Grocery Shopping and that’s about it   The sunny skies were a pleasant surprise based on the forecast, but we took advantage of the break to do our weekly food shopping, now that we were native Rotarians. Well, almost. The natives would know of the Carrefour supermarket around the corner from us about a five minute walk from the apartment. We, instead, chose the one that was 20 minutes away. And by the time we were on our way back, the rains would return and settle in more in tune with the forecast for the week.   I like cooking because I like eating. The grocery basket was filling ..read more

Day one: Rota in the rain   We had dinner in a family-run Italian restaurant located about a minute from our apartment. The little grocery was closed, but we were able to get a bottle of vino blanco for the apartment at a cheerful bar (La Silla Azul or “The Blue Chair”) across from that Italian restaurant. We walked out to the lighthouse, but it was too windy and cold for a beachwalk. Though in the course of that first evening, I learned that we were a moment’s walk from restaurants, groceries and the Atlantic Ocean. This was going to be no FUBAR, for sure. We sleep well knowing no ship ..read more

The 03112 to Madrid    We stopped for coffee and croissants just around the corner from our apartment the morning of our departure from Barcelona. Then we walked the five minutes or so to the city’s main train station, where we sauntered through baggage check, and then immediately onto our first class carriage for our two-hour plus ride to Madrid. This is European train travel at its finest: no waiting, no lines and drinks served upon departure.    Later, lunch with wine was served. It was not the same hot, gourmet lunch I remember enjoying on my previous solo (and pre-cov ..read more

  So here’s the thing. The main part of this Spain trip was to be two weeks in the Atlantic coastal city of Cadiz. That meant our three nights in Barcelona and then two more in Madrid were just a holding pattern awaiting the beginning of the real trip. Barcelona and Madrid, Spain as mere waystations? Have you ever heard of such loutish traveling? What a poltroon!   So there we were walking the electric promenade of Las Ramblas to watch the children scatter the pigeons like fall leaves at Plaça de Catalunya and then onto Catedral de Barcelona, where Carol sat me in the squa ..read more

  A couple of things were left out of my last blog. When we landed early in Barcelona and then cleared customs in a breathless matter of minutes, it wasn’t even 8:00 a.m. yet. Our apartment would not be available until 3:00 p.m. What we could do with eight hours to kill while schlepping luggage across  Barcelona was limited to, well, nothing. A luggage locker version of Let’s Make a Deal?   Carol was able to learn from the agency renting us the apartment of the many luggage storage locations throughout the city. Carol was leary of the whole concept. (Keep in mind she’d become ..read more

  Just a quick word that my comic novel, A Roomful of Monkeys, is now available on Amazon.com as a Kindle download for the mere bag of shells of $5.99.   Figuring you’d prefer to purchase from a site you’re more familiar with, I held off making this more shameless solicitation to part with some of your well-earned cash until you could get it on Amazon, where a full refund is theoretically possible but (I hope) still highly unlikely. Hah!    Just kidding. You could probably get your money back. But give the book a shot. You might actually like it. If you enjoyed m ..read more

  A Roomful Of Monkeys is the comic novel I’ve thought about writing for years. I like humor. I like satire. I could sustain both for about 600 words, as a newspaper or magazine column back in the good old days of newsprint. (I loved it when my words would dissolve into a  gray film on your fingertips.) But I never could see myself sustaining my particular brand of nonsense for 40, 50 or 60,000 words or more.   Whether by pure accident or the result of a personal dare with myself, I wrote a 20,000 word novella sometime in 2014. To my great surprise (and embarrassment ..read more

From your favorite blogger! (Who is so confident you’ll love it that he published it under a pseudonym!) Dorothy Kane Liddle’s brand new comic novel is all about writing a novel – just what you’ve been waiting for, right? The story: As an unknown writer struggles to get a new novel underway, he is suddenly confronted by the characters from his previous, unsuccessful books, who are demanding fuller lives. The author must decide if that’s his responsibility or whether his characters, fictional though they be, are still the authors of their own destinies.  A Roomful of Monkeys is a book abo ..read more

  We were looking out over the famous Cliffs of Moher outside of Galway, when I happened to observe they reminded me of a similar coastal view we had visited in Dyrholaey, Iceland looking for puffins. The ocean sculpting of the cliffs themselves, the height, the variegated layers of rock and the complete lack of puffins both here and in Iceland struck me as remarkably similar. Carol disagreed. “There was only one cliff in Iceland,” she noted.   “Well, how many do you need?” I asked.  Okay, maybe Moher is better   We had seen both sights on cold, windy days and with interm ..read more

  Don’t let the title fool you. You won’t be jotting down any “must sees” or “must do’s” on this ensuing list. That’s not how Carol and I roll. Or at least how I do. We’ve been to Paris several times since we’ve been together, for example, and have yet to set foot in the Louvre. We’ll routinely watch a Rick Steves episode on a country or city we’ve just gotten back from visiting, and will routinely comment “Didn’t see that,” or “Didn’t know that was there.” So when you read through the list below from our recent trip to Ireland, keep in mind some might not strike you as the kind of expec ..read more