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After a flight made much more pleasant by a serendipitous upgrade to business class, which gave me a night’s sleep on a flat bed, I’ve spent the day here in Wales. I have given up trying to actually pronounce the names of the places I’ve seen. We are staying in […]

Los Angeles will celebrate on October 9 by shutting down ten miles or normally congested streets. Why?  To turn all of this inner city space into a car-free, safe, family-friendly place for exploring the city from a new perspective and at a leisurely pace.  No cars, just bikes, sneakers, stilts, […]

The first gravestones in New England were simple rectangles.  Then in the 1720s, death’s head began to be featured on the tops of the stones.  The figures would usually be graced with lines, as if they were ascending up into heaven. Forty years later, the motif du jour was winged […]

“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 […]