We knew we’d have fun and hear some great music in Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee. But the road trip in between, along Tennessee’s Natchez Trace, was a pleasant surprise: a scenic drive, some great food, and a couple important historic sites along the way. We first got a taste of the western Tennessee landscape when […]
On an unplanned swing south into Mississippi from Memphis, we drove around as you might walk around a city, just wandering. We were looking for the roots of the blues, the ghosts of the music makers, and the views from this southern section of U.S. Highway 61. Meaning, we were driving in circles. Our base […]
A couple friends from Omaha told me recently that, for more than a decade, all they saw when visiting Minneapolis/St. Paul was the Mall of America and one stadium or another. Granted, a lot of attractions vie for attention in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. Visitors can be forgiven steering toward sports, concerts, and shopping, then finding […]
It’s not that the Marais neighborhood of Paris is new or anything. Its heyday was from the 16-18th Centuries. But for being so close to the main tourist routes of central Paris, it has a distinct feel and a separate story. And it’s new to me. We walked the Paris Marais district in late May […]
Fred Schlomka is idiosyncratic enough that I shouldn’t have been surprised when our interview by email, between the U.S. and Israel, morphed into a personal meeting in Minneapolis. And even less surprising, now that I think about it, was that we met at a bike shop, The Hub in Dinkytown to be precise, a favorite […]
In May this year we sailed the Rhine River from Basel, Switzerland, north to Amsterdam with Viking River Cruises. Amazingly, this is our fifth river cruise, fourth with Viking, and we’re surprised, even ourselves, at how much we enjoy these experiences. What we appreciate in a river cruise is the combination of onboard relaxation and […]
The Galapagos Islands’ main draw is the wildlife: the marine life, botanics, birds, and mammals that have populated the volcanic islands since they were formed some million and a half years ago. Like most visitors, our expectations revolved around spotting and photographing wildlife, and with Galakiwi Tours, we anticipated lots of land and water based […]
Earlier this summer, we pedaled our way around the northern part of Brittany, France, on a self-guided tour designed by Exodus Travels. The experience–a first for us–was thoroughly enjoyable, and we surprised ourselves a bit at how quickly we got into the swing of cycling across the countryside for hours on end. We wrote about […]
The challenge for Vietnam visitors like us–Americans old enough to have lived through the war or at least to recall the nightly news images–is to acknowledge those memories and then let them go. First-time visitors, especially, will want to get out of their own heads and embrace today’s Vietnam, its people and food and culture…but […]
Note: In May, we took a week-long bicycling trip around the northern part of Brittany, France. We’d never done anything like this before; our only biking experience had been rides across town and on urban trails. Over five days of cycling in Brittany, we covered 200 kilometers (125 miles) and climbed a cumulative 2,000 meters […]
