Blog

Don’t get me wrong: Otaru, Japan is not Fisherman’s Wharf, Time’s Square, or Niagara Falls. But it’s cut from the same cloth. It’s a town that I was prepared to adore. A port city on Hokkaido (Japan’s northernmost island), Otaru sits on a bay about 90 minutes northwest of Sapporo. One of the first towns […]

I don’t generally go in much for “historical re-creations.” I mean, sure, it’s great that historians preserve old buildings from around a country, then bring them together in one location. But then what? Given my druthers, I’d probably choose a movie set (like Hobbiton in New Zealand) to a historical recreation site. At least on […]

There aren’t many beers in the world named after the city where they were created. About the only other one I can think of is Shiner, a beer brewed in Shiner, Texas. Thus, when I heard that Sapporo Beer, the oldest in Japan, has been fermenting in its namesake town for 150 years, I needed […]

Over 30 years ago, I’m living in the rural town of Shimonoseki, Japan, finishing up my evening jog around the nearby rice paddies. As I round the last corner, my course parallels the bullet train tracks, high above and to my right. Suddenly I hear a whooshing sound and look up. Sparks sizzle off the […]

Dads love trivia, don’t they? Some know baseball inside and out. Others know their WWII battles. My dad knew everything about classical music. “Did you know, Dave, that when Beethoven first performed his Ninth Symphony, it was so revolutionary it started a riot in the theater!” “Really, Dad?” “Yes, really. No one was expecting a […]

Wow Place #316: Prambanam Temple, Indonesia Growing up, I was almost-magnetically drawn to adventure films like Indiana Jones. I ate up pretty much anything that involved swashbuckling archaeologists battling cannibals, boa constrictors (and yes, Nazis), all in search of hidden, supernatural artifacts. When, in my 20s, I started traveling around the world in earnest, I […]

Until I went apple picking in Hirosaki, Japan (Wow Place #18), I never thought much about fruit gathering as a popular recreation. I mean, the trees just sit three. Now, if there was a windstorm, with my fruity targets darting in and out of reach, that would be a challenge! Or if the tree tried […]

One of the pleasures of a trip to Europe is touring all the grand manors and estates, with their classic architecture and their manicured gardens. You just don’t find many of those places in the U.S. – and most certainly not in Northern California. Filoli is the exception. Also known as the Bourn-Roth Estate, Filoli […]

When you grow up with a disabled parent, you tend to develop a certain degree of patience. At age 17, my father, Walter, contracted polio. Although he was one of the lucky ones to survive the illness, he spent much of his adult his life battling PPS or “Post-polio syndrome” – a gradual breakdown of […]

“Dave, on our way to Portland, I’d like to scatter my mother’s ashes on the Shakespeare stage in Ashland” “You what, Michelle?” “You heard me. My mom adored Shakespeare. I’d like to scatter her ashes at a place she loved.” I first visited the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) back in my 20s. As an English […]