Central Portugal. Visting Viseu Serra da Estrela a mountainous region with great wines and ancient history and places to see.

  After a day touring the historic sites of Coimbra, Portugal, my head is swimming with the stunning works, buildings and monuments of this city of 120,000 in the central part of the country. As a travel writer, museums are pretty much a part of every trip I take, yet […]

Throughout my visit here in Le Gers, Midi-Pyrenees, there has been one consistent element that has bound together every person we met, every place we saw, and even what we ate. That has been the ancient, sacred drink of Armagnac, which we have sniffed, sipped and quaffed in elegant salons, […]

Denise Simeon-Lambert has a blue Jaguar parked outside her blue shop which is called Bleu de Lectoure. Her house is blue and she wears a lovely blue scarf on top of a shirt that’s stained with blue dye. Behind her sit vats of dye and every imaginable thing you can […]

Here’s a fantastic use for an unused train track, without having to rip up all of the rails.  The Velo-Rail was built a year ago and has been a hit with families in the town of Nogaro. The machine uses the power of two humans to turn the steel wheels […]

Today I took advantage of a time zone difference to rise and shine at 4:45 am. It was the perfect time to go running here in downtown Toulouse, and when I hit the streets at 5:15 am, there was no one to be seen. I heaaded out toward the Canal […]

I”ll be blogging for the next six days from the Midi-Pyrenees region of France, located in the central southern part of the country just above the Pyrenees, with the center being the big capital city of Toulouse. I learned that this is France’s largest region by geography, but that there […]

–DEERFIELD I joined my neighbors at Deerfield Town Hall last night to meet the three candidates for town administrator.  After meeting each one in person, and then listening to their extensive answers, I’ve created a Zagat-style summary of each man, and some of their mannerisms and quotes.  Then I’ll tell […]

Want to put a relatively small city on the map forever? Build a $351 million state-of-the-art interactive museum about human rights, and make the building so spectacular that it looks like nothing ever built before. That’s what’s happening in Winnipeg and the big party happens this September. I got a […]

On Saturday morning I awoke to grey skies with promise for a nice-looking day, and joined a dozen others up at the Gill Town Hall. There, Peter Talmage, a science professor at GCC was giving a talk about the current state of electric bicycles. Peter explained that he was looking […]