Thick sour cigarette smoke welcomed me at the Istanbul Ataturk Airport and it was umm….not welcome. Trying to escape the fumes, I ducked behind one offending smoker and instead met an invisible wall of bus and taxi exhaust. After traveling for nearly 24 hours, I simply wanted a fresh salad, a hot shower and a […]
I couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear as I jogged across the finish line at the Inaugural Boulder Ironman http://www.ironman.com this summer. Earlier in the day, the Ironman staff and volunteers had laid bright red carpet along the 13th Street finish chute and had lined the runners’ path with metal crowd control stanchions. […]
Once upon a time there was city in Germany called Berlin, and it had been divided into two sections, East Berlin and West Berlin, thanks to the Soviets not wanting the East Germans to escape into a free and prosperous Western society. A 12’ tall concrete wall had been erected around West Berlin, effectively closing […]
Enjoy this short video highlighting a few best of Africa photographs I took during the 2014 summer in South Africa, Mozambique and Swaziland. I used a Nikon D7000 and Nikon Coolpix P510. Note: For best results, view this YouTube video full screen in high-definition. (After starting the video, hover over lower right corner of video for […]
During a recent Saturday morning bike ride, just out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a herd of llamas grazing. Other than their jaws chomping away on the dewy grass, the llamas hardly moved and I could have easily missed seeing them. I looked back to see if my eyes had played a […]
How much freedom to choose or independence do you need when you travel? Freedom to choose where to go and when to go? And independence to not follow a trip leader or do what “everyone else does”. For people traveling with an organized tour, freedom to choose is generally diminished since the trip leader will make […]
How lucky am I that www.TravelTalesAndStuff.com has recently been nominated for the Liebster Award by Mr. Ben Pastore of TripAccomplice.wordpress.com blog fame. Thank you so much! As a fairly new blogger, I needed to peak at the Google data bank as well as Ben’s nomination post to learn what the heck the Liebster Award is….I’ll […]
Yes, I’m really writing about how to ride a camel, and perhaps I should write how to successfully ride a camel. After all, if the rider falls off, then it can’t really be considered riding a camel, can it? Camels have really cool elbows and knees, and while they may seem disjointed and wobbly, they aren’t. When […]
Моско́вский метрополите́н – Moskovsky metropoliten – Moscow Metro I cannot read Cyrillic. Nor can my sister who was traveling with me. But we still stood in the underground Moscow Metro station with a color coded transit map in hand, and thought that if at least we couldn’t read, we could at least decipher the red, blue […]
From a highway’s black ice in Alabama to gravel mountainous roads in the Kingdom of Swaziland, my fun Chevy Spark rental cars provided a great backdrop to some of my American and African adventures. It all started with a severe winter ice storm moving across the southeastern United States and airlines canceling thousands of flights, including my next […]