Travel
Below are Bud's travel articles from over the years. Soon we will add a table of contents for easier navigation.
(NOTE: This is a climb I did in January of 1988, but am posting anew to this website…..)
Mount Kilimanjaro, 19,340'
Mt. Kilimanjaro – 1/27/88. Seeing my friends, schoolgirl Nicole Wineland-Thomson and adventurer David Breashears, scaling Mt. Kilimanjaro in David’s Imax film at the Museum of Science in Boston in 2002, stirred memories of my own ascent almost 15 years before. continue reading »
June 16 2010 | Tanzania and Travel | 1 Comment »
Marvelous Spanish Steps with Mother's Day display of azaleas
ROME – Walked up a hill to see the most famous – and most infamous – of all tennis players. That would be the great painter Caravaggio, of course.
Oh, I know he’s been dead for 400 years, but you never know who you’ll run into while wandering along Rome’s skinny cobblestone streets. Caravaggio, whose straight name was Michelangelo Mensi, is hanging out on the museum walls of the Scuderie del Quirinale, where he grabs you with stark reality: from a bowl of fruit – you reach for a pear – to Goliath’s decapitated head. He, the conquering David, is a self-portrait and his last painting . More contrasts; the Annunciation sharing space with a prim lady cutting a man’s throat. Not to mention believable angels, seductive St. John the Baptists (no less than four versions) and a game of cards. continue reading »
May 21 2010 | Italy and Travel | 2 Comments »
Our crash landing in Lustenau, Austria, with poor Bud at the bottom of the basket! One has to go where the winds take them!
LUSTENAU, Austria — Drop in any time.
That was the surprisingly hospitable sentiment of people we didn’t know in this small rural town we’d never heard of.
Unannounced, we dropped from the benign blue sky, American strangers providing a little entertainment on a Sunday morning in June.
Lustenau? End of the line? Apparently, because there was no choice. This was it for Dovie, the towering flying machine known as a hot air balloon. Not long before, the gigantic sack, emblazoned with its logo, a blue dove of peace, was loafing along placidly at 11,000 feet. Below lay the countrysides of Switzerland and Austria, divided by a wet border – the Rhine. continue reading »
July 29 2009 | Austria and Switzerland | 2 Comments »
SANTA FE, New Mexico — Woman needs a fix. Has to feed her habit. The habit is called eating — specifically NewMex.
Once a year the craving for victuals of a Southwestern nature, injections of fiery red and green chili, overcomes my friend, Aurelio, and she takes off for the so-called “Land of Enchantment” (as the state’s license plates proclaim). There she grew up among Mexican immigrants on a hardscrabble ranch, hooked on grub hotter than Mephistopheles’s sauna or an arsonist’s piece de resistance. continue reading »
August 04 2005 | United States | No Comments »
Probably I should clean my walking shoes. But the smudges of muck and salt from Lake Eyre remind me of the wondrous journey into the South Australian Outback, of unimaginable vastness and sights, and extremely friendly – if few – people encountered along the way. Besides, I knew that snow at home, Boston, would do the cleaning job.
continue reading »
February 01 2005 | Australia | No Comments »
ARROWTOWN, New Zealand – You might call it a double-dose of Middle-earth. For a Tolkien junkie, it’s heaven.
Although I don’t fit that profile – Frodo isn’t my go-go guy – I did read J.R.R. Tolkien’s stuff to my kid, and wasn’t going to miss a chance to plunge into the splendors of Middle-earth (aka New Zealand) that Oscar-winning producer-director Peter Jackson, a native, selected for his filmed trilogy.
Jackson knew what he was doing. So small, so few people, this country of two principal islands is a scenic smorgasbord of distinctive topography: ruggedly commanding ranges, virginal forests, grand beaches, endless sheep and deer-dotted meadows, vast uninhabited tracts – some lonely and desolate — conducive to solitude and privacy. continue reading »
January 10 2004 | New Zealand | No Comments »
COGNE, Italy – It’s a hideaway that makes you recall the longingly romantic lyric:
“There’s a small hotel, with a wishing well. I wish…we were there together.”
We have the bygone American songsmiths, Richard Rodgers and Lorenze Hart, to thank for that gem. And we have the Jeantet-Roullet family to thank for 81 years stewardship of their inimitable small hotel in the Cogne Valley, a pocket of the Italian Alps.
Sorry, no wishing well on the property. But the joyously pink-walled Hotel Bellevue, resting in its meadow, is the stucco-and-timber embodiment of Rodgers and Hart’s wishful revery. continue reading »
May 15 2003 | Italy | 2 Comments »
ZAO MEN, Qi Dong Province, China – As the kids’ horns brassily blend with the thumping of a uniformed drum and bugle corps – some of the fanfarers actually in tune – you feel swept up in a scene from a movie. It might be a film entitled “Hail the Conquering Angel.”
Fireworks crackle. Schoolchildren in warmup suits, white, blue or red, are passing out flowers, singing and chanting welcoming sentiments, waving and smiling at us big-time while scarlet banners draped between street light poles salute the annual return of the Chen family to their ancestral village. continue reading »
November 20 2002 | China | No Comments »
New York, NY — The ghosts of New York’s Third Avenue will stay with me.It was Black Tuesday, 12 days ago, and the ghosts were easily identified: those survivors able to walk away from the shambles of the World Trade Center – ashen apparitions, dirty-faced, smudged by debris, coated with the grime of tragedy. They were among those surging northward on clotted sidewalks, refugees marching to the unending threnody of sirens and the barking horns of fire trucks headed way downtown.
continue reading »
September 23 2001 | United States | No Comments »
SANTA FE – Feverishly fluttering . . . flapping so furiously fast that focusing on it is a problem for the human eye . . . The winged wanderer pauses for an “In your face!” pose, just halts in midair, as though clinging to an invisible trapeze. Looks you square in the eye, this stop-action show-off – then is gone with its buddies.
Michael Jordan’s hang-time is small-time stuff to this creature that could use one of Michael’s toenails as a landing strip. With room to spare. continue reading »
September 10 2001 | Travel and United States | No Comments »
Next »
