Category: Themes

Activities / Off-the-beaten-path / USA

If you haven’t seen fireworks in a place like this…

I have seen the World Pyrotechnic Championships in Toronto. (Yes, there is such a thing and it’s held in a different city every year.) Seeing fireworks over an alpine lake surrounded on all sides by soaring mountain peaks easily rivals that.

Bucket List / Nature / Off-the-beaten-path / USA

The Badlands aren’t so bad after all

On my way across the country, I rode 3,100 miles and passed through 14 states and four time zones. Ever since I saw photos of it in a magazine back in the 1980s, I have been dying to visit Badlands National Park in South Dakota. Before white settlement, the Lakota...

Nature / Off-the-cuff / USA

Guess who came to visit

….and then these guys came wandering into the front yard.

Art / Off-the-beaten-path / USA

Well, what else are you going to do with old chewing gum?!

Who started this insane tradition? In the alleyway that serves as the back entrance to Seattle’s famous Pike Place Market, is the equally famous “gum wall”. Actually several walls along about 50′ of the alley

Bucket List / Europe

Bordeaux… great wine and a lot of charm

Visiting a vineyard and doing a wine tasting in Bordeaux, France is one of those things that I imagine is on most people’s bucket lists. Fair warning: don’t go on a Sunday!

Europe / Nature

The frogs in France make strange noises

The farm I’ve been babysitting for the past month has a very small man-made pond in back. The pond is roughly the size and shape of a swimming pool yet is home to an incredible number of frogs. They sing pretty much 24 hours a day. Frogs in France sound...

Europe / Off-the-beaten-path

Visiting a castle in France

For some reason, the town of Châtellerault, France seems to have a magnetic pull. My first visit to there was under somewhat trying circumstances. I had just done my best to completely destroy a rental car.

Europe / Off-the-beaten-path / Wandering

Every French village is as pretty as the one before

Driving through the tiny villages of the bucolic French countryside, it seemed that every single one of them was as cute and adorable as the one that came before. There was so much cuteness that

Art / Europe

Even the trash cans are classy in France

Everyone thinks of France as a place of art and beauty. Yet few realize how true that can be. In many rural villages and hamlets, there are even decorative murals on

Europe / Off-the-beaten-path / Sedate

The “Big City” (compared to my tiny 16th century French village)

Just four and a half miles from my tiny little French village sits the closest town that actually has