It was a beautiful spring day, but hazy. We learned that the haze was due, of all things, to a wildfire 2,500 miles away in Alberta, Canada. We left the house at 9:00am, after the tail-end of rush hour, headed for a day of sightseeing in in Washington, D.C. The trek was painless and took just an hour, in stark contrast to thousands of arduous, stressful commutes to and from the nation’s capital I had made over the years. I spent many years of my working life in journalism, publishing, and corporate communications in and around Washington. I used to cover Congress and my News Galleries pass a ..read more

Donna’s brother Larry and his wife Patricia recently invited us to spend a couple days with them in Cape May, New Jersey. Of course we quickly accepted.  Cape May is one of those places Donna and I had never been to but had for years talked about visiting someday, and taking the ferry that crosses Delaware Bay between Lewes, Delaware and the Victorian beach resort town at the southernmost tip of the Garden State. After all, the town bills itself as the country’s oldest seaside resort, dating back to pre-Revolutionary times, and its historic district is a National Historic Landmark for it ..read more

Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may, advised English poet Robert Herrick almost 400 years ago.   Since the Winton Marsalis concert we attended the end of February (scroll to the bottom of this entry to read the blog), Donna and I have continued to gather our share of rosebuds. We have:  Visited Donna’s sister Sue in New Jersey  Attended the powerful and intense production of King Lear in Washington, D.C.  Took a day trip to beautiful, historic Havre de Grace, a place we have talked about exploring for years  Spontaneously attended a weekday afternoon Orioles game ..read more

To celebrate my birthday, Donna recently took me to an overnight getaway in Washington, D.C. to see a concert at the Kennedy Center and get together with a friend of hers from high school. We stayed at the Georgetown Inn, where we have stayed frequently over the years for similar getaways. In 2018, we stayed there for a grand wedding of the daughter of relatives of Donna. During that trip, a week after Donna suffered a broken shoulder from a fall, we also took in an Eagles concert at Nationals Park. Most recently, we stayed there a couple years ago to attend a National Symphony concert featur ..read more

One of the things I love about traveling abroad is learning about different cultures. Sometimes you may learn something profound or have an epiphany about your own culture. Other times you learn something amusing or mildly entertaining. Such is the case with some final thoughts about our latest trip to Ireland. Naming conventions: The names Irish ascribe to many things are different from our names. You need trash bags? No, what you need are rubbish sacks or refuse sacks. Dish detergent? No such thing. Perhaps you’re looking for washing-up liquid. Illegally parked? Your car won’t get booted ..read more

On our four-hour drive from Dublin to Kinsale, we passed through Killeagh, the village from which Donna’s mother’s family came. We parked near a church we thought may have been the family parish and struck up a conversation with a gentleman who was standing outside a pub. We told him we were looking for information about the O’Keeffe family and whether the church we pointed to was the right one. “Are ye Catholic?” he inquired, and when Donna answered in the affirmative, he clutched his heart in mock distress and let out a moan. “Well, yes, that’s the Catholic Church, St. John the Baptist, so ..read more

The house we rented in Dingle is a 20-minute stroll from the town center on an unnamed road that’s off another unnamed road, which unlike the other is paved. The paved road is wider, enough for two small cars to pass if they squeeze against the hedgerows at a crawl, and features blind, hilly curves. The speed limit on the larger road is 80 kilometers per hour, or 50 miles per hour, which seems a little optimistic. Directly behind the house is a mountain, covered on the lower parts either with thick, impassable waist-high thorn bushes or mucky, swampy ground covered with chest-high grass. Thr ..read more

We flew into Dublin and spent a day and night there before driving to Kinsale. We walked from our hotel to the Temple Bar section and enjoyed our first pints on Ireland soil in a very crowded tourist bar, listened to a talented Irish musician there, and, it being Ireland, quickly struck up a conversation, with a couple from Australia who were on a round-the-world trip. Dublin is teeming with college students and young workers at the major tech and consulting companies there, including Accenture, Google, IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, and Deloitte. Trams, busses, cars, and scooters whiz through the c ..read more

  We had awoken at three a.m. to break camp at the bottom of the Grand Canyon to get as far along our return to the rim before the heat and intense sun began their assault on us. Our guide, another in our party, and I had dropped off some duffels to be carried out by mule at Phantom Ranch, a half-mile from our campsite, and we were returning in the dark to meet the others and begin our upward trek. Straight ahead, in a notch between two distant bluffs, hung the moon - a crisp bright crescent against the darkness that my camera rendered as an amorphous blob. The canyon exists in two ..read more

You pile up enough tomorrows, and you’ll find you’ve collected nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays. So says The Music Man’s Professor Harold Hill, the name taken by a traveling scam artist peddling marching band instruments in the rural Midwest in the early 1900s. Donna and I are heeding that sound advice by striving to have as few empty yesterdays as possible. We recently returned from a trip to New York City, during which we saw the magnificent Hugh Jackman in Meredith Willson’s masterpiece and had other adventures over a couple perfect fall days. Getting there We took a Megabus from Whi ..read more