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They All Start with T: Three Reasons We’re At the Airport, Again!
We like the airport. No, we don’t like pat-downs, delays, mind-numbing microphone announcements, or being smushed nose-to-nose with other passengers on a bus ride out to the tarmac to catch our plane. (United thought of a new way to torture passengers! Way to go, United!) We seldom complain about airport indignities because we love what the airport does for us. Kind of like how we stuck with algebra, since it was our ticket to college. (I like algebra now, truly I do, math buddies out there…) The airport gets us to the three T’s and much more, so off we go again. My always-supportive sister-in-law follows our travels closely, and she…
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Happy New Year! 2019 Resolutions for Later-Life Travelers
Swim More Laps With Geese, Resolution #3, takes some explanation, so let’s back up and start with the easy ones: Resolution #5: Attend More Dachshund Parades (and other fun stuff) After I sat on the curb watching pooches parade from Whitehead to Duval (a very short parade, of course), I kept smiling for hours. Dachshunds are so…….short, and cute, and hey – if they can regally parade down the street, anyone can! They give the smallest, shortest of us plenty of hope, and we sure can use some of that in the year 2019. And let’s not forget all those interlopers: the Chihuahua Flash Mob, the take-charge boxers, the pampered…
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A Key West Christmas: BELIEVE!
I’ve always been a Christmas person. My folks loved Christmas too, and I have treasured memories of all those family Christmases long ago: Sitting in the pew at Christmas Eve candlelight service, Mom’s gorgeous table groaning with turkey and all the fixins, the tree with treasured ornaments, some I still hang on my own tree 60 years later. Over time, things change, of course. For several years I took over the family dinner duties, and have oodles of photos of our extended family, smiling round my Christmas table, so many in fact that I finally put them all in a photo book (you’re all in there somewhere, family – trust…
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VEGAS, BABY! 5 Reasons It’s Time to Hit the Road
The road is waiting! So is Padre, and I better finish this before he gets cranky. After the Epic Journey last spring we picked up right where we left off: yard work and ‘real’ work, pumpkin growing, jam-making, Mariners, and mindless TV shows such as Beach Front Bargain Hunt. Too much news, too, even for a journalism junkie like me. Don’t get me wrong, I love home, much as the nail technician who painted my toes gold yesterday loves her home. She hummed a soft tune near the end of my treatment, similar to music I’d heard in Southeast Asia, so I asked where she learned it. She smiled widely…
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Great Big Beautiful World
We don’t have to leave home to see the great big beautiful world. No one does. The beautiful world embraces us: The landscapes we live in, the skies overhead, and right at our feet, in the royal purple winter crocuses that peek above the frozen soil here in the Pacific Northwest. The sun and moon rise and set every day in sometimes-stunning shows, free to all, wherever our feet are planted on this glorious earthly globe. So why does everyone get amped up about snapping the perfect photo of a sunset while on a cruise, myself included? It’s not like we haven’t seen one before, but it’s suddenly magical when…
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Why Travel? Come Home to the Same Place, Only Better
Ok that’s a puzzler: What does T.S. Eliot mean by that? As an Eliot-besotted English major back in the day, I analyzed the original poem where this quote is from and it’s not about travel, unless you mean travel to the inner recesses of your soul or a search for the meaning of existence. (If you like poetry, it’s a masterpiece worth musing over: Little Gidding) Despite that, I don’t think Eliot would mind that so many preachers, therapists, life coaches, and travellers find this quote motivational. In the larger work, Eliot challenges us to consider how all beginnings and endings on our life journeys transform us in meaningful ways,…
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Traveller’s Tales: Just Say WOW
What travel experiences have left you speechless? We were awestruck last year while touring St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Art Museum, which used to be Peter the Great’s Winter Palace. We just kept saying ‘wow’. During my studies of the 1917 Russian Revolution, I watched film footage of Red soldiers fiercely storming up the staircase pictured here. To walk up those same steps myself? Definitely a ‘wow’ moment. And then there was the art. Ibn Battuta, our inspirational quote author, left home at age 21 to complete a pilgrimage to Mecca. He loved travel so much that he didn’t come back for 29 years. When he returned he wrote A Gift to Those…
