“Pointillist picnic”    Of all the sightseeing I would just as soon avoid, cathedrals are at the bottom of the list. With castles and chateaux, you’re forced to walk through drawing rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, studies with endless displays of tapestries, depicting deer hunts and oil portraits of useless dandies and wretchedly spoiled children. To me they’re […]

Meatballs and nightcaps    Saturday morning it was my turn to wake up with a start. “It’s eleven o’clock! I gotta get up!” I jumped out of bed, and started putting on clothes.”    “Where are you going in such a rush ?” Carol asked, still sleepy eyed. (Yes, we were still lounging till nearly the crack […]

“Chenonceau, a toughening labor of love”    Carol hoped the history of the chateau as a one time home of French kings and even Catherine de Medici would lure my interest in the tour. I gave it my best, but twenty minutes in I was hoping the joint would suffer a structural calamity that would […]

“The way the locals do it”    Of course, the secret ruse behind the concept of “living like the locals” is that you wake up in the morning with nothing more staring you in the face to do than what does when you wake up as a local in your own hometown. Since for me […]

“Before Sunrise: The reality show”    The theme behind this trip was that we’d find a small city or town in France, and then go there to live like the locals for two weeks or so. That meant an apartment instead of a hotel, and shopping for meals to cook at home, joining café society […]

   Our itinerary had us flying first to Atlanta before boarding a 10:00 pm overnight to Paris. Then a bus into the city from the airport, a taxi to the train station for the little more than one hour high speed train to the city of Tours, our home for the next two weeks. We […]

    I was five years old when the Supreme Court ruled racial segregation  illegal. I was 15 when the Civil Rights Act guaranteed the rights of citizenship regardless of race, color or creed, and 16 when the Voting Rights Act could not restrict the right to vote regardless as well. I was 24 when the […]

   For someone growing increasingly reclusive as he ages, you wouldn’t think the words “street festival” would have any appeal whatsoever. Crowds of people jammed together, wandering aimlessly about and looking only to create long lines to stand in. No thank you.    But the promise of pasta, marinara and sweet Italian sausage was like […]

   Thomas Jefferson crumpled yet another piece of parchment, and tossed it among the others as Sally Hemings stepped into the library. “Words not flowing again, Tommy?”    Jefferson winced at the familiarity coming from a slave, whom he loved deeply and without a shred of irony.    “I dreamt I saw Liberty as a […]

   Even as I was still completing the personal information for the online order, I had an increasingly uneasy feeling I was falling for a scam. In the end I decided the most I’d be out was $40, and it could still turn out that it was totally legit. After all, the ad claimed Tiger Woods […]