I know summer is over. I know talking about vacation is out of season. But the arrival of fall prompts me to go over some of the things I’ve done this past year that made me feel far away without leaving home. Took a class At the tail end of a cold Connecticut winter, my friend Chuck Allen invited all the people who have raved about his home-baked focaccia bread, to stop talking about it and actually learn to make it. The group, many of whom did not know each other, gathered in the expansive Stamford kitchen of Peggy Flood, one of Chuck’s running partners. From… Read More…

One does not decide to spend four days on a trip that can be accomplished in 5 hours by air without some weighing of the pros and cons. On the upside, taking the VIA Rail train from Vancouver to Toronto would give me the chance to actually see a part of the country with which I am not familiar. It would give me expanses of uninterrupted time to finish working on a writing project and also a plus, I’ve always, always enjoyed sleeping in a moving vehicle, train, boat, car it makes no difference.  The VIA Rail trip promised 4 nights of glorious slumber. On… Read More…

  Mexico has its playas, the Caribbean its beat, but Americans are prone to overlook the charms of the neighbor to the north. I’ve already had a healthy dose of the remedy to that affliction with visits to two of Canada’s largest cities; Calgary and Vancouver. Soon, I’m off on a four day journey back across this great big land on VIA Rail, Canada’s version of the Orient Express. A full report on the train trip will follow my arrival in Toronto, but I already know it will be a far different experience from the ones I’ve had so far. While a tour by train… Read More…

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…

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…

If you are one of the 14 million people living in the New York metropolitan area or even one of those who will visit the region this autumn, here’s a tip; Set aside a day, hop on the MetroNorth train to Connecticut and visit Old Greenwich, my little town. For the entirely reasonable price of around $8, an electric train will carry you from the congested chaos of the city to the tranquil Nutmeg State and voila! there you are in New England. Didn’t think it could be so easy did you? You can thank me later. The mantra in our home from the beginning of September… Read More…