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 […]

Vacations give a better outlook on life and motivate one to achieve goals. Here are some factors to emphasize the importance of vacations:

A road trip is an excellent way to travel, explore and see the world around you. Here are a few tips you should stick to when planning a road trip

   For the second day in a row, we started Happy Hour early, at a cozy lakeside café nestled among the pines and close to our cabin. Carol wimped in with an order for iced tea, which did have the salutary effect of eliciting from our waiter the only live bear story we were to […]

   Almost nothing has worked out for our Lake Tahoe getaway the way we were expecting. The fires threatening the entire lake area have diminished, and evacuation orders have been rescinded. Air quality has been good since our arrival, the skies are cobalt blue and the lake itself is pristine emerald green and there’s no […]

   Between Los Angeles and Bakersfield on our way north to Napa last week, we passed no less than two wide swaths of fire-damaged hills. Later on that same drive, we passed a number of fire trucks addressing a fire that had recently licked its way to the edge of CA 4 near Martinez. Traveling […]