As soon as we arrived in London, after a long day of travel from Italy, we headed straight for the pub. After finding no IPAs in France and only a couple of bottled ones in Italy, it was good to be in England and enjoy a really good beer, not to mention that everyone spoke […]
The whole reason for putting the Cinque Terre on my bucket list was that years ago I read Shirley Maclaine’s book about hiking the Camino and entertained the idea of making that month-long pilgrimage someday. The reality is, I don’t have the stamina to pull something like that off. The idea of taking shorter hikes […]
__ From my understanding, The Chalice (Calice) is a group of small communities near Santa Maria, Italy, set like a bowl within the surrounding mountains. This is one of the first sights we saw when we arrived via train from the Cinque Terra to visit our friends Rick and Donna, 16 Hands cofounders/studio potters who […]
After three days in Paris, we headed to Italy and immersed ourselves at the Cinque Terre village of Monterosso. First, in the Porto Roca infinity pool (that’s a vineyard behind me and the trail for the walk to the next village which Joe hiked). and then in the teal blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. […]
I got closer to going into the Louvre than I did in 1975 when I had no money to venture in and only saw the building from a distance. This time I had money but was too tired after our first Parisian dinner with Joe’s cousin and her family the night before, finding our way […]
It was a metro ride away from our Paris hotel and a highlight of our three days in Paris. And by highlight, I mean a light show like I’ve never seen. Gustav Klimt at the Atelier des Lumières was a digital immersion installation that I first learned about when someone posted a video of it on Facebook. […]
It’s never too late put flowers on the table / to let the song birds of your childhood / sing like Jericho through middle age / To let them be blue/ and enjoy them when they’re golden / to visit Claude Monet’s garden in spring… Ever since I wrote that poem with the above closing […]
1. I call the photo above the Leaning Tower of Eiffel. 2. We spent our first of three days in Paris taking in the sights from the top of a double-decker bus. 3. We’re staying in the Vavin quarter, near the Mont Parnasse neighborhood, booked for us by our own Floyd Rose of the Winds travel […]
I got disorientated after viewing all the surreal art with double images, optical illusions and symbolism at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. With names like Exploding Raphaelesque Head, The Hallucinogenic Toreador, Portrait of My Dead Brother and The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, I’m not surprised that by the time we ordered […]
After a Virginia windstorm that knocked our power out for 5 days, a two hour plane trip and an uber ride from a Cuban-American that Joe spoke Spanish to, he crashed on Madeira Beach, proving how much he needs a vacation. This is the doorway to our backyard. This is the front of our home-away-from-home […]
Rockport, Massachusetts is a place that’s forever etched in my psyche. Whenever I’m there, I feel like I’ve walked into a timeless painting. The first time I went to Rockport was in the early ’70s with my sister Sherry. It was a foundational experience and a brave endeavor for two girls to hit the road […]
At the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay, I worried that the bees would think I was wearing a flower and try to land on me. Sherry was hoping a monarch butterfly would land on her. In the hydrangea garden, we ran into some other flower girls that we knew, my niece, her girlfriend and one […]
