This is the sort of thing that boggles the minds of Californians. Well, actually, just about anyone from America, the land of mediocre $30 bottles of wine, as well as tasting sessions that offer five tiny pours for $15-to-$25. Imagine a local winery that lets visitors taste as many as seven wines. Less than a […]

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No, it’s not just your imagination. Many of the 1.6 million residents of Barcelona can be a bit abrupt. A bit impatient. A bit aggrieved. Those conditions can be the product of decades and decades under the thumb (in their telling) of the Spanish capital, Madrid. More recently, it has been about the inundation, over […]

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It always is a bit embarrassing, while traveling, to walk into someone else’s important holiday … and know little or nothing about it. A pre-Easter parade in San Blas, Mexico, in 2005. Bastille Day, which we didn’t see coming in Normandy three decades ago … and then tried to make amends by marching at the […]

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I must have missed this. Some time over the past year or two London has become a post-cash society. Yes, a few holdouts can be found, mostly among immigrant-run businesses that don’t like the idea of credit cards. Such as the Chinese noodle house on Wardour Street, in Soho. A pot of tea had already […]

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That is what a person does. You go to London, you eventually make your way over to the West End and settle in at one of those grand old theaters and let someone sing and dance at you for two or three hours. We carried out that plan perhaps too aggressively.

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I’ve never really had winter clothes. Because I always lived in places that either were temperate or Just Plain Hot. Long Beach, then the Inland Empire, then Abu Dhabi. But here in Europe, in France, we can go weeks (!) without a single minute in the 60-degree (Fahrenheit) range in December, January, February. Granted, it’s […]

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We completed the five-day Camino de Santiago pilgrimage yesterday, and celebrated by having dinner twice in about five hours. Walking 13 or 14 miles a day is enough to work up an appetite that can be acknowledged without fear of gaining weight. So there is that. Thinking back, I failed to mention, over the past […]

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*By “triumphal” we mean stumbling past the sign that read “Santiago”. So, Day 5 of the Camino de Santiago, the condensed, 73-mile version of a pilgrimage that can be 10 times as long, for the minority who start walking in distant lands, and often is about six times as long when starting just north of […]

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The Camino de Santiago is a public event that passes through some of the most remote parts of Spain. The miracle is that the pilgrimage is so little touched by crime, especially given the surge in participation over the past 20 years, crossing the 275,000 mark in 2016, with women making up almost half of […]

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If Day 1 of our Camino de Santiago was about getting to the other end, Day 2 was about getting comfortable among the other pilgrims. It is a diverse group. Statistics compiled by church officials in Santiago de Compostela, in northwest Spain, suggest half the pilgrims are not Spanish … that Germans are the biggest […]

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