We turn our attention to destinations within the great United States of ours rather infrequently. In half a dozen years since our repatriation from England there have been only a couple of pleasure/sightseeing-centric trips that we undertook without crossing international borders. There are several excuses I can cite for prioritizing…
3 countries, all visited for the first time. 4 major towns, each explored in significant depth. Several day-trip excursions of varying durations. 6 UNESCO sites added to my collection. Travel between destinations using planes, trains, boats, buses, trams, metro, and an occasional taxi (not a single minute behind the wheel,…
It has been nearly two years since the last time we took a family trip where all five of us were present. One could say it was overdue. So we decided to spend an extended weekend in Quebec City, which was a brand-new destination for all of us. The trip…
I just came back from a trip to Amsterdam and the rest of the Netherlands. The goals were to enhance my Amsterdam photo-archive as well as to visit and photograph as many World Heritage sites in the country as possible. I am happy to report that I achieved nearly the…
My oldest friend and I undertook a trip to Scotland this past week with the expressed goal of trying as many different Scottish whiskies as was humanly possible. Ok, not exactly true – this was his expressed goal. Unlike him, I have been on a Scottish whisky trail before and…
In 2014, I visited 5 foreign countries – of which 3 were first-time visits for me – and added 11 World Heritage sites to my roster (admittedly, most of those featured on a single trip in a matter of two weeks). Certainly far above the average American intake of overseas…
Over 2,200 kilometres by car. Nearly 150,000 steps (if the pedometer is to be trusted). A couple of thousand shots that should yield at least a couple of hundred additions to my public photostream. Six regions of the country that had dedicated stops on our itinerary. A dozen cities that…
Seeing family who we do not get to see often enough, having kids spend quality play time with their cousins, and fitting in some sightseeing – that’s my recipe for a good time in Chicago. We took a portion of Easter week to visit my brother and his family. They…
A recent business trip took me to two countries farther east that I’ve ever been and to one country that I have not visited since I was a kid (not counting the well-familiar fourth country where I had only an hour and a half between flights this time around). Here…
All good things come to an end and our long-overdue family trip to Italy turned out to be no exception. It was fantastic. The trip gave us a chance to spend time at locales that we’ve never visited before as well as to return to some of our most favorite…
Gary Arndt travels the world. I never got into any details of how that came around, but he apparently made a lifestyle change about six years ago and since then had become a sort of celebrity in the travel photography field. I actually do not find either his prose on…
Once in a while, we decide to go for a beach vacation. It’s a pretty long while. Our last such vacation was a week-long stay on the Costa del Sol in 2008, but that included two day-trips and a couple of other excursions to strip the holiday of its “lazy”…
Driving around on our college tour, one of the games that we occupy ourselves with is searching for different license plates on surrounding vehicles. Up to this point, we managed to see license plates of 35 US states, plus Washington, DC, and 4 Canadian provinces. The most exotic – for…
I’ve been thinking for the longest time that the only reason I have to keep this website going is that my expat musings from the years of living in England can be of use to friends and strangers alike. Only yesterday a couple of friends relocating to England for work…
When we lived in England, we had a tradition of going to some interesting destination for my birthday. Be it Amsterdam, or Andalusia, or Rome – I’d rather be someplace fun for my birthday. (Ok, part of the reason for that “tradition” was that school holidays coincided with my birthday…
I hope that every one of you had smashing time greeting the New Year! We did our usual thing with a group of our good friends, gathering around the table, eating, drinking, laughing around, eventually moving on to karaoke and movie-watching. We did this in practically the same company for…
This year, with the new baby, I managed to leave almost all of my allotted vacation time till the very end. Spending three weeks at home in quick succession would be a challenge both to my wandering spirit and to my saintly wife’s patience. Although she cannot yet join me…
We have been back in the States from England for exactly a year, and Natasha made a fairly sad observation the other day: For the first time in over a decade, she spent an entire length of a year without venturing abroad. Not even to Dominican Republic or Canada… Not…
Where do you think I’d go for my first real vacation since repatriating? Duh! Europe, of course! We did not manage to visit Prague while we lived in Europe, even though it kept my designation of “The Most Beautiful City” bestowed upon it after our first visit there. We always…
Spent a few days in Chicago on business. The schedule was fairly packed, but I managed to squeeze in an evening with the little brother and his family. Did not manage to find much time for idle city-seeing, although I did try to take different routes between the hotel and…