Calgary is city where winter arrives early, hits hard and sticks around for a long, long time. So it is no surprise that three months of moderate weather means a full schedule of outdoor activities and festivals. The most famous is the city-wide rodeo celebration called Stampede. From what I hear, every company and household welcomes the Stampede with its own preview party. I missed this celebration held in July and many people I’ve met in Calgary have suggested this was a big mistake on my part. However, I was in town for the opening of the 10th annual GlobalFest  which took place last night… Read More…

When my kids were little we used to take them to Eastover Estate  & Retreat in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. Ignore the fancy-pants name, this was a home-spun, teeny-bit threadbare mom & pop resort – a place where three meals a day were served in the enormous dining hall, next to which was a equally enormous community space with fire place, game tables and 24/7 hot chocolate. We all loved the place because it was like going to camp. Heck, we could do the same activities at home but throwing darts and dancing to Top 40 tunes in the resort’s wood-paneled rec room was… Read More…

On a side street in Sedona, Arizona, behind the adobe-style shops and the Pink Jeeps that take tourists to the area’s abundant natural wonders, Felipe and Marcela Roldan in are making a new life for themselves in a tiny kitchen of the Oak Creek Brewing Company.The couple may not have made cheapflights.com’s just released top 10 hot dog stands around the world, but their Simon’s Colombia-style Hot Dogs deserves a mention. Through lunch and dinner, the Roldans turn out man-sized meals with an global theme. Recently,  my husband Jim and I ordered a selection of four dogs, the Colombian, the Cowboy, the Wunderhund and Tokyo Madness. I’ll admit, when I read… Read More…

The only other time my husband, Jim and I saw a whale in the wild, it was an orca that came up to our boat flashing its shiny black tail so close I gasped out loud. We were in, or I should say off the coast of Victoria, British Columbia. It was thrilling, but full disclosure, it was one whale and we’d traveled 90 minutes in very choppy waters to see it. So my expectation when boarding the Dolphin Fleet whale watching boat in Provincetown on Cape Cod last month was for a similarly look-hard-and-don’t blink experience. Wrong. Thirty-five Humpbacks, 9 North Atlantic Right Whales,… Read More…

“Crack House” was the phrase that sprang to mind when I pried open the door to board the Metro Plus commuter train to Simon’s Town in Western Cape, South Africa on Saturday morning. Yep, it looked like a scary place. By the end of the journey, one of my fellow travelers reminded me that first impressions aren’t always correct. Let me explain. First, there were no lights in the car and, as it was sitting in the station, no sunlight either. Not that much light could have permeated the scratched and fogged windows anyway. So I could see very little, but I could smell and… Read More…

It would not be entirely accurate to say that I had dinner at the Moyo Restaurant in Cape Town on Tuesday night. I ate there, but in fact, I had bought my meal from a street vendor at the V&A Waterfront, a humungous recreation district of shops, clubs and residences in the middle of the city’s working harbor. Before taking my order, Moses introduced himself to me with a warm handshake and then set out to prepare my quarter chicken and chips. It had been raining off and on all day so I asked if there was a dry table somewhere nearby where I could sit and eat…. Read More…

By Andrea Lee Negroni In New York, I ride the subway and buses. In Washington and Paris, I travel on Metro, and in any city with a bikeshare program, I ride a bike. Failing these, I take cabs. This routine gives me an excuse to brag occasionally about exercise, economy, and the environment. I’ve never been a “car person,” but a couple of hours at the Auto Shanghai 2013 could convert even a diehard devotee of public transport. At the Shanghai New International Expo Center last weekend, buildings larger than airplane hangars were mobbed with adoring crowds wielding cameras. The event, recommended by a female… Read More…

Sometime during my walk in Sedona’s Slide Rock State Park, an elderly man who had been walking on the path nearby looked at me and sighed, “Everywhere is beautiful”. He had dropped a few words from the sentence, but I knew what he meant. Everywhere you looked, there was something beautiful to see and his comment has become the caption to my memories of Sedona. We visited Slide Rock because of my husband’s sentimental attachment to a drive he made in his youth. Shortly after getting out of the Navy, with a new convertible sports car and a beautiful girl in the right seat, he’d… Read More…

If you are looking for an inspiring place to spend Earth Day, where better than the Grand Canyon where the reasons to protect the environment fill the eye in every direction? Four and a half million people from all over the world travel to see where history, geology, biology and botany come together in Nature’s most glorious classroom. So I felt very good indeed when I visited the canyon earlier this week on the earth-friendly Grand Canyon Railway, because this April 22nd, its historic steam locomotive will be chugging from Williams, Arizona to the Grand Canyon Railway Depot powered entirely by reused vegetable oil.  It… Read More…

The womph, womph, womph made me stop in my tracks and look up. It was the sound of wings, big wings, wings big enough to make the use of the verb “flapping” seem inappropriately diminutive.  Above me I saw a large white bird  pummeling the sky on its descent to the pond in the middle of the golf course where I was  walking my dog. I thought to myself, “It could be a goose,” because there are plenty of those here,  and as it flew it had its long neck thrust forward like a goose. But if that’s what it was, it was not like… Read More…