual clergy conference of the Diocese of Ohio, held in the beautiful Lodge at Geneva on the Lake. I gave four talks focusing on challenges facing the ordained in today’s church and world. The basic theme was that the classical “theological virtues” of trust, hope, and love provide a key to understanding both the problems and how we need to grow in grace as we respond to them. A number of people asked if there might be a way to put the text online, but I don’t think they would work well transferred directly to this blog. They’re too long, for one thing. Still, it may be possible to present some of the material in this venue, and I’ll have a look at that over the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

My thanks to the Diocese of Ohio and to all the people who were there for the occasion. I had a very stimulating and encouraging time. Jon and I both enjoyed the company of those present. And I came away confirmed in my sense that the Episcopal Church is blessed with a dedicated and able body of ordained people–deacons, presbyters, and bishops.

Then there was vacation. Since we had both come down with colds, we spent more than our usual amount of time on holiday sleeping. But we still had quite a good trip through western New York. We were “off-season,” which made lodging easy to find, on the one hand, but also meant the weather was a bit on the cold side many days. Pluses and minuses.

Some years ago, we took a car trip up the West Coast which we came to think of as the “Volcanos and Vines Tour,” since practically every place we went was associated with at least one of those elements. This car trip could be called the “Water and Wine Tour.” The water aspect came in the form of cataracts (Niagara Falls, Honeoye Falls, Watkins Glen), lakes (Erie, Cayuga, Seneca), and canal (the Erie Canal at Lockport). The wine aspect was the Finger Lakes region.

Niagara Falls, of course, is the sort of place that nothing can quite prepare you for. The presence of the

falls makes itself felt not only visually and aurally, but in mist and, I think, in a kind of rumble that one doesn’t so much hear as feel. The best views were from the Canadian side, though the US side has wonders to offer, too. We also went down behind the falls on the Canadian side, where we got a stronger sense of its sheer power.

Returning from Canada proved interesting. We were met by a surly immigration officer (what’s your immediate mental image? large, imposing male? No, average-sized female) who seemed to resent having to let us back into our native land and made sure she took long enough over it that we would feel her authority. I feel sorry for visitors of other nationalities—and a bit embarrassed for our country. Our passage through Canadian immigration, by contrast, had been judicious, but not unfriendly.

Honeoye Falls, by contrast, is a cheerful, rushing mountain creek splashing over rapids and a mill weir. Sheer homeyness rather than sheer force. We wouldn’t have known to visit it except that Jon’s niece Kerri and her family arranged to meet us there for lunch. The stream and the town are both worth visiting. The cascades in Watkins Glen have a comparable amount of water, but are more about determination—the highly visible battle of water against stone that has cut this narrow chasm over thousands of years and is still working away at the task.

We visited Lockport out of a long fascination with the Erie Canal, that early triumph of engineering and daring in the young republic, and a curiosity about canal locks first evoked by one we had seen in operation at Seattle on the Volcanos and Vines Tour. It was definitely a good call. The canal cruise was a great way to get a sense of the working of the locks—and the challenges in building the whole complicated thing.

Wines were more of an afterthought on this trip. Not being partial to the grapes widely grown in upstate New York, we didn’t expect to find much of interest to us, and that held true for the first few wineries we stopped at. Then we happened into the Ryan William Vineyards, where we found an excellent pinot noir, and Highland Cellars, which makes an excellent Bordeaux-style red they call “Highland Glen.” Fear not, it doesn’t taste a bit like the single-malt the name suggests.

A few notes on food: we had an excellent dinner at Wine on Third in Niagara Falls, NY. The Rabbit Room in Honeoye Falls has excellent fare, served in one of the old grist mill buildings along the creek. In Lockport, we particularly liked Lock 34 (a bar and bistro) and Scripts (an inventive sandwich shop). And we will long remember the friendly welcome we received when we stopped into Groff’s—directly across from the splendid ruins (alas) of the old railroad station—for a beer.