Tag Archives: How I Spent My Summer Vacation
The Friendly Skies
I didn’t have the guts to check the box. Discretion in this case was the better part of valour, as you will see as you read this. My wife, Vivian, is the world traveler. I’m the guy who likes to stay at home and sleep in the same bed every night. Usually when she wants […]
Ghost Walk
I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do enjoy a good ghost story. Ghost stories and tales of haunted houses speak to what we are as humans, revealing our fears of death and the unknown and allowing us to confront them on one level or another. We like to be scared, a little bit anyway. […]
Peasant Village
One of the semi-regular vacation destinations of my childhood was traveling with my family to visit Upper Canada Village, a recreated 19th century town saved from the flooding caused during the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway in the 1950s. It was an easy day trip from where we lived and was educational, something my […]
Crucifixes Everywhere
Vivian’s aunt is a retired schoolteacher. She makes certain that any visit we make to her in Lippstadt, Germany, has an educational component. There are no options, we will learn something. Or else. Since we always go along with her suggestions, I have no idea what the “or else” would be. That educational component is […]
How Do You Spell Overrated? Manneken Pis!
A pilgrimage to see the Manneken Pis is a requirement for anyone visiting Brussels. The small statue is only 61 cm tall (two feet if you use Imperial measurements) and probably the most photographed object in all of Belgium. Tourists flock to see it. In two trips to Brussels I have yet to figure out […]
Rest In Peace
In thirty years of marriage I have visited my wife’s ancestral hometown of Lippstadt, Germany, four times. That means I have visited the local cemetery four times. There are family graves there going back to the 18th century, maybe older for all I know. It is a ritual that cannot be missed, though usually it […]
Searching For Dracula
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 […]
All This For A Song
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 […]
The Bayeux Tapestry
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 […]
random thoughts from lorne 
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