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Travel Photo Thursday: Natural Disasters, Signs of the Times

Travel Essays
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You’ve seen them all too often:  Newspaper photos, television film clips, and even YouTube videos, chronicling the the utter destruction caused when irresistible forces of nature—winds born of hurricanes, the sucking vortices of tornadoes, or the swirling waters of floods—overwhelm puny man-made structures. I have lived in California for over forty years.  It’s known as [...]

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At The Movies: On Location in “Yemen”

Movie Reviews
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Patricia Maxwell, the British Prime Minister’s press secretary, badly needs a “feel-good” Middle East news story to offset the endless daily reportage from that region about bombings, bloodshed, and dead bodies. She finds a potential savior in Sheikh Muhammed of the Yemen who has a plan to turn his desert fiefdom into a Garden of [...]

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Back to “The Big Easy”

Destination Updates
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New Orleans’s post-Katrina artistic revival is in full swing (via The Christian Science Monitor) By Carol Strickland, Contributor posted April 15, 2012 at 9:48 am EDT New Orleans When you arrive at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport and hear Satchmo’s trumpet pour out soaring notes of “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,” your pulse [...]

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“Must See” Budapest

Destination Updates
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Top 10 Things to See in Budapest (via Downtown Magazine NYC) For more on Budapest, be sure to pick up a copy of the spring 2012 issue of DOWNTOWN Magazine. If you do decide to go, here are the Top 10 must-see sights in this beautiful city.  1. Houses of Parliament (Pest side of river) [...]

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Travel Tech: Best “Road Trip” Apps

App Reviews
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“Spring Break”?  Well, that’s come and gone.  But summer’s not that far off. When I was a kid, Dinah Shore exhorted Americans to “See the U.S.A. in Your Chevrolet.”  Whatever make of car you are driving today, and wherever you might be heading on your summer “road trip,” you won’t want to leave home without [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: Enigmatic Images

Travel Photo Thursday
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In “Travel Photo Thursday:  Who Stole My Sunshine?” I said “Light is an essential ingredient in cooking up a photographic image.  No light, no photo, no how.” Today it’s “some light, some enigma, somehow.”

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Travel Canada: Rockies By Rail

Travel Canada

(Tales Told From The Road” continues its series of “Travel Canada” stories highlighting destinations and attractions from sea-to-sea.) In our last “Travel Canada” post we checked out riding the rails between British Columbia and the Canadian Rockies on the Rocky Mountaineer excursion trains.  Today we’ll look at another train that travels that route, Via Rail [...]

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Travel Canada: Rail Journeys

Travel Canada

(Tales Told From The Road” continues its series of “Travel Canada” stories highlighting destinations and attractions from sea-to-sea.) Now that our “Travel Canada” series has completed its tour of British Columbia, it’s time to head to the Canadian Rockies and the gateway cities of Calgary and Edmonton which lie just to the east. While you [...]

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Travel Canada: British Columbia Wines Come of Age

Destination Updates

(Tales Told From The Road” continues its series of “Travel Canada” stories highlighting destinations and attractions from sea-to-sea.) Bad Babies Baby Duck. Baby Deer. Cloyingly sweet and rather disgusting in taste, these were the British Columbia produced wines that I drank in Victoria, B.C. during a visit in 1974. Heck, there probably was  even “Baby [...]

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Travel Tech: All The World Before Your Very Eyes

Travel Tech

You’re on vacation, in an unfamiliar city, thousands of miles from home. What’s the weather going to be like today?  Just look straight ahead. Made a reservation for dinner, but can’t remember where?  Just look straight ahead. What time is it?  Your watch is in the other room, but just look straight ahead. Need to [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: Reflections of A City

Travel Photo Thursday
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In “Travel Photo Thursday:  Who Stole My Sunshine?” I used a photo of Chateau de Chenonceau in France’s Loire Valley to illustrate how a photographer can use reflections of a building into a river on a cloudy day to create a a memorable shot.  This week, I’ll present another way of using reflections in a [...]

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Travel Canada: British Columbia’s Backroads

Travel Canada

(Tales Told From The Road” continues its series of “Travel Canada” stories highlighting destinations and attractions from sea-to-sea.) Vancouver, B.C. is a terrific Pacific Northwest destination:  Mountains tumbling down to the sea on the north side, beautiful city parks, lively entertainment, and fine dining. Whistler, just north of Vancouver, was the site of the 2010 [...]

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Found in My Own Backyard: Bee Gardens in The Air

Found in My Own Backyard

Something is abuzz these days on top of San Francisco’s Nob Hill. But it’s not some hot bit of socialite gossip. And it’s not hype about the latest and greatest thing since sliced sourdough bread. It’s all about bees and beer.

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Travel Canada: “Hanging Out” at Capilano River

Destination Updates

(Beginning today, Tales Told From The Road” will run a series of “Travel Canada” stories highlighting destinations and attractions from sea-to-sea.) Remember that scene from Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom when Jones uses a machete-like sword to cut loose a rope bridge over a canyon, sending “The Bad Guys” flailing their limbs in [...]

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Stockholm: Bringing You There with iPads

Destination Updates

Earlier this week, I attended the 2012 Canada Meeting Marketplace in San Francisco where travel writers spend a day “speed dating” in 15-minute mini-meetings with Canadian tourist boards and travel providers to learn about the latest travel opportunities in Canada.  This year, many Canadian presenters used an iPad as a tool for visually conveying “What’s [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: Looking Up

Travel Photo Thursday
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Since we’re bipedal creatures, when we’re walking about we are almost constantly looking directly ahead, or just a bit off to one side or the other.  We look the world in the same way when driving down the road in a car. Because of this habit of staring straight ahead, we tend to shoot nearly [...]

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Hey! Where’s My Beer?

Destination Updates
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4 Travel Destinations for Craft Beer Lovers (via The Good Pour) We have a son who’s the biggest beer geek we know. Every time we head to his house for dinner, we learn about another artisan or craft beer. Whenever we go out to eat together, he likes to choose an eatery with an impressive [...]

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