TUCSON – For reporters, things go according to plan, or it’s a story. I finally made it to Arizona from deepest Provence in time for leftover latkes at Christmas. But I now see why those eight tiny reindeer badly need travel insurance, a sense of humor and drugs.

Travelers’ tales are usually cheap shots. If we survive to tell them, we’ve escaped real tragedy. Listeners fidget, impatient to chime in with their own. This, despite all the first person, is not about me but rather what we have made of our world.

It started as one of those best-laid plans. I paid the usual Air France extortion money for Sky Priority, lowering the chance of standing in endless lines eyeing the clock as my gut deteriorates. Then, nothing to it: a one-stop hop from Paris to Tucson.

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LISBON – Techies snapping up real estate call this the new San Francisco. Moveable-feast jet setters see a new Istanbul. But this is still the old Lisbon, a fresh incarnation of the outward looking little capital that once ruled half the world.

It is as safe as cities get, clustered hills with gaily painted tiled houses and a Moorish casbah spilling down the cobblestones from a brooding stone castle, past the 12th-century Sé cathedral toward wide boulevards ablaze in colorful lights.

Down on the Tejo River estuary just off the Atlantic, people laugh and drink into the early morning, not bothering to hide joints if cops walk by. For some, things go better with coke. On Sunday, closely knit families gather for grandma’s cooking.

So Lisbon was the perfect place for an old pal’s 75th birthday bash in its elegant Old-World literary guild mansion.

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WILD OLIVES, France – Each year about now I return here among old friends to check on the state of the world. Emiliano, Julio, Ernesto, Shithead and the gang have been on watch for centuries. Their Mediterranean roots go back 10 millennia.

Some are now near despair, and a few are fighting for their lives. 

Olive trees can’t actually talk (and I’m not yet unhinged), but I learn more from them about what matters in the long term than from that fancy Samsung TV blaring away inside my old stone house.

They tell it straight without sponsors and ratings to worry about, or clueless editors guessing at a distance what their message should be. Having been around since before the Bible was a rough draft, their forte is historical continuum.

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