Seven weeks of travel with two nights in my own bed.  Two trips to Europe broken up by a pair of seminars back to back in DC.  The cities I have seen!  Dublin, Berlin, Lodz (Poland), Warsaw, Budapest, Bratislava, Vienna (Austria), Prague, Rome, Florence, Chianti, Siena, Posillipo (Italy), Cuma (Italy), and, from the airport, Chicago, Barcelona and London.  Two fascinating conferences where I connected with my past (semiotics) and my future (Vergil).  In Lodz, Jason Matzke (PHIL, UMW) and I gave an account of Stanley Cavell’s theory of the sign derived from his autobiography, Little Did I Know (2010).  In Cuma, I talked about the unlikely disavowal of philosophy (deduction, analogy) for religious modes of thinking (epiphany, faith) in Vergil’s first Eclogue.  But amidst all this professional activity there was a constant hum of Europe in all its diversity, sophistication, multilingual panache.  And being able to share Eastern Europe with a dear colleague, Jason, and Italy with my wife and one of our children, Luke, made it so special.  Here is Luke looking out from Vergil’s favorite spot in the Bay of Naples area, Posillipo, where we rented a villa.  In the distance is the island of Capri where the emperor Tiberius hid from the world and ruled it in idyllic, sybaritic repose.