I have been to Death Valley and to Badwater Basin there. I wouldn’t mind seeing what’s left of Deadwood or the Alaskan city named Deadhorse. Those are pretty foreboding names — which do nothing but further intrigue tourists. Aigues Mortes is a French entry in the “morbid town” competition. It translates from the Occitan as […]

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Andorra is one of Europe’s several microstates. Others include Monaco, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Malta and the Vatican. And if you get within a few hundred miles of a microstate, don’t you pretty much have to go? Just for the novelty of stepping into the country, and then stepping right back out? So, we packed up […]

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Six months ago, I had never heard of Clermont-Ferrand. Which probably left me in the overwhelming majority of people living in Europe. But the notion of it began to grow on me, and today we spent six hours in a car to drive the 190 miles or so to Clermont-Ferrand and back. Our first major […]

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