Whoa! Wait a second there!! Nearly two years of barely leaving the confines of our home – and then we had not one but two long-distance trips in quick succession!? One of them crossing international borders!?!? Yep, that is precisely what we did. Just a few weeks after returning from…
We got on a plane and flew to a remote locale. Funny how something that used to be par for the course for us in the BC era (“before covid” – a term not coined by me) is nowadays an extraordinary event. Two years sitting at home – a road…
Continuing the new series of travel memories by my better half. A small Medieval town called Rothenburg ob der Tauber was a stop on our first trip to Germany. Strolling along the cobblestone streets, you almost expect to see the characters from the old fairy tales come alive and join…
This post is penned by my better half and has the potential to start a new series on the blog. Every room in my house has at least one item that transports me to the exact moment and place where I got it. The stories behind things like an elegant…
Having descended from the Edge, I took a stroll along the length of New York’s High Line. The elevated park has been around for nearly a dozen years now, but I had very limited familiarity with it to-date. The walk thus progressed very neatly the theme of my second day…
On another day of my January staycation (first mentioned in the previous post), my targets in Manhattan included sights in Hudson Yards and Chelsea that I never explored before. Starting with one of the newest attractions in the City – the highest outdoor observation deck in the Western Hemisphere called…
At the end of last month, I took a week off work, for reasons none other than I would lose a perfectly useable vacation week if I haven’t done so. It was my first staycation in recorded memory, a type of holiday that has never held a lot of appeal…
Introduction This post was originally written in February 2020 and is occasionally updated. In our connected times, an aspiring student of languages can find tons of different tools online and elsewhere that each promise to get one to speak a foreign language in no time at all. I study languages…
Restaurant reservations aside, a sunset cruise on a tall boat was the only pre-arranged bit of entertainment on our road trip along the Maine Coast. Late September evenings are already quite cold at those latitudes when you are on open water, but bundling up and taking ample advantage of the…
Continuing from the prior entry, here is another limited selection of pictures from various Maine locales taken during the September trip. Main Street in Camden. View to the Camden Public Library from the green of Harbor Park. The opposite views over Camden Harbor. The tall ships seen in the above…
Our itinerary along the Maine coast was structured as a road trip with a lot of comparatively small stops. There is no particular narrative that lends itself to such an approach. This tranche of visuals represents brief impressions of a quartet of such stops in different parts of the state…
The biggest town on our recent itinerary along the Maine coast hosted us the longest. Not long enough for a proper exploration, but long enough to form a good impression. Old Port and downtown area are full of architectural features of the kind that we always find delightful. Every block…
“Acadia National Park” is probably the more common way to identify the location of Mount Desert Island. It is not without reason, as the national park is a non-contiguous entity with several areas covering large portions of the island (and a couple of other islands as well). Not all of…
Lighthouses are among Maine’s best-known points of interest, and on our recent trip we specifically marked out a few for a visit. With just a couple of exceptions, they all turned out to be true highlights of the trip. Our first stop was the Portland Head Lighthouse. One of the…
In our days of closed borders, enforced quarantines, and mask-up regulations, road trips to manageable-distance destinations become the primary refuge to somebody starved for travel. Over the last few days, we took one such trip to the great state of Maine, which we never managed to visit in the past.…
Earlier this week we did what we usually only do only on vacation: made time to watch the sunset. We went to a place on the central Jersey coast called the Fisherman’s Cove, found a likely spot at the edge of the marina, and lingered enough to see the sun…
If you follow me on Facebook, you know that I participated in a 10-day challenge of a daily impactful travel photo posted without explanation. It turns out that I somewhat disliked the requirement to avoid any narrative. I happen to love talking about my pictures – well represented by my…
This favorite photograph is actually a shot that went rather wrong when it was taken. It is a picture of the lake adjoining the Dubai Mall, with Souk Al Bahar prominently shown on the left. The lower levels of Burj Khalifa skyscraper occupy part of the background on the right.…
After the somber mood of the previous installment in this series, my randomized selection popped up a picture highlighted by the azure celestial hues. A bit ironic, since this photo was taken on the British Isles, which, you know, are not habitually associated with such brilliance in the skies. This…
I live to travel. In the last decade or so there has not been a single vacation day in my life that I did not spend traveling to an interesting destination. That stat probably makes me appear more well-traveled than I actually am, compared to an average person, but you…