Father and son Reunion?....

No, not a reunion but a very special experience in which my son, who is about to go into a 3 year mandatory period of military service, and myself, detach from the "regular world" to do something we both really love: to trek hard and long in the midst of lovely mother nature at best---the snow-capped mountains, blossom-full valley and small, quaint and ever so simple village of the remote Svaneti region of Georgia.

Words don't do justice to the feeling that permeated me just about the entire time we were on the trek: how infrequent it is to get such an opportunity! 

Far away from the incessant world of text messaging, TV blabbing away, facebook addiction, here we were the two of us with each other 24 hours a day in a very foreign land with next to no linguistic connection.

And it was just superb…
I savored every moment- and some of the moments were a bit tough- because I know that soon enough Gil will be in another world, he will be surrounded by the harsh, callous and often de-humanizing framework that we call "the military", all signs show that he will be very much the combat soldier that I wasn't (wanted to be then but medical profile prevented---but  that was many years ago).
There ain't nothing like it, to walk and sing, schmooze, touch on deeper subjects, recall and tell past history, plan and fantasize about the future---disconnect and by doing so CONNECT- a "father and son reunion, kind of a mix that sprung from the two songs that Cat Stevens and Paul Simon once "sang to me" in a different era, in a different country, a boy growing up and trying to make sense of the confusing paths of adolescence- "Mother and Child Reunion" and "Father and Son".
Yes, it WAS a father and son reunion, only a motion away…