Category Travel

The Mundenhof

Went to the zoo last weekend, COVID restrictions being raised enough for that. I could say I was underwhelmed, but that wouldn’t be fair. When my children were younger, we had a membership for the Toronto Zoo. It was a five-hour drive, yet we knew we would visit at least three times in a year, […]

Translation Woes

You don’t see much English on signs where I live. French either, though France is just a few minutes drive away. So it was a little surprising to see a bilingual sign on the fence of the ostrich enclosure at the Mundenhof, the zoo in Freiburg. Warning signs in zoos are not uncommon. Especially ones […]

Virtual Music

The Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels, like most cultural establishments in Europe, is closed these days. Usually about 10,000 people go through every month. COVID-19 has hot the cultural sector as had as any other industry. I wonder if the government supports to help museums, theatres, dance troupes and the like through this time are […]

Don’t Stop The Music!

It’s Saturday, which in theory is a day of rest for many people. Though in these everybody-works-from-home days there may be less of a distinction between times of work and leisure. I’ve been enjoying the daydreaming about travel, something that I still hope will be a reality for me this summer, even though I know […]

Musical Dreams

It’s tough not being able to travel when you want to. And that loss of freedom is just the tip of the iceberg – there are many travel-oriented businesses which will not survive this involuntary shutdown. That might be a topic for another day, maybe once planes start flying again. (I expect those flights to […]

Instruments Everywhere

Do you ever make plans and then forget to follow through? Of course not, only I would do that, right? When I went to post Tuesday’s flashback post from Brussels’ Musical Instruments Museum I thought I would choose photos from several different posts rather than just the ones from the 2014 original. But there weren’t […]

Sounds of Music

Dreaming of travel again since none of us can go anywhere. Here’s a post from 2014 about the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels. It’s a monument to creativity, seven floors in downtown Brussels devoted to musical instruments. But there was no cigar box banjo. Admission is free at the Musical Instruments Museum on Wednesdays, so we planned […]

Is It Fast?

Though I am not a farm boy, I have seen my share of tractors over the years – but never one like this. Sunday afternoon in Feldberg (not to be confused with the town of the same name in the Titisee region), we were taking in some nice views of the vineyards and surrounding hills […]

Dreaming of Summer

How are your vacation plans coming along? Everything up in the air thanks to COVID-19? Mine are. I wrote a rant for today, making light of some serious issues. My vacation probably won’t happen as planned this summer. The State of Maine is discouraging visitors by requiring them to quarantine for two weeks (and I […]

Silly Season

The tulips are in bloom in Ottawa – and the government wants people to view them online, not in person. Understandable I guess. Everyone knows you can catch COVID-19 from flowers. You can’t of course, at least as far as anyone knows. Officials with the National Capital Commission (NCC) are more concerned with large crowds […]