Whenever I see images of some isolated cottage overlooking a barren, craggy Scottish coastal cliff, windswept, forlorn, forgotten, with a wisp of woodsmoke (this is important) escaping a low, crumbling brick chimney, I think okay, what else would one need to make this paradise?   First, there would have to be a small but […]

  I once had the opportunity to sit in Havana’s El Floridita bar, where Hemingway still holds the house record for downing 16 double daiquiris at one sitting. The drink’s recipe to this day is known as the Papa Doblé.    I’ve never sought to challenge Papa’s prowess for daiquiri consumption or for his command […]

   Nowhere is this phrase more apt or literally applied than to the prospect of stand-by air travel, international air travel in particular. The reality of sitting at a gate in Atlanta or New York uncertain until the last minute whether you’ll get on that flight to London, Paris or Madrid can reach that moment of […]

  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 […]