I have a National Parks bucket list, and hiking The Narrows and Angels Landing at Zion National Park have been near the top of said list for at least as long as there’s been an Instagram. We concluded our tour of the Utah National Parks with visiting my most anticipated […]
I’ve had some amazing experiences at the 33 U.S. National Parks I’ve visited: rock climbing in Yosemite, biking through snow above the Grand Canyon, paddling under snakes at Congaree, hearing a ceremonial flute serenade at Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde. At Bryce Canyon, however, I had 2 experiences that rival […]
We awoke at Capitol Reef, Utah’s least visited of its 5 national parks, and had a lousy breakfast at Pioneer Kitchen before going by the visitor center for junior ranger workbooks and hiking the 2.25-miles-each-way Grand Wash trail in the bottom of a canyon with 800′ sandstone walls. It was […]
We stopped at Lin Ottinger’s Moab Rock Shop on our way out of Moab, where we saw dinosaur fossils and gems from all over the world strewn about dusty shelves both inside and outside the store. A Japanese man interviewed the elderly shop owner as a lighting crew and cinematographer […]
When an organization whose Board you’re on schedules its annual conference in Las Vegas, you sign up for the tax-deductible vacation. When you find out an artist you’ve loved for 35+ years has a very rare live performance at the same time, you go early and make it a weekend […]
This year, my annual workers’ compensation law conference was held at the Jekyll Island Convention Center instead of its usual location on Saint Simons Island, but since we’re more familiar with the latter location, we opted to stay there and just let me drive a bit farther to my conference […]
I awoke the Monday after Fathers Day to this Facebook message from one of our Tokyo karate instructors: Did you feel the earthquake? Are you okay? My nightmare from our first night in Japan had come true. Luckily, we’d missed it by a day, as it occurred near Osaka, and […]
Friday morning about 9:45am, we set off from our AirBnB and discovered a place called Cafe Green Door in a residential area, just a couple blocks from our home, which was a nice change from the previous days’ meats on a stick for breakfast. We had eggs and coffee […]
Thursday, June 14, we rode a series of trains until we met Eric, a quad-lingual KKday tour guide originally from China who lives in Japan and was our guide for the “romantic” train taking us to a horse-drawn carriage taking us to a wooden boat taking us down the Hozu […]
Wednesday, June 13 began with hot coffee at McDonald’s in Kyoto, because that was the only place I could quickly find hot coffee in our new ‘hood (we also had fried meat on a stick from a nearby street vendor). By 9:45, we were at the “Golden Pavilion” — Kinkau-ji […]