Category: Uncategorized

When it comes to travel, there are two kinds of sights:  1) planned & 2) unplanned.   Planned sights include landmarks you find in a guidebook as well as ones you hear about from friends, family and online forums.  You “plan” to visit these kind of locations because, more often than not, they’re pretty darn [...]

  As long as there’s been a Japan, there’s been sake.  At least that’s the message I receive as I wander through the three-story history museum at Otokoyama Sake Brewery near Arashiyama, Hokkaido.   If ever there was a cathedral to the production and consumption of Japanese rice wine, this is it.   Here you [...]

Wouldn’t it great to have a secret lair?   Good guys like Batman and Superman have one.  Bad guys like the Penguin or Gru (the evil villain in Despicable Me) also have one.  It seems like everyone has a lair these days, a secluded place where you can hide out, make plans and train your Minions. [...]

Japan is a land of contradictions.  On the one hand, its people are some of the most easily-embarrassed folks on the planet.  At least once a day, you’ll notice a Japanese person putting a hand over their mouth and exclaiming, “Hazukashii!”  (“I’m so embarrassed!”).  I find it rather charming, actually – especially if it’s a [...]

Have you ever arrived in a location and exclaimed, “This is like nothing I’ve ever seen before?”  It’s a magical feeling, isn’t it?   It happened to me at Pagan, Myanmar.  At the Taj Mahal in Agra, India.  At Durbar Square in Kathmandu, Nepal.  Time again, I was unmoored from the familiar, transported to a place [...]

Like many Americans, I grew up watching baseball.  My team, the Oakland Athletics, played in the clunky old Oakland Coliseum, known for its broken seats, peeling paint, power outages, and failing sound systems.  Described as a “bland, charmless concrete monstrosity,” the Coliseum had a massive foul territory that pushed the fans far from the field.  […]

When you’re planning a trip to Athens, you go to the Acropolis. When you’re planning a trip to Agra, you go to the Taj Mahal. When you’re planning a trip to Pisa, you go to the Leaning Tower.   There are some cities that are just known for their one, primary tourist attraction.  Not that [...]

Those of us “of a certain age” remember the good old days of travel when one could go to the airport, walk right up to the gate, and meet our friends and family as they arrived or departed. Wasn’t it fantastic? In those heady days pre-9/11/2021, we were still required to pass through x-ray machines, […]

Years ago, on a trip to Florence, Italy, a friend and I find ourselves at a restaurant known for its “blueberry steak.” If that sounds like a strange combination of flavors, it certainly is. I imagine a scenario in which the chef’s husband spills a jar of blueberries on a freshly-grilled t-bone sitting on their […]

I never really knew our neighbor, Mrs. Jarvis, when I was growing up. Although I was occasionally friendly with her son, Ricky, his mother was essentially a mystery to me. Until Halloween night, that is, when she would deck herself out as an evil, cackling witch, stir the bubbling contents of a giant cauldron, and […]