Early November and gorgeous autumn is going strong. Daylight Savings is over and the sun slants in like a spotlight between 3:00 and 4:00. Every splotch of butterscotch, sienna, magenta takes another curtain call. Painters take note…. France? Or Boston? Inspiration for Jackson Pollock? Inspiration for Mark Rothko? Inspiration for Read More
Travel
Provincetown: New England Summers
As much as I’ve traveled, there’s no place like gorgeous New England clinging to its coastline of rocks, coves, safe harbors, islands, sandy spits, dunes, marshes, glacier ponds. Why go anywhere else in the summer? I’ve been hanging out in Provincetown at the very end of the long arm Read More
Taiwan: Parting Thoughts.
Guest Blog Post by Judith L. Katz We are now in the air, having escaped the grey clouds of Typhoon Goni swirling around Taipei. Our final day in Taiwan was a delight for the senses–a fabulous lunch of soup dumplings at Michelin-rated Din Tai Fung, delicate Li Shan tea Read More
Taiwan to the Mainland: Across the Straits. (Another Typhoon?)
Guest Blog Post by Judith L Katz. Jinmen, the Cold War, and Cross-Strait Relations: In a wrinkle of history, when the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan in the closing days of China’s civil war (1949), they held on to the small island of Jinmen, a stone’s throw from the Chinese mainland Read More
Taiwan: “Let’s Eat!”
Guest Blog Post by Judith L. Katz “There is so much to eat here,” proclaimed the cab driver as he transported us away from the night market in Tainan – Taiwan’s ancient capital. This particular night market is a multi-acre maze of pop-up booths offering fried food, sugar-coated fruit Read More
Travels to Taiwan on the Tail of a Typhoon
Guest Blog Post by Judith L. Katz Typhoon Soudelor swept across Taiwan on August 7 as one of the strongest recorded, with over 50 inches of rain in some locations and wind gusts well over 100 mph. Here in the capital city of Taipei, much of the damage was related to Read More
Great Books to Read While Traveling
Reading and traveling – does it get any better? These books have kept me company on long flights and sleepless nights, on the beach and in shabby hotels with bad lighting. Some are fun – even hilarious, some are great adventures, some are historical companions. Most of these are Read More
Western Skies. Wyoming, Idaho, Montana.
On the road in the Mountain states, in fabulous weather (heat wave threatening – very unusual for June), we head south from Yellowstone, stop in the Grand Tetons for three days of biking, hiking, staring up, up, up at the 13,000 ft snowcapped peaks and floating down the Snake River. Read More
Smarter than the average bear: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.
There aren’t many clichés you can add to the spectacular-ness of nature. And there aren’t many places where you can get the full impact of its largesse than that of the Lamar Valley in the northeast corner of the first US National Park. From a core herd of 24 genetically Read More
Sicily: Ancient Empires
The three highlight antiquities we’ve seen this trip are the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento (Greece 2400 BCE); the remarkable Roman mosaics (300 CE) at the Villa Romana del Casale in Piazza Armerina, and the rarely open Houses of Augustus and Livia with their delicate wall frescoes in the Read More