The second of the three main islands of the Maltese archipelago, Gozo enjoys the reputation of a retreat from the hustle and bustle of the main island. Our several hours traversing Gozo one day suggested that said reputation is not entirely undeserved. Non-trivial numbers of day-trippers set foot on Gozo…
The Great Siege of 1565 remains to this day one of the most significant events in Maltese history. Roughly a six-thousand-strong defensive force of the Knights Hospitaller and local militias repelled the invasion of the Ottoman army that numbered over 30,000 troops. The nearly four-month-long siege took place all around…
The Grand Harbour of Valletta has been, through the ages, the main maritime gateway of the island of Malta. Its fjord-like topography has borne different settlements springing up on its headlands. Today, they essentially meld into a continuous metropolitan area that is home to the majority of the country’s population.…
I started this blogging thing exactly 20 years ago, and somehow, inexplicably, it remains an ongoing endeavor. The porcelain anniversary calls for a short reflection. My devoted audience will have to forgive me this stated admission, but if I were writing primarily for public consumption, I would have given up…
Malta has three World Heritage sites as of today. Everyone reading these pages by now knows me well enough to correctly surmise that all three were non-negotiable parts of our itinerary in Malta. One of those sites is a serial property. Megalithic Temples of Malta are recognized for being unique…
When you come across promotional pictures of Malta, you most likely see one of these two perspectives: either a waterfront of Valletta or the colorful boats in Marsaxlokk harbor. The latter was one of our early targets – an open-air market that, on Sundays, stretches the entire length of the…
Summer holidays for us lately mean something Mediterranean. This year our destination was Malta, where we spent a week in the sweltering sun, swimming in the sea, exploring layers of history, and generally enjoying a country and a culture that we have not been exposed to in the past. The…
This article first appeared on August 5th and has been rewritten with promotional details. Little of what I do on this blog can be considered travel guidance, even accounting for the explicit Travel Guides item in the top menu (that section of the site contains mostly enumerations of likely points…
In between nuptial-related festivities and visits to Gilded Age mansions, we also explored the historic center of Newport a bit. The mansions along Bellevue Avenue may be the top attraction in town, but the precincts between the northern stretch of the same avenue and the wharves to the west are…
A few weeks ago, we found ourselves in Newport, Rhode Island, where our cherished friends held a wonderful wedding celebration for their child. We’ve been to Newport ages ago, on a targeted exploration of the Gilded Age mansions in the Preservation Society of Newport County portfolio. This time around, participating…
My to-date photographic portfolio of Cinque Terre on these pages is the extreme example of “outsourcing” photo hosting to external services. I included a single picture of each village in the summary WH post, and revisited that only a couple of times within the intermittent “Postcards from” series (one picture…
Princeton University campus must be one of the loveliest in the whole country, and we have had the good fortune of residing fairly close to it for nearly three decades now. We probably enjoyed the setting for leisurely weekend outings more times than at all of the nearby state parks…
One of my children has spent a few days in Florence this spring. Me, I haven’t been back there for over a dozen years now. My last visit took place right around the time that I rediscovered interest in photography. However, back then, my standard M.O. was to post minimal…
A couple of weeks ago, we spent the long weekend on a stretch of the Florida Suncoast, where our good friends had moved a couple of years ago. The trip was meant as a friendly reunion, to be spent mostly by the pool or on the beach. I explicitly considered…
Last Sunday was a gorgeous day. Just the right balance of sunny and breezy, warm but not hot. The rhythm of our lives – and the peculiarities of the weather swings in our neck of the woods – rarely offer such perfect opportunities to go out and explore, but the…
Back in early March, we spent a weekend in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where the youngest was participating in a regional volleyball tournament. We’ve been to the area years ago and even did some sightseeing back then, so I did not initially form any specific plans for exploration. But then the…
Þingvellir National Park (the first character in the name denotes the Icelandic unvoiced “th”, hence the frequently transliterated spelling of Thingvellir) is inscribed on the World Heritage list for cultural criteria: it is the place where the Icelandic Parliament was founded in 930 CE. The Althing (or Alþingi, if you…
The term “Golden Circle” is a marketing device. There are several natural wonders located close enough to Reykjavik that they can all be visited on a single day trip, and some bright hospitality executive came up a few decades ago with a moniker that shouted “must-do!”, and it has since…
Forty-eight hours in an unfamiliar destination is usually enough to check out the highlights, form a limited impression – basically, scratch the surface at best. My stay in Iceland was exactly that long, and it gave me roughly one cumulative day to explore the capital of Reykjavik. Which, for a…
If you look through the UK World in Pictures category on this blog, you will find quite a few “glimpses”, “impressions”, and even dedicated sets of Scottish sights and locales that caught my eye in between whisky tastings on various trips to the country. The itineraries may be structured around…