This part of France is given over almost entirely to vines. A smattering of olive trees. A field of grain, here and there. Almost zero significant industry. In terms of consumption, this ought to be wine country, and it is … but not as uniformly as it might have been a century ago. Beer is […]

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Actually, I suppose the overnight air flight never really disappeared. It just seemed to, for those of us who do the majority of our flying inside the United States. (And it is called the red-eye because of how you look the morning after flying most of the night.) After what seemed years since I had […]

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I suppose I have always believed that some people were sleepwalkers. Enough sleepwalkers talked about it, certainly, and I seem to recall episodes where I witnessed a family member moving around the house without being awake. Perhaps even being able to answer a question without being awake. But I had never gone sleepwalking myself — […]

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We once lived decades in southern California. We feel like we know the place pretty well. Certainly from the Mexican border to, say, Sacramento. We had been outside the country for more than a year, and what we found here on our return yesterday has been … astounding. When did California prices get out of […]

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Maybe it’s just me, but I prefer the pilots of my commercial flight to be friendly. With each other. They do not have to be pals swapping gossip, but they should be able to sit in the same cockpit without fighting. India’s Jet Airways was unable to clear that low bar on New Year’s Day. […]

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The Boeing 747 was the first jumbo jet, and it forever changed the experience of flying. For the better. No one under the age of 50 can have a personal recollection of this, given that the first commercial flight of a 747 was made on January 22, 1970 — from New York to London. It […]

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On the way back to Spain from Portugal, we left the little town of Luz and took a short detour through the “big city” in this part of the Algarve region — Lagos, population 30,000. What originally drew my attention was the town’s name — also the name of the biggest city (and former capital) […]

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I saw this just the past day or two, on some website. “Describe an act of random kindness that you encountered.” I think the point of this is … the act ought to be dramatic, unexpected and from someone you do not know. That is what the “random” is getting at. I probably am forgetting […]

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I have become … oh, not obsessed but definitely interested … in the notion of saying hello to strangers. As the French do. On our most recent trip to California, I tried out the French method, in English, to people I encountered while walking. “Good morning!” It met with some success, suggesting that suburban Americans […]

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(Above: A statue to a bullfighter, in Seville.) Passing references have been made on this site to our tour of the Iberian Peninsula. Normally, more of that would have appeared here, as we went along, but the Dodgers were in a seven-game World Series — which vied for attention on this blog — originally intended […]

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