Travels WithJohn and Janice

Travel blog

Every trip we've shared since 2011—filter by where we went, when we traveled, or what we explored.

Showing 83 of 236 posts

Turquoise water and a pink-sand cove on the Bermuda coastBermuda
14 min read2026

Dateline March 22-26, 2026, Bermuda

Twenty years after our first visit, we returned to the Pompano Beach Club for its couples' golf tournament, three courses, three formats, and a week of new friends from all over. The story of how a Massachusetts man fell for the island and built the resort, a travel day at the mercy of the weather, the famous par 3 hanging over the Atlantic at Port Royal, the history of the Royal Naval Dockyard, John's seventy-ninth birthday in the rain, and golf so bad it could only be called fun.

#Bermuda#Pompano Beach Club#Port Royal
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Victory and promise, the National WWII Museum in New OrleansUnited States
9 min read2025

Dateline May 27, 2025, Visiting the National WWII Museum

On a Memorial Day trip to New Orleans, we brought John's father's wartime letters, photographs, and Silver Star to the National WWII Museum, the new home of Jack's Story. The curator Chase Tomlin walked us through the archives and a restored Sherman tank, the kind John's father commanded. We sat through the Tom Hanks film Beyond All Boundaries, and Derrick Strassburg took us behind the scenes to the research library, the restored PT-305, and Kilroy's Lounge. It was a day we will never forget.

#New Orleans#National WWII Museum#Jack's Story
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Panorama over Lisbon's rooftops from the Senhora do Monte viewpointPortugal
7 min read2024

Dateline November 28, 2024, Tour Lisbon By Tuk Tuk

Our last day in Lisbon, spent in a three-wheeled Tuk-Tuk with Salvador, a guide pulled straight from central casting. The Alfama's long history, the Cherry Liquor Queen and her homemade ginjinha, the old Jewish Quarter and its hard story, the highest viewpoint in the city with its love-locks, and a farewell at a tiny local restaurant before the ship home.

#Lisbon#Alfama#Tuk-Tuk
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John and Janice at a fresco in the courtyard of the Hanging ChurchEgypt
8 min read2022

Dateline December 4, 2022, Cairo, the Egyptian Museum and the Coptic Churches

Our last full day in Egypt, in Cairo with our guide and friend Sam. The Egyptian Museum, the Rosetta Stone that unlocked the hieroglyphs, the Narmer Palette, and the treasures of Tutankhamun. Then the old Christian quarter of Coptic Cairo: the founding of the Coptic Church by St. Mark, the cave where the Holy Family sheltered, and the Hanging Church. A blessing from Father Jacob, a goodbye to Sam, and a story we have saved for its own telling.

#Cairo#Egyptian Museum#Rosetta Stone
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The Suez Canal Bridge to the Sinai PeninsulaIsrael
5 min read2022

Dateline November 16, 2022, Haifa and the Suez Canal

A new corner of Israel at Haifa: the closed Bahá'í gardens, the Byzantine mosaics at Shavei Tzion, and Rosh Hanikra, where the world's steepest cable car drops to the sea grottos on the Lebanese border. John's leg, skinned in Wadi Rum, kept us aboard rather than bound for Jerusalem. Then south to Egypt and a long day's sail through the Suez Canal, under the great bridge to the Sinai.

#Haifa#Rosh Hanikra#Shavei Tzion
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John and Janice at the Library of Celsus in EphesusGreece
6 min read2022

Dateline November 11, 2022, Athens and Ephesus

The land half of the journey behind us, we flew from Cairo to Athens to begin the cruise we had planned for years, from Greece all the way to Dubai. Two days at Piraeus and its bitter orange trees, then aboard the Norwegian Jade to our first stop in Turkey: the House of the Virgin Mary, the vast Roman ruins of Ephesus with its Library of Celsus and great theater, and the lone surviving column of the Temple of Artemis.

#Athens#Piraeus#Ephesus
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The sixth-century Madaba Map, the oldest surviving map of the Holy LandJordan
7 min read2022

Dateline November 6, 2022, Mount Nebo and Madaba, Moses and the Mosaics

The last day in Jordan, and the one we'd had to wait for. Mount Nebo, where Moses looked out over the Promised Land he would never enter, with its ancient memorial church and Fantoni's serpent cross. Then Madaba, the city of mosaics, and its great treasure, the sixth-century Madaba Map, the oldest surviving map of the Holy Land. A mosaic table bound for home, and a warm goodbye to Hasan.

#Mount Nebo#Madaba#Madaba Map
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John and Janice at the Treasury in PetraJordan
5 min read2022

Dateline November 3, 2022, Petra, the Siq and the Treasury

The morning we had been waiting for. Petra, the lost city of the Nabateans, rediscovered for the West in 1812, with our guide Mariam, the first Bedouin woman to guide there. We walked down the long canyon of the Siq, past the dams and carvings, to the moment everyone comes for: the Treasury revealed at the end of the slot, the rose-red facade that Indiana Jones made famous.

#Petra#Nabateans#the Siq
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The Temple of Hercules at the Amman CitadelJordan
5 min read2022

Dateline November 2, 2022, Amman, the Citadel and Shobak Castle

A tribal feud closed the road to Mount Nebo, so Hasan turned us toward Amman and the south. We climbed the Citadel for the Temple of Hercules and the Roman theater below it, heard a Muslim Brotherhood protest rise up the hill, then drove down to the Crusader fortress of Shobak, hidden in the rock, before a Palestinian feast on the way to Petra.

#Amman#Amman Citadel#Temple of Hercules
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John and Janice in front of a temple at JerashJordan
6 min read2022

Dateline November 1, 2022, Jordan and the Roman Ruins of Jerash

The Middle East had been on our list for years, and Janice finally built the trip. Flying first and business class out of Los Angeles by way of London and Cairo into Amman, we met our guide Hasan and spent our first day at Jerash, one of the best-preserved Roman cities anywhere, often called the Pompeii of the East. Then a Jordanian feast in Amman and a night on the shore of the Dead Sea, with the lights of Israel across the water.

#Jordan#Jerash#Gerasa
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The Norwegian Epic seen from a hill in St. LuciaCaribbean
9 min read2022

Dateline January 30, 2022, Cruising the Caribbean from Puerto Rico

One of the first cruises after COVID nearly sank the whole industry, which made for a comedy of dos and don'ts: three negative tests just to board, a ship built for forty-two hundred carrying a thousand, and islands where you couldn't step off the boat without a chaperone. From Old San Juan and its great Spanish fort out to St. Thomas, St. Maarten, Antigua, Barbados, St. Lucia, and St. Kitts, with monkeys, a water slide, an America's Cup memory, and a lot of shuttered shops we hope reopen soon.

#Puerto Rico#Norwegian Epic#St. Thomas
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The Plymouth Rock pavilionUnited States
7 min read2021

Dateline August 25, 2021, Cape Cod

North from Pinehurst to Cape Cod, to see Janice's Uncle Bill and Aunt Margaret in Harwich. Along the way, Plymouth Rock and, at the Barnstable courthouse, the statues of James Otis and Mercy Otis Warren, two Founding-era figures who happen to be Janice's own ancestors. Then eye-watering lobster rolls, the Mooncussers Tavern, and a round of golf with ninety-three-year-old Uncle Bill.

#Cape Cod#Plymouth Rock#James Otis
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Janice with Wilson Hix on the porch of the Clover Hill TavernUnited States
5 min read2019

Dateline September 2, 2019, Appomattox

Following the by-ways toward Williamsburg, we came on the signs for Appomattox, where Lee surrendered to Grant and the Civil War effectively ended on April 9, 1865. We read the courthouse displays, learned the story of Ely Parker, the Seneca officer whose hand penned the surrender terms, and were taken in hand by costumed living-history players at the Clover Hill Tavern, where Emma Hix carried us back to the weeks just after the surrender. A terrific stop, and not one to be missed.

#Appomattox#Civil War#Ely Parker
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The original entrance to the Lewis and Clark CavernsUnited States
5 min read2019

Dateline August 10, 2019, The Lewis and Clark Caverns

Janice found us the Lewis and Clark Caverns near Whitehall, Montana, and what a history they hold: discovered by hunters in 1892, made a national monument by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, fought over for decades by a tour-running quarryman named Dan Morrison, and finally, after the CCC carved its way through, Montana's first state park. The tour itself, bats and broken columns and all, was not to be missed.

#Montana#History#Caves
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The Roseman covered bridge in Madison County, IowaUnited States
4 min read2019

Dateline August 3, 2019, Iowa, Looking Back at 2018

Coming back into Iowa stirred up a year of memories, so we finally told the 2018 stops the RV troubles had kept off the blog: the American Pickers store at LeClaire, the Hoover Library, the covered Bridges of Madison County, John Wayne's birthplace at Winterset, and the Amana Colonies, seven old German villages with a communal past and a refrigerator company in their future.

#Iowa#History#Road Trip
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The Slab Fork headquarters building at the Exhibition Coal MineUnited States
6 min read2019

Dateline July 10, 2019, Beckley and the Coal Mine

Having loved the Soudan mine last year, we went down into the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine in West Virginia, riding the mantrip five hundred feet in behind a guide who spent twenty years underground. He showed us the thirty-inch seams worked on hands and knees, the rats that meant the air was safe, and twenty cents a ton for a brutal day's labor. Above ground, a whole company town, homes, church, school, and the store that kept a man in debt, told the rest of the story.

#West Virginia#Beckley#Coal Mining
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Otsego Golf Club on the shore of Otsego LakeUnited States
7 min read2018

Dateline July 23, 2018, Janice's Cooperstown

Cooperstown holds a special place in Janice's heart; she summered here as a girl, water skiing and golfing on Otsego Lake with her father. We came back to play the old course and to look up John's boyhood friend Steve Mahlum, unseen in thirty years, who with his wife Ellen brought the town alive, the Clark fortune and the Singer sewing machine, the Dakota, and the tall tale that made Cooperstown the home of baseball though Doubleday never had a hand in the game.

#New York#Cooperstown#Baseball Hall of Fame
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The view from Herbert Hoover's birthplace to his gravesiteUnited States
9 min read2018

Dateline July 12, 2018, Herbert Hoover

We have always loved the presidential libraries, and Herbert Hoover's, at his birthplace in West Branch, Iowa, asks a fair question: how did a brilliant humanitarian who fed millions come to be remembered as a failure? We set out to tell his whole story, the Quaker orphan who made a mining fortune, organized the rescue of starving Belgium and Russia, and then had the Great Depression land on his desk within months of taking office. It is a fuller and more generous picture than the schoolbooks give.

#Herbert Hoover#West Branch#Iowa
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John and Janice with their guide deep in the Soudan mineUnited States
6 min read2018

Dateline July 8, 2018, Soudan Underground Mine

We drove up into the north woods of Minnesota to tour the Soudan Underground Mine, the old iron mine on the Vermilion Range that helped build and arm America. Our guide James took us down a loud, dark cage to the twenty-seventh level, 2,341 feet under and nearly 700 below the sea, then by ore train into the workings. It is the story of the high-grade iron, and the hard-working people, that fed the nation's steel.

#Minnesota#Soudan#Iron Range
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The first view down at Machu PicchuPeru
5 min read2018

Dateline February 12, 2018, Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu, top of so many bucket lists, was ours at last. We rode the glass-roofed Vistadome up the Urubamba, climbed the breathless steps at 8,000 feet, and got that first look down at the lost city that no photograph can match. With Edgar we walked it until evening, heard how Hiram Bingham was led to it in 1911, eyed the peaks we'd have climbed twenty years younger, and rode back to Cusco with costumed dancers working the train. One of the great days of our lives.

#Machu Picchu#Inca#Hiram Bingham
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The circular terraces of MorayPeru
4 min read2018

Dateline February 10, 2018, Into the Sacred Valley

The second day took us into the Sacred Valley itself, the green corridor the Urubamba River carves between the Andes, which the Inca saw mirrored in the Milky Way overhead. We climbed breathless to the temple above Ollantaytambo, marveled at Moray, the Inca crop laboratory of circular terraces, ate guinea pig cooked in the ground, and watched the weavers of Chinchero turn berries and leaves into color. Edgar saw us through it all, and Machu Picchu waited for morning.

#Sacred Valley#Ollantaytambo#Moray
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John with a baby llama at PisacPeru
5 min read2018

Dateline February 9, 2018, Cusco and the Inca World

Our Peru tour was a group affair, four busloads sorted out in Cusco, and ours became a happy little 'Mob' for days. With our guide Edgar we took in the Inca world: stonework so fine it needs no mortar, the Sun temple the Spanish buried under a convent, the Cathedral's Last Supper set over a plate of guinea pig, the great fortress of Sacsayhuaman, and the children of Pisac Market with their baby llamas, one of which John nearly brought home for the grandchildren.

#Cusco#Inca#Koricancha
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Steve, Marilyn, and John at the start of the tripPeru
5 min read2018

Dateline February 8, 2018, Lima, Peru

A bucket-list trip to South America began in Lima, with Janice's brother Steve and his wife Marilyn along for the whole adventure: a land tour of Peru's Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu, then a cruise around Cape Horn to the Falklands and Buenos Aires, and finally Iguazu Falls. Our first day downtown brought the changing of the guard, a wonderful free-tour guide named Alejandro, the square where Peru declared independence, a bar with a heart, the unloved Pizarro statue, and a Pisco Sour or two.

#Lima#Plaza Mayor#Pizarro
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Looking out over the water from the Bell grounds at BaddeckCanada
2 min read2017

Dateline August 22, 2017, Alexander Graham Bell

Our last stop in Nova Scotia was the Alexander Graham Bell site at Baddeck, where the great inventor summered. We knew him for the telephone; we did not know he was Scottish-born and a longtime Canadian, nor that he chased the Wright Brothers into the air with the Silver Dart, built a record-setting hydrofoil, and gave his deepest passion to teaching the deaf, work for which Helen Keller said he carried her from darkness to light. In the morning, the six-hour ferry to Newfoundland and the heart of our trip.

#Alexander Graham Bell#Baddeck#Cape Breton
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Janice firing a musket at the Fortress of LouisbourgCanada
6 min read2017

Dateline August 21, 2017, The Fortress of Louisbourg

Everyone said not to miss Louisbourg, and they were right. The great French fortress, once guarding the third-busiest port in the New World, has been brought back to life a quarter at a time, its streets full of costumed soldiers and storytellers. We pulled on wool uniforms, stood up as new recruits before a crowd, heard how a recruit chose each month between shoes and wine, and fired the muskets ourselves. Down the road stood the first lighthouse site in Canada. A day we won't forget.

#Louisbourg#Fortress of Louisbourg#Cape Breton
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Uncle Bill and Aunt Margaret on Cape CodUnited States
3 min read2017

Dateline August 7, 2017, Aunt Margaret and Uncle Bill

Off the road north, we spent a couple of days on Cape Cod with Janice's Aunt Margaret and Uncle Bill, who turns ninety in October and hasn't slowed a step. Janice's cousin's wife Karen Otis was there too, and we got to talking about the family's deep roots: the Otises of the Revolution, Mercy Otis Warren and her brother James, whose statues stand in Barnstable. There were wild turkeys to debate, three-mile walks in the rain, and dinners out. Visits like this are the heart of why we travel.

#Cape Cod#Aunt Margaret#Uncle Bill
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The Welcome to Plains, Georgia signUnited States
4 min read2017

Dateline July 18, 2017, Plains and the Jimmy Carter Library

From Georgia Veterans we made a day of Jimmy Carter's Plains, a whole town inside a single square mile: the depot that ran his campaign, a downtown mural of the landmarks, a memorabilia man with buttons dating back to Woodrow Wilson, and fried peanuts and peanut ice cream. Then on to his presidential library in Atlanta, the energy crisis and Janice's 21% mortgage, the Camp David Accords, and a humanitarian record after office that puts most presidencies to shame. We left, as we always do at these libraries, grateful to all who served.

#Jimmy Carter#Plains#Presidential Libraries
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The old train bridge lit at night in Little RockUnited States
3 min read2017

Dateline May 28, 2017, The Clinton Presidential Library

The last stop of our Spring Fling was Little Rock and the Clinton Presidential Library. We found a city RV spot right on the Arkansas River for $12.56, with an old train bridge, lit up beautifully at night, that walked us straight across to the library in the morning. Reclaimed from an environmental ruin, it is one of the handsomest presidential libraries we have seen, and a fine experience whatever your politics. Then we said goodbye to Little Rock and turned for home, with a summer up north already on the horizon.

#Clinton Library#Little Rock#Presidential Libraries
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The Petrified Forest National Park signUnited States
4 min read2017

Dateline May 23, 2017, The Arizona Parks

Leaving Sedona, we were two Floridians astonished to meet May snow at Flagstaff. The day's drive home was a string of wonders: Meteor Crater, where NASA trained the astronauts who would walk on the moon, and the Petrified Forest, whose stone logs look sawn but split themselves clean. We stood among the 650 petroglyphs of Newspaper Rock and the impossible colors of the Painted Desert, and found an old Studebaker parked where Route 66 once ran through the park. A night in Holbrook, and Santa Fe ahead.

#Meteor Crater#Petrified Forest#Painted Desert
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The Guadalupe Mountains in west TexasUnited States
4 min read2017

Dateline May 17, 2017, West Texas and Hueco Tanks

The long road west across Texas took us past a Fredericksburg grown too touristy to keep us, through a windy night in Fort Stockton, and on to the Guadalupe Mountains, an ancient sea reef pushed up into the four highest peaks in the state. We watched the oil and gas country roll by, miles of new pipeline and drilling rigs, and reached Hueco Tanks near El Paso, a state park that is really a preserved historic site. There among its great granite hollows are pictographs left over ten thousand years, geometric designs and more than two hundred painted masks in the rock. We camped quietly at the foot of it and turned, at last, toward Sedona.

#West Texas#Hueco Tanks#Guadalupe Mountains
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The Alamo in San AntonioUnited States
4 min read2017

Dateline May 16, 2017, The Alamo and San Antonio

An afternoon in San Antonio took us first to the Alamo, smaller in person than a boyhood of Davy Crockett movies had led John to expect, and to the stirring story of fewer than two hundred men who held it to the last against Santa Anna. We read Colonel Travis's famous letter, ending Victory or Death, and we have kept it here in full. Then we crossed to the River Walk for lunch at the rowdy Dick's Last Resort, and the next morning played the Quarry, a beautiful course laid into an old rock quarry. Then we pointed the Roadtrek west.

#The Alamo#San Antonio#Travis Letter
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John and Janice in TexasUnited States
4 min read2017

Dateline May 15, 2017, The Presidential Libraries of Texas

The next leg of our Spring Fling was a two-day tour of the Texas presidential libraries. At the George W. Bush library in Dallas we walked through his Portraits of Courage paintings of wounded veterans and the sobering Nation Under Attack room, where Janice still keeps her old World Trade Center badge. We took in George H.W. Bush's library at Texas A&M, where John remembered meeting the man himself years before, and Lyndon Johnson's at the University of Texas, with his taped phone calls and a robot reciting his speeches. Whatever your politics, each one is a piece of history.

#Presidential Libraries#George W. Bush#George H.W. Bush
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John and Janice at the Blue Mosque in IstanbulTurkey
10 min read2016

Dateline June 25, 2016, Istanbul and the End of Ten Weeks

The last leg of our ten weeks took us ashore in Taormina with Gordon and Karen, then off the ship at the port near Rome, where the four of us shared a car to the airport and said our goodbyes. From Rome we flew on to Istanbul, our final stop and the city that was once Constantinople, the Christian capital of the East. We raced the Grand Bazaar before it closed, were welcomed into the Blue Mosque, walked Topkapi and the spice market, and learned afterward that we had stood at the Ataturk Airport checkpoint barely a day before the bombing there. Ten weeks, seventeen countries, and home in time for our anniversary.

#Istanbul#Taormina#Sicily
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Outside the Church of the NativityIsrael
3 min read2016

Dateline June 20, 2016, Bethlehem

Our three days in Israel ended in Bethlehem, just across the line on the Palestinian side, where an Israeli guide handed us to a local Palestinian Muslim guide who walked us into the Church of the Nativity ahead of the lines. We knelt where Jesus is said to have been born, browsed the olive-wood carvings in his little shop, and then ran into trouble leaving: a fire on the road, a backed-up crossing, and a long walk on foot through tunnels and checkpoints to get back into Israel, with our guide telling us to keep it to ourselves. Standing where Christ was born, and the day before where he was crucified, left us with chills we still feel.

#Bethlehem#Church of the Nativity#West Bank
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The Temple Mount and the Dome of the RockIsrael
6 min read2016

Dateline June 19, 2016, Jerusalem, the Old City

Our last full day in Israel was a long walk through the Old City of Jerusalem, the kind of day you do not forget. We started at the Zion Gate and the room of the Last Supper, passed the Roman Cardo and the golden menorah, and took in the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. Then we followed the Via Dolorosa, station by station, to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and ended on the Mount of Olives looking across at the sealed Eastern Gate. Holy ground for three faiths, layered one century atop another.

#Jerusalem#Old City#Temple Mount
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The fortress of MasadaIsrael
4 min read2016

Dateline June 18, 2016, Masada and the Dead Sea

On our second day in Israel a new guide drove us two and a half hours south into the desert, to Herod's mountaintop fortress at Masada, where 960 Jewish zealots made their last stand against Rome. From there we floated in the Dead Sea, muddy and crowded and unforgettable, then drove up to Jerusalem to spend the night inside the Old City. That evening we stumbled into a Palestinian Christian restaurant for a wonderful lamb shank, and learned at the front desk that we had gone to the wrong place, our first lesson in how finely the divisions are drawn here.

#Masada#Dead Sea#Herod
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The Wedding Church at CanaIsrael
4 min read2016

Dateline June 17, 2016, Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee

Our three days in Israel began on a free Friday we had not planned for. We talked Gordon and Karen into joining us, hired a driver named Haim, and set off for Nazareth, where it all began. We saw the two great Churches of the Annunciation, heard an Arab Christian family in Cana describe living as neighbors with their Jewish countrymen, and dipped our hands in the Jordan where Jesus was baptized. The day ended with the four of us over Lebanese food on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.

#Nazareth#Cana#Sea of Galilee
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The Acropolis lit up at nightGreece
5 min read2016

Dateline June 12, 2016, Athens

Athens opened the last leg of our journey, the part we would spend at sea. We landed from Rome to a hotel right below the Acropolis, watched it glow at night with a glass of wine in hand, and spent a full day climbing through its ruins with a guide named Stavros. We wandered Plaka, made friends over Greek wine with a couple named Cathy and Dino, and then took a city bus to the port to board the Oceania Sirena for twelve days, unpacked at last.

#Athens#Acropolis#Temple of Olympian Zeus
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The Colosseum in RomeItaly
6 min read2016

Dateline June 11, 2016, Rome

Rome was the grand finish to our weeks of Italy by rail. We threw our coins in the freshly cleaned Trevi Fountain, stood before Michelangelo's Pieta and under the Sistine ceiling, walked the Forum and Palatine Hill, and looked down into the tunnels beneath the Colosseum floor. We caught a bishop's service by luck at the oldest church in Rome, paid our respects to Raphael in the Pantheon, and went back twice to a tiny family restaurant we loved. Then, in the morning, on to Athens.

#Rome#Trevi Fountain#Vatican
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The boat houses at HerculaneumItaly
4 min read2016

Dateline June 8, 2016, Pompeii and Herculaneum

We gave our one full day from Sorrento to Pompeii and Herculaneum, and a guide named Rosanna turned it into one of the best days of the whole trip. She made the dead cities live again: the shops and bakeries, the wagon ruts worn into the stone, the picture signs for people who could not read, and the plaster casts of those caught by the eruption. At Herculaneum we stood by the boat houses her own professor helped excavate.

#Pompeii#Herculaneum#Mount Vesuvius
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The three of us on Castle Hill, with HalHungary
5 min read2016

Dateline May 26, 2016, Budapest

Budapest gave us the warmest ending we could have asked for behind the Iron Curtain, because we had Hal. Our friend from an Alaska trip kept a flat in the city and arranged to be there for our visit, and he gave us two days of what he called his forced march: Heroes' Square, the Opera, St. Stephen's and its strange holy relic, a ruin pub, Langos at the great market, and Castle Hill by day and by lights. This post is for him.

#Budapest#Heroes' Square#St. Stephen's Basilica
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The entrance to Auschwitz IPoland
3 min read2016

Dateline May 25, 2016, Auschwitz

Of everything we saw in ten weeks across Europe, one morning stands apart. From Krakow we were driven out to Auschwitz, and what we found there was beyond anything a history book had prepared us for. This is a short, plain account of what we witnessed, and of the guide's parting words, that the world knew, and that we must stay watchful.

#Auschwitz#Birkenau#Holocaust
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The great market hall in Krakow's Old TownPoland
4 min read2016

Dateline May 24, 2016, Krakow

Krakow was the warm stop before the hard one. We talked Soviet times with a forthright Polish woman on the train, ate kielbasa for six dollars in the square, slipped into St. Mary's Church the moment a bomb scare cleared, and toasted the city with freezer vodka poured by a barkeep named Ania. The next day took us deep into the Wieliczka salt mine, hundreds of steps down to chapels, a chandelier and a Last Supper all carved from salt. That same day took us to Auschwitz, which we give a page of its own.

#Krakow#Old Town Krakow#St. Mary's Church
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The rebuilt Old Town square in WarsawPoland
3 min read2016

Dateline May 23, 2016, Warsaw

We reached Warsaw on an overnight train that turned out to be a private room with bunk beds, rolling worse than any ship. Our Airbnb host Ada met us at the station and led us up five flights to a lovely flat in the Old Town, a quarter the Germans leveled in 1944 and the Poles rebuilt brick by salvaged brick. We met the Warsaw Mermaid and the story of Solidarity, and stood at the edge of the old Jewish Ghetto, a place John had carried in his head since reading John Hersey's The Wall as a young man.

#Warsaw#Old Town#Warsaw Mermaid
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Inside St. Vitus Cathedral in PragueCzech Republic
3 min read2016

Dateline May 21, 2016, Prague

Prague was our first taste of how far a dollar goes in Eastern Europe, and our introduction to its beauty. We settled into our first Airbnb, found our way to the Old Town Square and its famous Orloj clock, crossed the Charles Bridge, and climbed a long flight of steps to Prague Castle and the magnificent interior of St. Vitus Cathedral. We also learned to mind the taxi meter, and ate two meals and an appetizer for about twenty-five dollars.

#Prague#Old Town Square#Orloj
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The Brandenburg Gate todayGermany
7 min read2016

Dateline May 19, 2016, Berlin

The overland half of our trip began behind what we grew up calling the Iron Curtain, and our first stop was Berlin, where we spent nearly all our time on the old East side. We rode the public buses and subways, bought a new lens to finish off our 'International' camera, and shared a table and a few fiery plum snaps with two German businessmen, one of whom asked us to make sure America takes care of them. We walked from the Brandenburg Gate to the stelae of the Holocaust memorial, to the parking lot over Hitler's bunker, to the matched cathedrals of Gendarmenmarkt. It was a day of seeing, up close, the things that were off limits when we were young.

#Berlin#East Berlin#Brandenburg Gate
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Coops Shot Tower at Melbourne Central, Victoria, AustraliaAustralia
11 min read2015

Dateline February 27, 2015, Melbourne, Just a Great City

After our wonderful afternoon with the kangaroos at Anglesea Golf Club, we arrived in Melbourne at Robinsons In The City, a boutique hotel in an 1850s heritage building that began life as Henry William Bennett's bakery. We were welcomed by the General Manager, Paul Humphreys. Three days of city wandering followed: the Royal Mail pub with John's first taste of kangaroo steak (like eating Bambi, but really like eating Joey after a week of golf with them), the Victoria State Library and its beautiful Domed Reading Room, the Coops Shot Tower under a glass canopy in the heart of the central shopping center, a Saturday cricket ticket attempt that failed because India versus Pakistan was sold out, a long Sunday walk through the botanical gardens, the Australian Henley Regatta on the Yarra, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra practicing in the open, the Shrine of Remembrance with its Ray of Light ceremony, and a round of golf at Albert Park Golf Course laid out around the Grand Prix track. We had Lebanese-Italian on Errol Street to close it out. Melbourne should be at the top of any Australia list.

#australia#victoria#melbourne
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The Great Ocean Drive coastline, Victoria, AustraliaAustralia
4 min read2015

Dateline February 26, 2015, The Great Ocean Drive

As we left Port Fairy we knew we were close to starting one of the most beautiful drives in the world. John and Janice had done the drive in 2009; this was Pete and Bunny's first time. The Great Ocean Road is more than a string of fabulous beaches, cute towns, and spectacular cliff and rock formations. It is also a war memorial. Survey work began in August 1918, and thousands of returned WWI soldiers descended on the area with picks, shovels, and horse-drawn carts. The first stage, linking Lorne and Eastern View, was completed in 1922, and the full route was officially opened on November 26, 1932. We drove toward Apollo Bay with frequent stops: Bell's Beach for the surfers, the Bay of Islands for the rock formations, London Bridge (which famously broke off the mainland in 1990 and stranded a few tourists who had to be helicoptered out), the Grotto for the ocean-level view, the Twelve Apostles (which is, historically speaking, a kind of marketing miracle), and the Otway Lighthouse in the Great Otway National Park, where we watched a mother koala let her baby out of her pouch and onto its own little perch in the tree. Apollo Bay for dinner at Casalingo. Onward in the morning.

#australia#victoria#great-ocean-road
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The Obelisk at Robe, South AustraliaAustralia
7 min read2015

Dateline February 18, 2015, Robe and Port Fairy, Australia

We drove almost six hours to get to our next destination, Robe, one of the oldest towns in South Australia. We checked into the Harbour View Motel, where Robbie at the front desk offered us an 'upgrade' for an extra hundred dollars (we politely declined). Drinks at the Caledonia Hotel, built in 1858, then dinner at Sails, the best restaurant in town and probably in the province. A morning walk along the cliffs by the lighthouse, breakfast at the Marina Cafe, a lobster pickup at the fish market that became one of our favorite lunches of the trip on a picnic table at Cape Bridgewater. Then north to Port Fairy and the Quamby Homestead, where William and Ailsa host out of a property whose gardens were designed in the 1880s by William Guilfoyle, who ran the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. A round of golf at Port Fairy Golf Club, oceanside and beautiful, where a friendly woman at the bar afterward showed us a photo of the tiger snake she had recently found in her house and warned us about the copperheads on the course. A walk around Griffiths Island, a first wallaby sighting, and a second night at Clonmara Cottages. Onward to the Great Ocean Drive.

#australia#south-australia#victoria
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A koala at the Parndana Wildlife Park on Kangaroo Island, South AustraliaAustralia
7 min read2015

Dateline February 15, 2015, Kangaroo Island, Meet the Koala

We left the Lambert Estate Retreat, headed over to Jim and Pam's to buy a few bottles for the drive to Sydney, and pointed the car at the Cape Jervis ferry through the Adelaide Hills route to Hahndorf, the oldest German town in Australia, settled in 1838 by fifty-four families escaping religious persecution. We strolled the shops and had lunch in town, then caught the 4:00 ferry across to Penneshaw on Kangaroo Island. We were based in Kingscote for two nights. Over a motel dinner that turned into wine and conversation, we met Terry Modern from Victor Harbor, who was on the island for the Kangaroo Island Cup Carnival. The next morning we drove to the Parndana Wildlife Park, fed the smaller, darker island kangaroos in the enclosure, and met Dana, the conservationist who walked us through the koala — marsupial, related to kangaroos not bears, threatened more by drought and chlamydia than by predators, sixteen thousand on the island and ten thousand sterilized to keep the population in balance with the foliage. Two of Dana's rescues had been raised in a burlap bag with formula. Then on to Flinders Chase, where koalas sat in the trees right above our car, and out to the Remarkable Rocks, Admirals Arch, and Weirs Cove on the wild south coast. A wonderful two days.

#australia#south-australia#kangaroo-island
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Jack's Point Golf Club, on Lake Wakatipu, beneath the Remarkables Range, South Island, New ZealandNew Zealand
3 min read2015

Dateline February 10, 2015, Jack's Point Golf Club

The first question the pro at Jack's Point gets is whether the course is named for Jack Nicklaus. It is not. It is named for Jack Tewa, known as Māori Jack, who saved two friends from drowning when their boat overturned on Lake Wakatipu in 1862, near what is now the Jack's Point village. He is also credited with the first discovery of gold in the Arrow River that same year, which set off the gold rush in the region. The course is one of the top-rated in the world. Snow fell the night before we played, so the Remarkables Range stood over us in white. On the second hole, an airplane landed on the grass strip just below the tee, then took off almost immediately with a load of skydivers, whose chutes opened against the mountains as we played on. The fourth tee is across a small road and through a stone wall, with views down Lake Wakatipu and out to the high ranges. It is a true links: you do not see the clubhouse again until you walk off the eighteenth green. We agreed that it was the most beautiful and challenging course we had ever played, and we told the pro so. We were rained out at The Hills the next day, and the local advice was that Jack's Point was the better course anyway, so we went back and played it a second time. That second round was the end of our golf in New Zealand. It was a spectacular ending.

#new-zealand#south-island#queenstown
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Sheep mowing the side of the highway on the South Island, New ZealandNew Zealand
5 min read2015

Dateline February 3, 2015, Christchurch

We left the Marlborough Valley early in the morning and drove south toward Christchurch. We made a roadside stop on the way and discovered we were at the Ōhau Point Seal Colony, a New Zealand fur seal breeding ground about twenty-five kilometers north of Kaikōura. Pupping season had just passed, and there were many babies playing on the rocks and in the tidal pools, and a few having lunch with their mothers. In Christchurch we checked into the Classic Villa B&B, an 1850s home where the lovely Alisa met us at the door. The city was four years out from the February 2011 earthquake that killed 185 people and demolished much of the center. The recovery was slow. The shops had moved into temporary buildings on the edge of the reconstruction zone. A San Francisco infrastructure expert who was staying at the B&B told the hostess that Christchurch had taken more damage than San Francisco's quake. We ate lamb burgers for dinner. Janice was wiped out from driving and called it early. At breakfast the next morning, Janice fell into a long conversation with two sheep farmers, and we got a whole education on the NZ sheep and beef business. Then on toward Terrace Downs, where we encountered a herd of sheep doing the highway maintenance work.

#new-zealand#south-island#ohau-point
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Lake Tekapo and the surrounding mountains from the LodgeNew Zealand
7 min read2015

Dateline February 5, 2015, Lake Tekapo, the Lodge, and the Church of the Good Shepherd

Our next stop was Lake Tekapo, where Stephanie and Alistair welcomed us into the Lodge at Lake Tekapo. The first day was cold (10°C) and raining, and the mountains across the lake were bare. Stephanie pointed us at Kohan, the Japanese restaurant down the hill on the lake, where we had fresh alpine salmon sushi raised in the local canals, possibly the best salmon we have ever eaten. In the morning the mountains had snow on them. Over breakfast, we asked Stephanie about her family. She is a fifth-generation New Zealander, and her story turned out to be one of the most remarkable we heard on the whole trip: gold rushes and shepherds in Stirling, Scotland in 1857, a Glasgow doctor who drowned en route to the Chinese mining settlement, a class photo from a 1966 girls' prep school that proved she and Alistair had sat next to each other thirty-six years before they thought they met. After breakfast, on to the Church of the Good Shepherd, the lakeside stone chapel dedicated in 1935 with the plate-glass altar window that opens onto the mountains and the lake. Then the drive to Queenstown, by way of Mt Cook, Lake Wanaka, and the Crown Range Road, on Stephanie's recommendation. Pictures say it all.

#new-zealand#south-island#lake-tekapo
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The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum on the Roosevelt estate at Hyde Park, New YorkUnited States
9 min read2013

Dateline August 13, 2013, The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum

After the JFK Library in Boston, we drove west across Massachusetts and into New York to Hyde Park, on the Hudson, for our sixth and final presidential library of the year: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The library sits on the old Roosevelt estate, dedicated by FDR himself in 1941, the original of the model every other presidential library has followed since. A $35 million renovation had just been completed, with the first major overhaul of the permanent exhibition in seventy years. Twelve thousand square feet of interactive video tables and digital flip-book screens walk you through the most consequential presidency of the twentieth century: Hyde Park, Harvard, the Navy under Wilson, polio at Campobello in 1921 (the cottage we had visited only the year before on our way through New Brunswick), the New York governorship, the inaugural at the bottom of the Depression with the line about fear itself, the fireside chats, the New Deal, the Arsenal of Democracy, Pearl Harbor and the Day of Infamy speech, the unprecedented third and fourth terms, Yalta, and Warm Springs.

#new-york#hyde-park#franklin-d-roosevelt
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The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on Columbia Point, Boston HarborUnited States
9 min read2013

Dateline August 12, 2013, The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

After a few days on Cape Cod with Janice's Aunt Margaret and Uncle Bill, we drove into Boston for the JFK Library on Columbia Point. The fourth of our presidential library visits this year. The welcome at the door was more reserved than the others had been, worth noting only because it was so different. The library walks you through Kennedy's life in proper sequence: PT-109 in the Solomon Islands, Harvard, the House, the Senate, the 1960 race against Nixon that included the first televised presidential debate in American history, the inauguration and 'Ask not,' the Bay of Pigs lesson three months in, the Berlin Wall and 'Ich bin ein Berliner,' the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, civil rights, the moon program, the Test Ban Treaty, Robert Kennedy at Justice, Jackie's White House restoration, and Dallas. In the morning we drive west to Hyde Park for the FDR Library.

#massachusetts#boston#john-f-kennedy
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Hearst Castle on the California coast, 165 rooms and 127 acres of gardens, terraces, and poolsUnited States
8 min read2013

Dateline July 23, 2013, Monterey, Carmel, and the California Coast

Out of Yosemite to the coast and the Monterey Peninsula. The Monterey Fair Grounds RV park, set up among the horse stalls (the 'Don't Wash Horses Here' sign at our water hookup was a nice touch). A walk through Monterey, with a memory or two from a Citrix Systems conference there years ago before we were married, the night they hosted a dinner inside the aquarium. Golf at the Bayonet Course, where the PGA Championship had played in 2012. Phil's Fish Market in Moss Landing, oysters on the half shell and a snapper sandwich big enough to defeat the two of us together. Carmel, the lodge at Pebble Beach, and the bagpiper walking out of the fog on the patio at Spanish Bay at sunset. Then the Pacific Coast Highway south through Big Sur, the elephant seals at their July haul-out, the Hearst Castle, the wines at Adelaida Cellars in Paso Robles, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and an overnight high above the Malibu beach. The Reagan Library was waiting for us in the morning.

#california#monterey-peninsula#monterey
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The Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, where Nixon was born and is buriedUnited States
8 min read2013

Dateline July 29, 2013, The Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library

Out to Yorba Linda for the Nixon Library, on the grounds where Nixon was born and where he and Pat were eventually buried. A personal note for John: this was the library of the first president he ever voted for, in 1968, when you still had to be 21 to cast a ballot. The library handles Watergate up front and well, then walks you through the rest of a long, consequential life: Whittier, Duke Law, the South Pacific in World War Two, the Hiss case, the Checkers speech, eight years as Eisenhower's VP, the loss to Kennedy, the loss for Governor of California, and the comeback that landed him in the White House in 1968. The opening to China. The Brezhnev treaties. The Paris Peace Accords. The Hanoi Hilton POW flag. The long, slow post-resignation work of rebuilding. And the 1994 funeral where every living president attended, with Bill Clinton's eulogy doing the difficult work of asking the country to consider an entire life rather than only its lowest point.

#california#yorba-linda#richard-nixon
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Air Force One (SAM 27000), the Boeing 707 that served seven presidents, suspended in the three-story atrium at the Reagan LibraryUnited States
7 min read2013

Dateline July 26, 2013, The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum

From Malibu over the coastal mountain roads to Simi Valley, sometimes at 15 MPH around the curves. The drive up to the Reagan Library has a portrait of each president lining the entrance, opening out at the top of the hill onto an extraordinary view across the valley. Inside, a chronological walk through Reagan's life: Eureka College, sports announcer making up the play from a ticker tape, Hollywood, Knute Rockne and the Gipper, World War Two training films, the Screen Actors Guild, the GE Theater years, the slow turn toward conservatism, the 1964 'Time for Choosing' speech, two terms as Governor of California, and on to the presidency. The 'are you better off than you were four years ago' debate, the Hinckley assassination attempt, PATCO, Beirut, Grenada, Reykjavik, the INF Treaty, 'trust but verify.' And the Air Force One pavilion, a Boeing 707 that served seven presidents from Nixon to George W. Bush, suspended in a three-story atrium overlooking the valley. The chocolate cake stories, the Jelly Bellys, the shining city farewell. A long, well-told life.

#california#simi-valley#ronald-reagan
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Bill Fairweather's grave on Boot Hill, Virginia City, Montana, with the sign noting his discovery of gold at Alder Gulch in 1863United States
8 min read2013

Dateline July 9, 2013, Montana, Big Sky Country

South out of Yellowstone into Teton National Forest, the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Parkway with the Tetons all the way down the right side, and into Jackson, where the farmers' market was in full swing on a Saturday morning. Then north to Virginia City, Montana, a real ghost town with deep family weight: John's mother's great uncle, Bill Fairweather, was the prospector who discovered gold at Alder Gulch in May 1863 and effectively founded the place. John had last stood at Bill's grave in 1958, at age eleven. Then over to Big Sky to spend a couple of days with old family friend John Bohlinger, Lt. Governor of Montana from 2005 to 2013, the Republican half of Brian Schweitzer's bipartisan ticket. Lunch at the Montana Club in Helena. Spruce River Campground outside Kalispell, an electrical problem on the Roadtrek that needed a part to be picked up in Seattle. On to Lake Coeur d'Alene.

#wyoming#tetons#jackson-hole
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The Eisenhower family home on the grounds of the Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KansasUnited States
6 min read2013

Dateline June 29, 2013, The Eisenhower Library and Museum

Saturday afternoon at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas, about three hours west of Kansas City. From the library wall: 'Dwight David Eisenhower was born the year the US census pronounced the frontier closed and died the year man walked on the moon. In between those milestones he planned and led the greatest amphibious military assault in history and waged eight years of peace and prosperity as President.' The Eisenhower story: West Point 1915, Fox Connor's mentorship in Panama, first in his class at the Command and General Staff School, the Philippines under MacArthur, Marshall's call to the War Department after Pearl Harbor, D-Day, VE-Day, NATO. Then eight years as President, two terms, two losses for Stevenson. Korea ended. The interstate highway system. The 1957 Civil Rights Bill. Three balanced budgets. Eight hundred rounds of golf, and a 'Truman and Eisenhower 2012' t-shirt in the gift shop that we both stopped to look at.

#kansas#abilene-kansas#dwight-eisenhower
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Sunset behind the arena at the Cody Stampede Rodeo, July 4, 2013United States
6 min read2013

Dateline July 3-4, 2013, Cody, Wyoming, as in Buffalo Bill Cody

Into Cody after the long drive across Wyoming. Fuel for the Roadtrek, fuel for the body (a local butcher with the best black rye we have ever had), and an early bed. The Stampede Parade on the 3rd is led by the only mounted Marine Color Guard in the entire US military, based in Barstow, California. A breakfast at Pete's Cafe that could have been a Norman Rockwell drawing. A drive out twenty miles to the McCullough Peaks Wild Horse Management Area to find a hundred wild mustangs on BLM land. And the Cody Stampede Rodeo on the 4th, running since 1919, with the sun going down behind the arena. Then on to Yellowstone.

#wyoming#cody#buffalo-bill
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Camped outside Centennial, Wyoming, at the edge of the Snowy RangeUnited States
7 min read2013

Dateline July 3, 2013, Traveling from Missouri to Cody, Wyoming

Out of Missouri toward Cody. The golf course we had on the schedule was hosting a Missouri Golf Association tournament, so we adjusted, did the Truman Library, then headed west past the Eisenhower Library in Abilene. John could not drive past Manhattan, Kansas without stopping at Kansas State University, his old college, to see the fraternity house and a couple of other old haunts. Then across Kansas to Lake Waconda in the wheat country, the largest community ball of twine in Cawker City, Ft. Collins for golf, Cheyenne for RV light repairs, and into the Medicine Bow National Forest. The Ames Monument at the highest point of the original transcontinental railroad. A campsite outside Centennial, Wyoming, found through the kindness of a bartender and a woman named Jenny. The Snowy Range at sunrise. A pronghorn antelope, the last surviving member of its family. Split Rock on the Oregon Trail. Saratoga's hot springs. And the dinosaur museum at Thermopolis, with one of twelve known Archaeopteryx specimens in the world. Then on to Cody.

#kansas#manhattan-kansas#kansas-state-university
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The 'Buck Stops Here' sign from Harry Truman's desk, on display at the Truman LibraryUnited States
5 min read2013

Dateline June 28, 2013, The Truman Library

Our stop at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri was one of those pleasant, unexpectedly educational mornings. Most of us studied World History and US History in school, but unless we became serious students of the subject, the details of any one president's tenure tend to fade. Truman's tenure does not deserve to fade. The atomic bomb decision. The Truman Doctrine and the start of the Cold War. The Marshall Plan. The recognition of Israel eleven minutes after the declaration. The Berlin Airlift. NATO. Korea. The firing of MacArthur. The Buck Stops Here. And the small silver piano sent by a Holocaust survivor with her thanks. A wonderful museum, and a wonderful country.

#missouri#independence-missouri#harry-s-truman
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The view of Bar Harbor and Frenchman Bay from the summit of Cadillac Mountain, the tallest peak on the Atlantic seaboardUnited States
6 min read2012

Dateline July 25, 2012, Acadia National Park

From Campobello across the FDR Bridge into Maine, and on to Mount Desert Island for Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor. The island is the second largest on the US east coast, with 26 mountains on it, including 1,530-foot Cadillac, the tallest along the Atlantic seaboard. Bar Harbor itself, a Gilded Age resort that once rivaled Newport, was largely lost to a fire in 1947 that smoldered underground through the winter, then was rebuilt. Plus a stop at the Desert Mountain Oceanarium for a hatchery tour with lobsterman David Mills, who explained how Maine's lobstermen voluntarily protect their own brood stock with size minimums, size maximums, and notched females, and why the catch has been growing year over year because of it. Then the history of Acadia itself, George Dorr's 43-year campaign, John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s carriage roads, and the long story of how 47,000 acres got preserved.

#maine#acadia-national-park#bar-harbor
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Atlantic salmon working their way up the fish ladders at the Salmonid Interpretation Center, Grand Falls-WindsorCanada
8 min read2012

Dateline July 17, 2012, Trinity and Gros Morne National Park

Out of St. John's heading west on the Trans-Canada Highway. Brigus first, the birthplace of Captain Bob Bartlett, the great Newfoundland Arctic mariner shipwrecked at least twelve times, with the 1860 Tunnel that John Hoskins cut through solid rock by hand. Then Trinity, a working heritage community where the Rising Tide Theatre's New Founde Lande Pageant walks you through the village telling Newfoundland history in song and story. Atlantic salmon climbing the ladders at Grand Falls-Windsor. Then Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland's UNESCO geology, where 500-million-year-old ocean floor was thrust up into mountains, and a boat trip down Western Brook Pond, a freshwater fjord with pitcher plants in the bogs and Pissing Mare Falls plunging from the plateau above. Then the ferry back to Nova Scotia.

#canada#newfoundland#brigus
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The view down to St. John's harbor from Signal HillCanada
5 min read2012

Dateline July 14, 2012, St. John's, Cape Spear, Signal Hill, and the Screech-In

Standing at Cape Spear, the easternmost point of mainland North America, with your back to the sea, the entire continent is behind you. Face the sea and the next stop is Ireland. The oldest surviving lighthouse in Newfoundland sits here, kept by the Cantwell family for over 150 years. Then up to Signal Hill and Cabot Tower, where Marconi received the first transatlantic wireless signal in 1901, the receiving end of the same circuit we had just seen the Cape Breton transmitting side of a few days before. The harbor below, the WWII gun batteries, the views of St. John's. Then George Street in the evening for a pub or two, and a partial entry into the Royal Order of Screechers, John kissing the cod, Janice and John both passing on the rum.

#canada#newfoundland#st-johns
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The finale of the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo, Halifax, July 2012Canada
8 min read2012

Dateline July 11, 2012, Halifax, the Tattoo, and Cape Breton

Into Halifax for the Maritime Museum, where the Titanic story still lives because Halifax was the port that received the bodies. A reunion with Roadtrek friends Ann and Ruth, who had just arrived in Nova Scotia. The Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo on Saturday afternoon, with the 1812 Overture and a surprise wedding inside the show. Then over to Cape Breton: the Ceilidh Trail, fish and chips at the Rankin family's Red Shoe Pub in Mabou, a shot at the Glenora single-malt distillery, the Cabot Trail, the Englishtown cable ferry, and a quiet round at Seaview Golf. And finally the Marconi National Historic Site at Glace Bay, where a retired ham operator named James Charlong gave us a tour that turned out to be one of the highlights of the whole trip, partly because John had reviewed Morse code messages for the Army Security Agency a long career ago, and standing at the foundations of Marconi's 1902 transatlantic station closed a quiet circle.

#canada#nova-scotia#halifax
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The lighthouse at Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, one of the most photographed spots on the Atlantic coastCanada
8 min read2012

Dateline July 5, 2012, Nova Scotia, Pictou to Peggy's Cove

Off the ferry at Pictou and across mainland Nova Scotia. Truro at the top of the Bay of Fundy, where we missed the tidal bore by a few hours. Grand Pré on the Annapolis Valley with the Bay's enormous tides going out at our campground. Two wineries in one afternoon, including a Scottish ex-pat ENT surgeon named Jon Muir Murray who had landed in Nova Scotia by way of South Africa and Bermuda. Parker's Cove, a working fishing village where the lobster boats stand on wooden braces at low tide and a fresh two-pound lobster cost $4.50 a pound. Our 13th anniversary, played at Annapolis Royal Golf Club, dinner of lobster and haddock from the village fish market with champagne from Domaine de Grand Pré. Then Shelburne, Lunenburg with the Bluenose II under restoration, and the lighthouse at Peggy's Cove.

#canada#nova-scotia#pictou
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Sunset over the Roadtrek at Crystal Beach Campground, Prince Edward IslandCanada
9 min read2012

Dateline July 1, 2012, Canada Day on Prince Edward Island

Three days on Prince Edward Island over the long Canada Day weekend. The Confederation Bridge from New Brunswick. The Bottle Houses of Édouard T. Arsenault, three buildings made from 25,000 reclaimed bottles. The Wind-Hydrogen Village at North Cape, where wind turbines split water into hydrogen for backup. A rainbow over the Roadtrek at Crystal Beach. Charlottetown and the actual room where Canadian Confederation began in 1864. Lobster sandwiches at St. Peters Bay and an elderly local named Chuck telling us what the place was like in the 1930s. The Prince Edward Distillery, run by a Florida B&B owner and a North Carolina granddaughter of pre-Prohibition distillers. A long evening of cross-border conversation with Chris and Mylissa Greening. Then the Canada Day ferry to Nova Scotia.

#canada#prince-edward-island#pei
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The Château Frontenac rising above Old Quebec CityCanada
7 min read2012

Dateline June 20-23, 2012, Montreal and Quebec City

From the wedding, north to Canada. A visit with Janice's cousin Bobbie Dawes in Clinton, New York, a free overnight at the Akwesasne Mohawk casino, and over the border to Camping Alouette outside Montreal. Lunch at Poutineville with David Williams (Parker's cousin, so a Wilson by way of Carol), and with Courtney and Amanda, who shared the news that grandchild number two was on the way. The afternoon at Saint Joseph's Oratory on Mount Royal. Then on to Quebec City for the only walled city in North America, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the Château Frontenac, the Citadel, and the story of how the British took Quebec in 1759. Plus a garage update from home.

#canada#quebec#montreal
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The 18th green of The Fighting Joe at The Shoals, overlooking Wilson Lake on the Tennessee RiverAlabama
6 min read2012

Dateline May 12, 2012, RTJ Trail Alabama, The Shoals

Out of Henderson Beach to Joe Wheeler State Park on the Tennessee River, where Pete and Bunny Warenski were already set up. Three rounds over four days. The Fighting Joe at The Shoals, all eight thousand yards of it. A rain day for Rogersville antiques and Brooks BBQ (Yelp again). The Schoolmaster the next day. And on Friday, Turtle Point Country Club in Killen, a private RTJ Sr design Janice had played years before in the SWATCA tournament. Plus a quick history of the Nassau bet, and the unlikely story of Joe Wheeler, the only Confederate general to come back and serve under Union colors.

#alabama#robert-trent-jones-trail#rtj-trail
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A green at Grand National on the Robert Trent Jones Trail, the iconic checkered pin flag against the waterAlabama
4 min read2012

Dateline May 8, 2012, The Robert Trent Jones Trail

Off for another adventure. Pete and Bunny, who we met during Walkabout in Alaska, came down to Flagler Beach in January for a few days of golf at home. By the end of the visit, we had a plan: meet in Muscle Shoals in May for a three-week golf fest on the Robert Trent Jones Trail. Twelve courses scheduled, and the Trail itself a quiet small-miracle of state economic development. A short post on the history of how 26 public golf courses, on eleven sites, with 468 holes, ever got built in Alabama in the first place.

#alabama#robert-trent-jones-trail#rtj-trail
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The 15th hole at Augusta National Golf ClubGeorgia
6 min read2012

Dateline April 2, 2012, The Masters Practice Round at Augusta National

Back on the road in the Roadtrek after six months in Flagler Beach. Janice's sister Connie and her husband Lee dropped at the Jacksonville airport, an overnight at Jekyll Island, and on to Augusta for Monday of Masters week. The 5:30 AM alarm, Gate 9, the merchandise tent, and then down to Amen Corner where Tiger and Mark O'Meara were standing on the 15th fairway. Tom Watson hitting into 9. The Eisenhower Cabin. Lunch by the Hogan Bridge in 90 degree heat. The 16th skip-shots. And Janice walking the same course she had worked three Masters tournaments on with IBM in the late 1990s, still without the chance to play it that some of her colleagues got.

#georgia#augusta-national#the-masters
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Mountains and a lake in Glacier National Park, MontanaMontana
5 min read2011

Dateline July 24, 2011, Glacier National Park, Custer's Last Stand, Crazy Horse, and Mount Rushmore

From Calgary down to the Montana border, into Glacier National Park with its mountains that somehow still impress after Alaska, then east through Missoula (where the people are absurdly good to strangers), across to Little Bighorn for a version of Custer's Last Stand we hadn't heard before, and on into the Black Hills for the Crazy Horse Memorial and Mount Rushmore. The first chapter of After Alaska.

#montana#south-dakota#glacier-national-park
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The USS Arizona Memorial above the sunken battleship in Pearl HarborHawaii
3 min read2011

Dateline April 1, 2011, Pearl Harbor, Oahu

A visit to Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona Memorial. Over six hundred feet of battleship resting on the floor of the harbor with the sailors of December 7, 1941. The wall of names, the small amounts of oil still escaping from the hull, and the USS Missouri turned inward to watch over them. Eleanor Roosevelt's wartime prayer at the circle of remembrance.

#hawaii#oahu#pearl-harbor
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