20 Thursday Dec 2012
Posted in Sentiments, Travel
We’ve just returned from a spontaneous visit to Puerto Vallarta. The rates in Mexico in early December — both airline and hotel — are almost a gift. The town is just lively enough to keep everything simmering, but the Christmas-week throngs have yet to arrive. And the weather? Well, the weather is a gift, especially if you’re coming from the Northwest where the rain is like a toothache that won’t go away.
06 Tuesday Nov 2012
Posted in Sentiments, Travel
I was chatting with my son Ted about our adventure, and admitted I was a little scared. (Don’t worry—I have run all the cognitive therapy questions and I know intellectually that leaving home is no scarier than staying home. But I will allow myself to be scared anyway, because it’s a normal reaction to a big forthcoming change.)
05 Monday Nov 2012
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
It was 2002, I believe. Ten years ago. Traveling alone in Italy with five days to spare, I pointed the rental car north and discovered, unwittingly, Lake Como. George Clooney hadn’t purchased Villa Oleandra yet (that came a few months later). They say the lake changed after Clooney’s arrival. I hope it hasn’t changed much, because we’ve just rented an August apartment there.
24 Wednesday Oct 2012
Posted in Sentiments, Travel
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We are here scoping out a place to spend next winter, after our European adventure. We hope to land here just about one year from now, in October 2013.
11 Thursday Oct 2012
Posted in Sentiments, Travel
I have had my phone number for decades. I must be one of the few people who actually likes his cell phone service – so much so that I haven’t had a land line since the Reagan Administration.
08 Monday Oct 2012
Posted in Sentiments, Travel
That’s me sipping a frappé – a Greek iced coffee.
It was really hard to decide between the diples, kataifi, koulourakia, and melomakarona, which had the added problem of sounding like a disease, so we just left all the pastries alone.
05 Friday Oct 2012
Tags
The optimist claims his cup is “half full.” Usually. But today, this optimist says “half empty.” And it’s not a cup, it’s a bag.
21 Thursday Jun 2012
Posted in Travel
You may notice that all is sweetness and light with us, except for the visa thing. The idea of amassing a bale of documents and flying down to San Francisco to present them in person, at $300 per round trip (each), then doing the same a month later to pick up the visa stamp…well, life is too short. We love going to San Francisco, but document digging we hate. All this to stay ninety days or more in Spain?
18 Monday Jun 2012
Posted in Travel
At last we can breathe again. It was invigorating to spend the weekend at 9000 feet in the Rocky Mountains, but the altitude made our lungs feel like very small party balloons, not quite big enough to get air. Keystone, a ski resort in winter, expects this: the shops sell $4 canisters of oxygen to help out.
18 Monday Jun 2012
Posted in Travel
Colorado mountains at 11,444 feet. (Click to enlarge)
We’ve just returned from the TBEX conference for travel bloggers held in Keystone, Colorado. We were humbled by the amassed talent there (eight hundred bloggers!) and have much to learn, but that’s all part of the adventure. We’ve posted some photos here.
The Expat Almanac 