Travel

I hadn’t really thought about it before I visited, but Sicily’s remarkable and consequential history should be obvious. Much of the history of Europe is the history of the Mediterranean Sea. As a large island right in the middle of the Mediterranean, Sicily was strategically vital at least from the time of the ancient Greeks through World War II. Some of the island’s oldest signs of human habitation are cave paintings dating to around 8000 B.

It was raining heavily when my flight landed Toulouse-Blagnac Airport in Toulouse, France early on a Saturday evening. Ducking through the raindrops, I made my way to the car my wife and in-laws had rented. We drove southeast about an hour to the town of Carcassonne. Carcassonne’s predominant feature is the massive citadel, La Cité, that rings its hilltop. People have lived in the area around Carcassonne since around 3500 B.

I took a red-eye to London. My flight landed at 9:30 in the morning. I’d slept fitfully, but was surprised to find I wasn’t aching with tiredness. Boarding the Heathrow Express, I rode into Paddington Station and transferred to the Underground for the last segment of my trip to a flat in Bermondsey. We started our tour of London with nearby Borough Market. The market features lots of food, including meat, dairy, and baked goods.

Contents Reykjavík The Golden Circle Southern Iceland Southeastern & Eastern Iceland Northern Iceland Western Iceland Landing at Keflavík International Airport in the early hours of a Saturday morning was a little disappointing. It was cloudy and foggy, and my first glimpse of Iceland through the airplane window was a barren rocky peninsula barely visible through the mist. Lauren and I disembarked from the aircraft and entered the terminal, a maze of duty-free stores, restaurants, and coffee shops.

I spent a weekend in late October touring two battlefields of the American Civil War with my wife and in-laws. We left Washington on a sunny Saturday morning and drove to Gettysburg. Fought from July 1 to July 3 of 1863, Gettysburg is often considered the turning point of the war. Robert E. Lee brought his Army of Northern Virginia, composed of about 75,000 men, to meet George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac, with about 104,000 men.

Lying between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians, the Shenandoah Valley is a stunning place brimming with natural beauty, historic towns, wineries, and breweries. I visited twice during October 2017, on two different fall weekends. My first stop was the Purple Wolf Vineyard. The vineyard lies on the White Oak Lavender farm, a delightfully pastoral spot west of Shenandoah National Park off of Highway 81. The vineyard has both indoor and outdoor seating, and sitting outside was perfect on an unseasonably warm October day.

Days 1-3: Bangkok It took exactly 28 hours to travel from my door in Orinda, California, to my hotel in in Bangkok, Thailand. My finacee, Lauren, and I had decided to take a trip to Thailand and Vietnam because we both had some time off during the summer of 2015. We flew out of San Francisco, via Singapore Airlines, at 1:20 AM in the early morning hours of June 24. After brief stops in Hong Kong and Singapore, we finally landed in Bangkok.

For his 60th birthday, my father, who has always loved hiking, mountaineering, and the outdoors, decided he wanted to go on an adventure with his family. He settled on rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon as his expedition of choice. Unfortunately, Grand Canyon trips tend to fill up as early as two years in advance, and we weren’t able to book one. Instead, we decided to raft the Colorado through Cataract Canyon.

Contents Norway Tallinn Helsinki Stockholm Copenhagen Reviews Norway After my trip to Svalbard, I flew south to Bergen, Norway. There I met Lauren and much of her family: her parents, sister, aunt, and grandparents. Our group of eight would travel together over the next two weeks, through five countries and seven cities. Upon our arrival in Bergen, we took a taxi to our lodgings at the Klosterhagen Hotell. After checking in, we walked around the area near our hotel.

“The bleakest barest most inhospitable godforsaken dead end of nowhere.” —Philip Pullman Arrival Horseback Riding Svalbard Museum Dog Sledding Hiortfjellet Barentsburg Reviews Arrival So the character Lee Scoresby describes Svalbard, an archipelago in the far north, in Philip Pullman’s excellent novel The Golden Compass. Nonetheless, visiting Svalbard has been a dream of mine since childhood, a dream that was partly inspired by that book. Apart from the literary basis, Svalbard is beautiful, has a fascinating history, and is one of the most accessible parts of the high arctic.