On the road
Life's journeys are worth sharing.
Category: Blog post
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(This is a long overdue follow up to the previous post. My bad. Personal and professional commitments got in the way. ) I am picking up on that air travel thread of baggage problems. At the outset, I have to say that most people go through their flights without a hitch, but once in a while…
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Many travelers put a lot of thought into packing, to the point they often overthink and overpack. I am one of them, and I have many times in the past overestimated things, thrown good sense to the wind, and departed with heavy luggage. As a result, I have found myself exhausted in strange and not-so-strange…
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It was freezing that December in Belgium and the only place to offer warmth and a seat without me having to buy anything was the Catholic church, and so I quickly dashed into it, hoping to also light a candle and say a prayer. The church was a cavernous Gothic structure designed to make you…
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I was recently reminded of a fictional conversation that took place at a poker game in a popular TV series some 25 years ago: CJ Cregg: (dealing cards to other WH staffers ) King… possible flush… ace no help…. six… possible straight…. Dave of love for the dealer… ace bets…. Mandy: Check! Sam: Check! CJ: Check!Leo: Check!Josh: Check!Toby:…
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The sound of steady rain woke me one recent midnight, and I imagined monsoon clouds irrigating the land as they always do this time of the year in the home country. It’s the kind of soothing sound that makes a person sink deeper into bed, an announcement that the season has simply arrived and is…
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For the past two weeks, I’ve been taking my daily walks around the neighborhood in the company of Ben Tucker, more precisely, his mesmerizing voice reading the 1962 novel Big Sur by Jack Kerouac.* Big Sur is a first-person stream-of-consciousness account of a summer the alcoholic writer Jack Duluoz spends in the San Franciso-Monterey-Big Sur…
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Around this time last year, my family made a three-day/two-night trip to Yosemite National Park in California, and among the hundreds of images I took home were variations on this one. Only when I was reviewing my photo gallery much later did I realize that I had seemed to capture at least three pairs of…
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When I planned my short side trip to Poland in October 2023, it was with fear and anxiety, but also a little bit of excitement. I had never been there, knew no one from there or anyone who had been there, except for an old friend of Polish ancestry previously based in the UK and…
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My trip to Berlin and Krakow in 2023 took all of a week, but the backstory and the side stories that came with it made it seem much longer and left some lessons for travel. At that time, I wrestled with the decision to take a trip abroad, mainly out of guilt that I was…
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On Jan. 27, 2025, the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the day the United Nations General Assembly set aside to remember the victims of the Holocaust. The U.N. chose that date because it marked the day in 1945 when Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau from the clutches of the Nazi. Auschwitz-Birkenau, located in Poland, was…
On the road 