Prepared to be shocked, but when I was a kid, I was a bit of a nerd. One of my favorite series of books was a collection by David Macaulay with specific titles like Castle, Pyramid, Cathedral. I suspect if one were to look through the records of the library at Lockwood Elementary and Middle School, s/he would see that I still hold the record for checking those titles...
It’s fashionable to mock places and experiences that are “touristic,” a word I am loathe to believe is real. You’ll often hear travelers in the same line you’re in deriding a place as touristic. It’s undoubtedly true that there are unfortunate excesses in many tourist locales: trinkets and faux authenticity among the worst offenders, but...
My Spanish is laughable and entirely inadequate. It’s so limited that I couldn’t write that last sentence, only a sad approximation of it. Four years of high school Spanish and two years of intermittent attention in college have left me with a random collection of vocabulary words and the ability to speak in broken present tense and only really understand someone if...
Madrid is a city for the young at night, and I am an old man who typically explores during the day. But it’s a great city, and I am glad that I had a brief stopover there on my way to Portugal. I arrived late (after midnight) at my Airbnb in central Madrid after a somewhat comical series of delays and errors in my flight from Reykjavik to Madrid which included all of...
I told myself that I booked the flight to Madrid that included a 33 hour layover in Reykjavik because it saved a few hundred dollars. The truth is that I booked it because I wanted to make sure to see Iceland one more time. The trip was a bit more complicated than I had hoped it would be, as I realized in Seattle that I had left my drivers license home in Montana. A...
This afternoon as I went through the security procedure at SEATAC, it was the usual mix of frustration and confusion about a system that seems designed to simultaneously, complete with all the accoutrement of theater, give us the illusion of safety and the absolutely certainty of frustration. The experience was amplified by the experience of being right behind a man...
Turkey didn’t happen. I was feeling quite nervous about the trip and decided that one more serious attack would be a sign that I should maybe wait before making the trip. Just a week or so before I was scheduled to leave, there was another large attack, this one about six blocks from the apartment I had been planning to stay in. I canceled and rebooked a trip for...
A trip with a few twists and turns.
