Writer, Explorer and Travel Philosopher
The base of the Schwerbelastungskörper
I’m moving flats soon, after four years, leaving this neighbourhood behind for another pre-war altbau in a different part of the city.
Imminent departure has prompted me to poke around some of those minor historic sites I’ve passed so often but never gotten around to exploring.
Kapka Kassabova is taking us back to the Balkans.
I’ve been looking forward to something new from this wonderful writer since Border, which was my top travel read of 2018.
That earlier book touched on the author’s childhood in Bulgaria, and To The Lake takes us deeper as she journeys to her grandmother’s place of origin in the mountainous Macedonian lake district.
V-1 and V-2 rockets at the Nazi’s Peenemünde Army Research Centre
The second-largest island on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast is a summer vacation paradise. But it once housed a massive secret weapons program that the Nazis hoped would allow them to snatch victory from the closing jaws of defeat.
Cut Stones and Crossroads by Ronald Wright
Ronald Wright traveled Peru in the 1970’s and 80’s, fresh from university with a degree in archaeology, feeding an obsession with the Inca Empire sparked by a random adventure novel he’d read in his teens.
Happy #CanadaDay2020 to all my friends and family back home.
One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned in two decades of travel — having lived in 3 other countries, and traveled and written about close to 80 more — is that we’ve got it very good back home.
The St. Lawrence downriver from my hometown, and the islands I knew…
We talked about ‘spirit of place’ in my last blog — locations and landscapes that hold an almost mystical resonance for each of us. We connect to such places on a deep level. They feel intimately familiar even when visiting for the first time.
The desert is my personal landscape — what’s yours?
The novelist and island writer Lawrence Durrell believed we are each aligned with certain places.
This is where we do our best work because we resonate with the Spirit of Place.
Put a bookmark here…!
It’s been brought to my attention that I might be somewhat strange.
Surely I’m not the only one who rotates their bookmarks?
It’s not as though I collect bookmarks.
I’m not a member of the International Friends of Bookmarks, either (yes, that’s a real thing).
“But Antoine, why worry about things you can’t control…?”
My last blog on conspiracy theories sparked an interesting discussion on Facebook.
My friend Nathan pointed out that I failed to draw a clear distinction between all too real large scale actions perpetrated by governments and the sort of “Lobby of the Unhinged” conspiracy theories I was talking about.
Spies everywhere…
A friend asked me this week, “What do you think of the ‘deep state’?
The short answer is, “I try not to.” Mostly because it has no meaningful impact on my life.
‘Deep state’ is the idea that some sort of shadow government made up of rich, powerful actors wields power, either within or behind the legitimately elected government.
