In some ways our visit to London this summer was a write-off. It was the last day before our flight home, and I had planned to take in a few sights, it having been a long time since I did more than change planes in London. However, we were tired and the effort involved in […]
York was not on the original summer itinerary. The plan was to go to England’s Lakes District and do some hiking. But by the time we decided that as our final destination the price of accommodations was sky high, so we looked for cheaper options that would be just as interesting. Compared to York, I […]
Dracula is everywhere in Romania, perhaps the country’s biggest tourist draw. But a flawed one that many Romanians are ambivalent about. Tourist cash is welcome, but I got the impression that vampires are not a favorite topic. Irish novelist Bram Stoker had never been to Romania when he set his 1897 vampire novel Dracula in […]
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 our visit for then. That turned out to be a good decision: I hate wasting money and Vivian wasn’t enthralled as […]
They knew it was coming. Not the exact date or time, but there was a sense of inevitability. One day they would look out of the bunker and the English Channel would be filled with ships and soldiers. They couldn’t take comfort in the propaganda boasts about the impregnability of their Atlantic Wall. They worked […]
When it all boils down to it, it’s just a big piece of cloth. But they built a multi-story museum to hold it and tell its story because it is no ordinary piece of cloth. The Bayeux Tapestry tells the pictorial story of William the Conqueror and the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. It […]
Before July I had never visited Bucharest, or anywhere else in Romania. However, when we arrived at the Palace of the Parliament, I had the definite sense that this was a place I had been before. Yes, I had read a bit about it before the trip; I knew it was in the Guinness Book […]
There was a movie (which I have never seen) that was very popular in 1969 titled “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium.” That I think is a pretty common feeling for anyone traveling through a number of countries in a short period of time: you can feel a little disoriented when you wake up […]
It’s huge. No, actually it is gigantic. Or colossal – you choose the adjective. The Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, Romania, is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s second largest office building, after the Pentagon in Washington, and also as the heaviest building. More than 700,000 tonnes of steel […]
random thoughts from lorne 
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