thoughts, tales and travels
As much as I like beer and chocolate, I like history even more. In Bruges, I hope to visit St. John’s the oldest existing hospital (12th century) in Europe. The whole medieval city center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The beer from their biggest brewery is piped underground to...
We’re in Colorado, enjoying some beautiful late-season snow squalls. There was an inch and a half on the ground when we woke up this morning. We headed out to meet Bill’s son John and grandson Charlie at the playground. We used the snow mounded on the slide to make snowballs...
Visiting Marianne in Boulder. The brilliant light, blue sky, and rosy clouds at sunset are an invigorating change from the gloom of an Oregon winter.
Most of the day to spend in LA? The Getty Center seemed the perfect choice, only 11 miles from the LA airport, where we would depart in the evening for Vietnam. We had a leisurely breakfast, then caught an Uber. It was a beautiful day, a little chilly, but the...
With our trip to Vietnam and Cambodia less than a month away, I am thinking about all that the country of Vietnam has meant to those of us who came of age during the Vietnam War. I have mixed feelings: guilty sympathy for the Vietnamese people combined with a second-hand,...
Safransky, retiring editor of The Sun, imagines the previous owners of a typewriter that had served him well. Writing in 1987, he evokes another era of different details along with the process of writing, which essentially remains the same: I wondered how many other people had owned it over the...
Pope Francis on Christmas Eve: “Tonight, our hearts are in Bethlehem, where the Prince of Peace is once more rejected by the futile logic of war, by the clash of arms that even today prevents him from finding room in the world.”
The Portland Airport experience this morning was about as calm, uncrowded, and smooth as I’ve ever seen. The new version of the Portland Airport carpet just isn’t quite the same, though. I was a fan of the turquoise. I even have a pair of Portland Airport carpet patterned socks, but...
Tired from the flight, just in time for dinner with the group. Turned in early. Toured Glascow in the morning with a bubbly, red-haired guide, a Glascow University grad.
