-
Canada, Morocco, and Friendship: Old but Gold
How many of us are fortunate enough to have an old friend, one who’s hung around for close to 70 years? Enduring relationships are more precious than gold, especially when life tarnishes our edges, bangs up our knees, and wrinkles our faces as the years pile on. Nance enriches my life in more ways than she’ll ever know, and we’ve…
-
KEY WEST New Year’s Greetings 2026: How to Say Goodbye?
Sometimes stuff just disappears. One day I almost reach for the phone to dial up one of my best friends for a walk, but she’s years gone. I still miss her so much. Another day, I remember that my house burned down. We didn’t own it anymore when it burned down, but it really did go up in flames and…
-
Season’s Greetings 2025: Budapest, Bomb Cyclones, and too Many TROLLS
In a few hours we board a ferry to the airport, where we’ll catch our flight to Muncie, Indiana for a Midwest Christmas family gathering. It’s -2°F in Muncie right now. Today, Pacific Northwest rivers may reach historic flood stages for the second time this week, and a gale force bomb cyclone swirls in from the Pacific Ocean, according to…
-
Eastern Europe: Shortages, the Garden, and So Much History!
Our Behind the Old Iron Curtain Trip: Can It Happen Here? Note for our wonderful subscribers: We’ll be blogging this trip on Substack since it’s faster. You can find us there/subscribe at: https://substack.com/@blakeislandjourneys The gusher of awfulness sits there, waiting at the other end of a link click. I don’t click. Instead, I watch the sun slowly rise over our harbor as…
-
A Key West Merry Christmas, and a ‘You Matter’ Message
On the darkest day of the year, does anyone else have a case of the grims? The dictionary defines the word grim as unpleasant, depressing, and difficult to accept. Grim means you grit your teeth. Grim means you’re going to hate this. Grim means you can’t do anything about it. I suspect that ½ of Americans feel rather grim since November 5th, and the fact that the other…
-
Scotland: Edinburgh’s Best Buses, Boats, Bookstores, and Tour Leaders (ours!)
In most tourist cities there’s a hop on hop off bus option: Visitors hop on multi-colored double-decker buses outfitted with live guides or taped commentary, and then hop off to visit top sites. Sometimes hohos work well; often they’re slow or unreliable. Edinburgh’s hohos proved reliable and fast, so it’s no wonder Rick Steves, our go-to travel guidebook writer, recommended them.…
-
SCOTLAND: Castles, Carvers, and The Royal Mile
Excessive dancing? Can there be such a thing? When Mary Queen of Scots returned to Edinburgh at the hopeful age of 23 she danced too much, according to party-pooper Edinburgh preacher John Knox. The last guy you ever want to invite to a party would be Knox, prominent Protestant Reformation leader, who replaced St. Giles Cathedral’s glowing rainbow-hued stained glass…
-
Scotland: Outlander Castles, Villages, and More
The wheels came off this trip on the first day, literally, but that was after the cyberattack and the volcanic eruption. ‘Tis but a scratch, as Monty Python’s jesters would say. We finally made it! After visiting Duone Castle, above, where Monty Python and the Holy Grail scenes were filmed in 1975, we recalled those cheeky jesters, who made careers out of…
-
Scotland: Off to Solve Some Mysteries
I finally found Anna Shaw, but then she disappeared. Anna Shaw’s life is such a mystery. She’s one of my Scottish ancestors, prominently featured in the family notes, until….. she simply disappears. And she doesn’t just disappear from my family tree. Anytime she shows up on someone else’s family tree, poof. Nothing, except her name. Dead end. She came from…
-
What We Learned in Singapore, Java, and Bali – and Merry Christmas 2023!
When our Mideast trip went ‘poof’ for obvious reasons, we thought we’d head somewhere warm and relax instead. A cruise to Singapore, Java, and Bali? Sounds good, right? It was beyond good, but it wasn’t the warmth and relaxation that stuck with us. Oh sure, we left our footprints in warm sand on distant beaches, and swam laps in delightful…
-
Singapore/Indonesia: A Sudden Travel Pivot
We were THIS close to embarking on our latest bucket-list travel adventure to Israel, Istanbul, Jordan, and Dubai. I bet you can guess what happened next. When I clicked on CNN one early October morning, there it was, the huge black word – WAR – and an ominous photo of flame-trailed red missiles shooting across the dark Tel Aviv night…
-
GREENLAND AND ALL THE REST: ICEBERGS, INUITS, AND A SPECIAL GUEST
Never saw an iceberg before, but now that I have….I wouldn’t blame the iceberg either, for that Titanic thing. Icebergs do what they do and will for the foreseeable future at least until all the glaciers, the iceberg parents, melt away due to global warming. (Don’t think so? Science for the doubters, right here/click here.) So we are thrilled we…
-
ICELAND: Coastal Cruising, Myavtn Moonscapes, and What About Those Elves and Bad Santas? 
Cruise ships aren’t for everyone. Never-cruisers shake their heads over the horrors that must lurk aboard a Celebrity Summit-type monster ship, our home for a 12-day Iceland-to-Boston journey. I understand why people with normal reasoning abilities might not want to be smushed together below decks with 2030 passengers sharing plated dinners, swirly martinis, and viral loads.* I get that. (*About…
-
ICELAND: Savage Landscapes, Storytellers, Literary Riches, and the Blue Lagoon
Our van driver steered into ferocious battering winds, clutching the wheel to stay centered in the lane. Icy sheets of rain slashed at the windows, and we stared through driving sleet at miles of lava rock, stretching away into the distance. The storm transformed black barren fields into blurry nightmare hellscapes, and I wondered: How do people survive in such…
-
ICELAND: Land of Fire and Ice, but What Lurks Underneath?
Iceland reminds me of a truth I understood long ago: Never underestimate what lurks behind a calm, quiet face. That smiling person in the corner? She may be the angriest person in the room. That grumpy gruff person over there? Might be the kindest. And that woman in the corner, who seems distracted? Or so it seems. She may propose…
-
Colorado Hot Springs: Three Insights for Happiness Along the Road Trip of Life
We drove slowly down a quiet leafy street, searching for an address, hoping the wealthy residents didn’t think these elderly gawkers were casing the joint. I pointed to a white flat-roofed mid-century: “There! That was our neighbor’s house, and the two-story boxy thing here used to be our home.” The curved archway in front of the blocky box’s front door…
-
IRELAND: Happy St. Patrick’s Day! A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away……
In Fall 2019 we were working the ten-year travel plan hard, traipsing around the globe. On our October self-drive around the Emerald Isle, we steered our tiny rental car over bumpy cart paths and up roads to the top of black rock sheer cliffs, just as we had 30 years prior. We hunted down most of the same stops from…
-
REGAL PRINCESS: Quiet Cruise to Nowhere, Two Letters, and a Yokohama Flashback
So I’ve been referring to our little cruise as the ‘Cruise to Nowhere’ but that’s just wrong. The island of Eleuthera is NOT nowhere, and it’s not just the island where Princess Cruises plops their passengers for an idyllic day in the sun, for lounging, snorkeling, and feasting. Ok the Princess part of the island IS all that, but Princess only owns…
-
Ancient Egypt: Edfu and Dendera Temples, Cleopatra, Coptic Cairo, and HOME
Life sure has a way of zipping along, doesn’t it? Blink and you’ll miss it. We’re about to embark on “The Cruise to Nowhere” (next post) so I’m going to quickly ‘finish’ Egypt, just for now, so I can say to myself it’s finished – love that sense of accomplishment! (There’s so much more, of course, as usual). EDFU AND…
-
Ancient Egypt: The Bus Wins! Who Knew? More Temples and Padre the Ham
Have you ever been tourist-tired? You know, that point of exhaustion where you’re this close to grumping at someone who doesn’t deserve it (Padre) and you just have to STOP? Squinting into the sun and sticky hot, I headed back to the bus ahead of everyone else to cool off in its calm, air-conditioned silence. But first, I snapped one…
-
Ancient Egypt: Nile River Cruise, Crocodile Mummies, and Which Way Is UP?
I’ve had Egypt at the tippy top of my travel bucket list for most of my adult life, as anyone who reads my blog knows by now. Sorry about that; I tend to repeat myself when I’m excited about, well, anything, from windstorms to Wordle. So now that my dream came true, what have I learned? Ah, so much. Was…
-
Ancient Egypt: Mummy Adventures in the Land of the Dead, and a Mystery
If I need to get Padre’s attention, all I have to do is say ‘The Land of the Dead’ and he perks right up. That’s because he’s been intrigued with all things funerary since his early years, when he worked in a local funeral home to afford college. He dealt with caskets, bodies, the works – and considered a funeral…
-
Ancient Egypt: All Aboard the Queen of Hansa, Two Temple Visits, and a Surprise!
Which one of the sunbathers lounging on the ship’s upper deck might be a devious murderer, I wondered, as I relaxed in the warm Nile River sun? Is it the mysterious man in the Biden shades, who never says a word? He could be Simon Doyle, the cad who ditched his fiancé to marry the rich socialite. Or is it…
-
Ancient Egypt: A Bustling Cairo Market, and the Blonde’s Take on Veils and Hair
A woman peered at me through the eye slit in her black veil: What must she think of this older American woman with a head of bright blonde platinum hair? As we strolled down al-Muizz Street, one of the oldest streets in modern-day Cairo, every woman I saw – our group excepted – wore a hijab, or veil, over her…
-
Ancient Egypt: Mummies On the Move and Museums In Transition
Many Egyptian wanna-be visitors wonder: Should we wait until the spectacular, state-of-the-art Grand Egyptian Museum finally opens, or is Egypt worth visiting now, when the current showcase for Egypt’s treasures, Cairo’s Egyptian Museum of Antiquities, is half-empty? Advice after our visit to the old museum: GO NOW. It’s true that the dusty place is packing up with movers bustling about, doing what movers…
-
Ancient Egypt: Claustrophobic Pyramids, Hissing Camels, and the Gauntlet of Touts
It’s 4:45 am. A monotone Gregorian chant spills into the early morning silence of our Nile River boat cabin, where I sit by the balcony window, tapping at the laptop. Yet this chant, similar to a song on my Amazon relaxation playlist, is not Gregorian. As morning approaches over the River Nile, it’s the Muslim call to prayer. Many Egyptian…
-
Cairo Here We Come! But First, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and a Platinum Blonde Surprise
The last time I flew through JFK I was with my 80-year old Dad, not Padre, returning from Landstuhl, Germany, where we visited my brother, who’d been called up for National Guard duty during the Iraq War after 9/11. Dad’s long gone but I chuckled when JFK’s luggage carousel sparked a memory of me snapping at the old guy to…
-
ANCIENT EGYPT: Hapshetsut Still Reigns Supreme at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art
Remember that famous photo from King Tut’s tomb, when Howard Carter saw the glint of gold and “wonderful things” as he peeked through a small hole in 1922? Carter’s candle flame almost went out as gaseous air escaped from Tut’s underground burial site. Until Carter peered in with his candle, whoever sealed up this door was the last to see…
-
ANCIENT EGYPT: Arabic, Airports, APPS, and the Big Apple
Almost there! We’re getting close to T-minus liftoff for our first international trip since the world abruptly shut down in 2020. Ok we did sneak across the border to visit our close friend Canada for a few days, but…Canada. International Lite for Seattle types, although we did have the sticks-in-noses PCR tests in order to cross the Maine-Canada border. So…
-
ANCIENT EGYPT: We’re Baaack, and Ready to Raid (visit) some Tombs!
It’s finally time to dust off the passports and dig out the money belts, because we are headed overseas soon, to visit EGYPT. Now if you’re curious as to how important an Egypt trip is to our travel goals, just read this old post, one of my first. (Travel: Well, Why Not?) Third time’s the charm, we hope, since two prior…
