Halifax Nova Scotia: A City of Firsts With a Serious Working Waterfront
Nova Scotia is as nice a place as I thought it would be. It’s kind of like Maine, but there are some things here that are way more dramatic. On a double-decker bus tour this afternoon, we drove around this compact city of about 400,000 and saw the impressive seaport–and […]
Nova Scotia on a Plane Tonight, first a Drive to Montreal
We are madly packing for a trip to Nova Scotia this week. We will drive to Montreal and at 5 pm take the Porter Airlines flight over to Halifax. Many people have asked us why we’re not taking the ferry from Maine. The sad answer is that there is no […]
Green River Fest 2013: No lines, Plenty of Great Music, Balloons Tethered
The first day of Green River Festival 2013 was fun, just as much fun as I hoped it would be. What I sensed and confirmed among many people I asked was that this year the crowd was smaller….but it was just as enthusiastic as ever. When I went up to […]
Are You Going to the Green River Fest? The Answers are Mixed
Last night I played drums, like I do every Wednesday night, and I asked my music making chums if they were going to this year’s Green River Festival. It’s become such a tradition for me, and I see so many of my old friends there, I wondered how many of them were […]
Dishcrawl Pioneer Valley Invades Easthampton
A really exciting place these days is… Easthampton! People are talking about Popcorn Noir, and Coco and the Cellar Bar, and that great rail trail so easy to come from Northampton. I want to spend more time in Easthampton. In a few weeks is a great way for you to […]
Over the Deerfield River on I-91, A Peek at the New Highway between the Bridges
A few times a week I drive on Rte 91 and look down to where the new bridges are being built over the Deerfield river. The project, costing about $40 million, is set to be completed by 2016. Today I finally got to see what the bridge that is being […]
A Three Generation Vacation in the Endless Mountains
I’m back from a week’s vacation with 20 or so members of my extended family and what a time we had! I had worried a bit about the old sophomore jinx…could this trip be as fun as last year, when we first came to this gigantic house on a lake […]
Off to Magic-land, for a Week of Family and no Connections
I’ve been stalling because I’ve got a five-and-a-half hour drive ahead of me. I’ll be taking a course through New York State and then …well I am sworn to secrecy about my destination, so I will not provide those details. I am meeting the entire family down there, it’s a […]
After Solid Sound, I Advance to the Solid State
I am zipping along here, having made a major improvement to my four-year-old Macbook laptop. Have you ever seen how fast a solid state drive is, compared to the spinning hard drives we find in most computers and laptops? It’s incredible. It’s as fast as an iPad, and nothing needs […]
Notes on the Solid Sound Festival at Mass MOCA on Sunday
WILCO’s Solid Sound Festival at Mass MOCA in North Adams was a great day of music, arts and comedy. It was also so popular it felt like all of New York City had jumped on a bus and headed north. It was bumper to bumper people, lines snaking out far […]
Bank of America to Close South Deerfield Branch August 16. Bummer!
I moved to my small Massachusetts town in 2000, and brought with me an account at BayBank. I had my Baybank Card…some of you may remember that quaint jingle. The BayBank branch in South Deerfield was a busy place, every Friday afternoon migrant workers from Mexico would line up 12 […]
Solid Sound Festival this Weekend Brings Arts, Comedy and WILCO to MassMOCA
Solid Sound is back! Two years ago we enjoyed a whole day of arts and music in the expansive Mass MOCA complex. There was endless art, from artists making art during the fest, to a comedy show with John Hodgman and other Daily Show cast members, and it all capped […]
The Taste of Amherst Brings People Together Under the Tents
Last night everyone who was out and about was in a good mood because it wasn’t raining over the Taste of Amherst. Mary recalled how in its earliest days, Amherst’s food festival took place outside each restaurant’s store front….people stopped by for small tastes of each place, with tables set […]
Taiwans’s Giving Free Wifi to Anyone Who Visits
Taiwan became one of the first countries in the world to offer free wifi on a mass scale to its citizens, and now it is extending that to any foreign tourist, also for free, in a move that will gain it a lot of goodwill. As someone who is constantly […]
France Random Notes: It’s not free, it’s Free
Here are some of the things I have noticed in France: Random observations from my ten-day trip in Burgundy, Champagne and Nord-Pas-de-Calais in June 2013. I only saw one old man in a beret. Benoit, the 34-year-old guide from Pas-de-Calais, laughed when he said, ‘There, a Frenchman in a beret!” […]
Champagne Comes from an Ancient Abbey at Taittinger in Reims
No visit to Champagne would be complete without spending some time in a cave, and there are hundreds to choose from in Reims, the region’s largest city. After touring the spectacular Palace next to the Cathedral, where we saw the original life-size statues created in the 1500s of kings, popes […]
Louvre Lens Brings Attention, Prestige and Hope to a Depressed Part of France
The first thing we saw when we arrived in Lens, France were two huge mountains that look like pyramids with grass growing on them. They were coal heaps, giant piles of tailings left over from some of the many coal mines in this part of northern France that all closed […]