4 min read
Ever lose your voice? I don’t mean laryngitis. I’m talking about seeing something so bewildering, your words bump into each other with no room to escape your mouth - leaving you to silently flap your jaw in the wind. What was it that caused me to go all Lou Costello - face to face with the Mummy – wheezing, stammering, and sputtering? What ungodly thing did I see?
3 min read
It was a Christmas party in Edinburgh and I was minding my own business when the well-dressed matron suddenly leaned toward me. “You must think we are barbarians the way we send our young children off to boarding schools.” At a loss and as a guest, I shook my head. “Uh no, not at all. I love the Harry Potter books… I love Hogwarts.”
3 min read
Thumping down the steps of the ancient fortress, I spotted my bank’s familiar logo and headed to the ATM. Excellent. I was running low on cash, so I crossed the street and conjured up my PIN number on the other side of the world. A fist full of $20’s later, I turned to walk back to the Great Wall of China. I didn’t make it.
4 min read
Greece is art… a sunlit beach… a taverna and the aromas of moussaka, pastitsio and tzatziki. But my Greece had another dimension. Sadly, it was the sight and stank of tourists lying in puddles of their own tzatziki, they had just heaved. Aboard a ferry that was also heaving to and fro, fighting the waves of a stormaggedon.
4 min read
This story is about horizontal and vertical travel. Horizontally, I traveled to California City to witness the Flying Peckerwoods, an amiable group of guys and gals that enjoyed jumping out of airplanes and then vertically traveling to earth wearing nothing but their socks and a parachute. As naked skydivers go, these happy folks really enjoyed a good, stiff breeze at 12,000 feet.
4 min read
Korea has the scariest borders and the scariest street food but, it should also be noted, the most astonishing toilets. So there is balance here. If you get too freaked by pots of simmering fried bugs or marauders invading from the North, you can always retreat to the comfort of a microchiped toilet directing a jet of warm air over your butt as the battle between good and evil rages outside.
4 min read
This is a short travel story. It only runs the distance of a bus ride from Second Avenue and about 65th Street, down to Saint Mark’s Place in the East Village. In New York City.
Though its time-frame is compact, this journey still has a workable beginning, middle and end. It begins where it should and ends right on the dot, just like a bus schedule. It times out perfectly. You’ll see.
2 min read
I had been in Australia less than four hours when I saw my first platypus. It was adorable, unreal and clearly had been put together with leftover parts from the animal kingdom. If you think kangaroos are a world apart, the platypus is a guarantee that you have landed in an evolutionary twilight zone.