Since long before I ultimately fell upon the delights of Limburger and onion at a famed destination in the warren of alleys that is lower Manhattan, scientists have been employing mice and mazes to study cognitive traits, such as learning, memory and spatial navigation.    Acknowledging the precarious current state of scientific funding, I might consider […]

 …Or more like we bought the feeling of owning a place in the Hamptons. As long as that feeling is of a sense of a second home in a small seaside town where the zoning regs have evidently withstood the modern pressures to measure square footage in gold ingots.   My anxiety about arriving in Rota for […]

  I left out this tiny segment of our current trip to Spain, because it deserves a blog of its own.   When our train had finally limped an hour late into Jerez de Frontera, where we’d planned to nurse our jet lag for a couple of days before taking a cab into Rota, it […]

DL 0721 ATL DL 0782 ATL DL 0108 MAD DL 0270 BAR DL 0194 BAR   Flying standby is a great, enormously inexpensive way to fly, until it isn’t. One moment it’s a no-brainer and the next, a brain teaser. It’s in that twilight between “easy peasy” and “what if we never get out of […]

  Our planned six-weeks stay in Rota meant there was enough time for a road trip – or a vacation from our vacation might be a lighthearted way of putting it.   We did this on our last visit because there was a hole in our reservation that we had to fill. This time, it […]

  When it comes to food, I’m no Anthony Bourdain or even a Stanley Tucci. I’m more like a four-year-old who won’t eat food that touches and absolutely nothing either green or slimy. In short, I’m most definitely not a candidate to embrace Rota’s 9th annual Ruta Caracol.   This exotic celebration runs throughout the month of May […]

  On her own Carol entered the hair salon and emerged with an appointment for the following Thursday, 8 May at 11:15. She was particularly proud to have committed her very personal standard of hairdressing (“just cover the roots!”) to a completely foreign country’s standards of beautician care. But she had done it, and with […]

  Growing up in New Orleans there was a street celebration unique to our city. You all know it as Mardi Gras. We knew it as Mardi Gras too, but it meant something different for us locals.   Here in Rota Feria ran for four days on a city fairgrounds that took days to assemble and […]

  We had strategically used the last morning of our car rental to stock up on groceries at the big Mercadona supermarket on the outskirts of town. The bad news was that the outage was projected to last six to ten hours. But this was Spanish time, which meant eight to twelve hours. (It lasted […]

  I always thought it was just a little affectation of mine that when I’d be “making my sauce,” I’d do it with flair. I would don my “Roma” apron (the only time Carol doesn’t have to demand I wear an apron when cooking with oil or tomatoes). Then I queue up “Italian dinner music” […]