I have from time to time seen photos of Hungarian horsemen riding their horses while standing on the horse. Finally, a couple of years ago, I had the chance to see this. I was traveling with a few other travel writers. Our excursion from Budapest was typical of what any
There are a lot of onions at a festival that celebrates the onion. So, I suppose it sounds a bit odd when I say I thought I would see even more at the Onion Festival in Weimar, Germany, in the fall of 2015. There were countless stands displaying and selling
This fall (2015), a friend and I aimed to spend a weekend in Weimar, in the former East Germany, when the Onion Festival was on there. But we could not get a hotel room in Weimar. Erfurt, a larger city about a 15-minute train ride from Weimar, was our fallback.
I read this week that Yale University is buying a huge collection of photos, mostly focused on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era. To be more precise, it is Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and Yale University Art Gallery that are acquiring the collection, which includes 57,000
I’ve been clearing out old files, all to reduce clutter and, no doubt, to make room for more of the same. Rifling through old papers has jogged many a memory, recalling long-ago trips to destinations no longer safe to visit and, in particular, the trips I hosted to Europe for
In early September of 2014, I walked on a bog in Estonia. I hasten to add that, given I was not adept at this, the walk was very short. Within minutes, I had gotten my boot buried past my ankle in the waterlogged moss that I was supposed to stay
The 9/11 Museum, which opened in 2014, is underground, reaching down about 70 feet to bedrock. It extends under the two memorial reflecting pools that mark the footprints of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, destroyed by terrorists in 2001. The museum had to go below ground because it is
Last year, at my sister’s request, we booked a timed visit to the World Trade Center site in New York where I live, but this year (2014), with the 9//11 Museum now open, she wanted to return to see the new facility. So, we did just that. Timed entry tickets
I have a foster elephant, and her name is Kamok. Actually, quite a few people are foster “parents” to the same elephant. This youngster, born in September 2013 in Kenya, was orphaned at birth (natural causes, it says on her paperwork). David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust’s orphanage for elephants and rhinos,
This past week (summer 2014), I had the great good fortune to participate in a guided tour of the current exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue in New York. The show is “Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe.” I was part of a press group, and our narrator
