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Showing posts from September, 2013

The Saturday Evening blogPost: The off-the-beaten-path Travel Log, Gran Canaria

It was 1988 and I was teaching at an international school in Salzburg, Austria. It was late May, and school had just ended for the year, meaning that the traveling season for my fellow teachers and I was just beginning. My friends Bill and Chief and I had been planning to hike from the Italian/Austrian border, across the spine of the Austrian Alps, to the German/Austrian border, staying at Alpine Mountain Huts at night. I had been looking forward to the trip all year, but when it arrived the weather forecast was a deal breaker: cloudy, raining and cold. So, we improvised, and rode our bikes downtown and found a travel agent offering last minutes deals on trips that other people had already bought and paid for and then cancelled last minute. A few hours later we were on board a plane for Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. To be honest, I had never even heard of the place, but it had been a dreary spring in Salzburg, and the travel agent had promised us sunshine (or that's how I translated

The Saturday Evening blogPost, #2: Travel Diary, The Cinque Terre

It was twenty-five years ago and I was on a train going through southern France, or perhaps it was Spain, I honestly can't remember. But I do remember running into this guy in the dining car, called himself Chris. He was a cheesecake guy; the first five minutes talking to him, like the first bite of cheesecake, was flavorful. The next ten minutes, like the next few bites, were pretty good, although not quite as good as the first bite. And then, out of nowhere, the fried calamari, the six pieces of bread, the Caesar salad draped with anchovies, and the steak that looked like an entire side of beef catches up with you and you can't stomach even the thought of another bite. This is what the next hour of talking to Chris was like, only with lots of gas. Imagine hoping for a bout of cholera or other highly infectious and unpleasant disease in order to encourage him to find someone else to tell his embellished stories to. Of course, I can only blame myself, as there were clues early,