“One, Two, Three, Four, Five…BURN!” shouted the radio DJ, and all of sudden the skyline was illuminated with the fiery glow of a dozen hot air balloons aglow in the Texas sky. The crowd up on the hill crackled with camera flashes, cheers went up, and as each balloon randomly […]
I’m up at the crack of madness this morning, since the goal is to catch the sunrise from aloft in a hot air balloon. Yesterday I flew here to Plano, Texas, and saw that the ground was mostly brown from the window of the packed plane. After just a few […]
After a relaxing night of sleep in my own comfy bed, Croatia keeps bobbing back up in my mind. What it like there? One thing that again and again you think of is how old and how new the country is. There was no country of Croatia until 1991, when […]
At the end of the conference on tourism and the media, British travel writer and BBC TV host John Bell gave the closing speech. He ended it with good advice, paraphrasing JFK, when he said, ‘tourism boards, ask not what the media can do for you, ask what you can […]
Last night was the official opening dinner of the World Tourism Organization conference in Zagreb, and I found myself seated with a bevy of beauties representing the world. Next to me was Zivile Vaskyte, who is the one person who handles the media for the Republic of Lithuania’s state department […]
Today I met a group of journalists who are all here to attend the World Tourism Organization conference. As usual, there was pomp and circumstance, such as when Croatia’s Minister of Tourism glad handed his way through the crowd. The men in suits were all glad to see one another, […]
Our destination on this sunny Sunday morning was New Zagreb, a part of the city developed after the war. We pedaled by a statue of a former mayor of the socialist times, walking through a doorway, symbolizing leaving the old to the new area of the city, which as all […]
We landed at the Zagreb airport and just as I got outside, we walked through a grove of oak trees, a shady oasis right next to the small terminal. This city of about 800,000 is full of shady trees, and smells better than any metropolis I can remember visiting. It’s […]
We are going on a trip, dear readers, so come along with me and I’ll show you a country I’ve never set foot in. Tonight I’ll fly from Boston to Munich, then another short flight to Zagreb, Croatia. The reason I’m going is to attend a conference about tourism and […]
Up on my office wall, I have a copy of an old newspaper article from the Portland Evening Express that was written about me in 1982. Wow, that was so long ago, yet when I think back on the day that story came out, it doesn’t feel like it was […]
We drove up to Erving this morning, planning on a hike on the M&M trail, a long one that bisects the state en route to Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire. We found a place for eight cars to park, and took a quick look at the trail map before heading […]
The scene was what you might see in Greenwich Village: a cool cat playing experimental music and using a bunch of different machines to create ambience and alternative sounds while he pounded on the grand piano….all while playing a hit song by Led Zeppelin. Last night Marco Benevento played the […]