Don Pogreba is a current writer and retired teacher of English, Social Studies and Debate, and a loyal, if often sad, fan of the San Diego Padres and Portland Timbers. When he is not traveling, he is working on his classroom web site or dreaming about another adventure.
While my photographs are hardly art, it does seem relevant to quote Saramago here as I think about my last trip to Portugal: “Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or...
Six years is a long gap between travel recommendations. After my 2016 stay in Porto, I wrote a post with my recommendations for the city that I’ve probably shared a few hundred times, but time and, I suspect, Covid, have led to some of those great spots closing down. Farewell, Moustache Cafe! But as some places close, others...
In the seven years since I first visited Porto, the city has changed. Massive construction projects in the city have blocked dozens of roads, and the traffic is so bad in some areas that police work at every intersection. The abandoned warehouses lining the river that were the setting for some amazing photos have been replaced with new...
When I first started traveling in earnest, I was skeptical of tours in cities. As much as anything, I love wandering through new places and discovering corners on my own. I worried that these organized trips were the province of tourists, not travelers, that absurdly Manichean distinction that seems to allow many of us to justify our...
I was in Malta five years ago when I realized the loneliest hours of solo travel almost always occur during the evening in the hours when people head out for outdoor dinners with their friends and families. In The Great Gatsby, Nick describes the feeling of being at a party but not in the party as a feeling of being “simultaneously...
Kosovo was just a one-day trip this time, but I will definitely be back.