I had an opportunity to spend a week in Amsterdam recently. I was in town for a conference on how to maximize my use of air miles and elite status to get travel benefits, and I decided to stay a few more days to check the place out. It was my first visit to this city, and I want to share a few highlights with you. We rented an apartment in the Western Islands, and it proved to be the perfect...
I’ve never been the sort of traveler to obsess over frequent flier points, or to spend hours trying to game the system. Where my time is concerned, quite frankly, I’d rather have more of it than save a few bucks or get the occasional free upgrade. But my friend Craig Ballantyne of Early to Rise recently turned me on to a couple of cool “mileage hacker” newsletters. And when an opportunity came up...
The Romans made their presence felt in every part of the Mediterranean basin. And so when I travel the region, I always make a point of looking for Roman ruins. I was headed outside the Mediterranean this time, but the Empire was there too, and the southern coast of Portugal — the Algarve — did not disappoint. I found a significant Roman site just a 15 minute drive from the apartment I was...
I believe every trip has a soundtrack. That special album which entrances you on long journeys by bus or rail, occupying your conscious mind and allowing insight to float up from the depths. Those songs soak up the landscape, the smells and the very feeling of the place you’re travelling through. And they colour the way you see it, just like different shades of glass colour a sunny day. Well...
I decided to do something different this year. Rather than knock on doors to get candy, or run around town throwing eggs and evading capture, I thought I’d spend the night in jail. But not just any jail would do. It had to have a reputation for dark deeds, and at least a few hauntings. What better place than the Inquisitor’s Palace in Birgu? In a string of innovative tours — which recently...
If I could turn back time.
If I could turn back time, I would change that first sentence so that it read, “If I could turn back time” rather than what it says now.
“It does say that,” you might observe. “It says that now.”
It didn’t a moment ago.
Photo ©Tomoko Goto 2014
I shared a video with you in my last blog, where I got together with an old childhood friend to search for a campsite we’d set up 27 years before. I hope it brought to mind some of your own childhood adventures and memories, and that you spent a couple days taking a mental journey through the hazy summers of your youth. But I’m not quite finished taking you down Memory Lane… We didn’t just search...
I found one of my old campsites this summer… nearly 27 years later. In a recent blog, I talked about exploring old haunts in my hometown region with my friend Rob Wilson. Rob was my partner in crime for many teenage exploits. And when we weren’t pulling pranks or getting in trouble at school, we took to the woods near his home on Buckwheat Road, or we borrowed a canoe from my father’s friend Lee...
My Portuguese travels continued from Lisbon to the Algarve’s sunny south. I chose to explore the eastern Algarve, near the Spanish border, rather than the heavily touristed stretch between Faro and Lagos to the west. I’m told that tourism didn’t develop heavily down there because the coast to the east of Faro is made up of sandy barrier islands. A lagoon sits between these long narrow islands and...
It’s Banned Books Week. I’m sure the majority of people aren’t aware of this. And even avid readers may have missed the news. But this is the special time each year when we pause to think about censorship, and to remember all the great literature that has been banned, suppressed or otherwise made purposefully unavailable in an effort to control what we read and think. I’m talking about monumental...