Where The Mississippi River Starts
I first met the Mississippi River in 1972 when my mom moved - with me and my two siblings from Brooklyn, NY to rural Iowa. We first arrived in Clinton,…
My Personal United Airlines Horror Story
Context Summer 2023 finds United Airlines once again in the news for poor service, canceling thousands of flights just prior to a major holiday weekend and blaming the FAA. Their…
The Bonsais of Omiya
If your visions or memories of Japan lead to thoughts of bonsai trees, you should visit Omiya, Japan, a town specifically founded for bonsai growers. Omiya Though mentioned as if…
Travel and Phone Data
Using your mobile phone during international travel has always been expensive. Pre-smartphone, you'd carefully ration how often you make/take calls because the per-minute charges ratcheted up substantially once out of…
The Asian Gardens of Portland
In our first visit to Portland, Oregon, my wife and I visited the Portland Japanese Garden in Washington Park and the Lan Su Chinese Garden in the Old Town Chinatown…
Amsterdam By Ferry
After I spoke at a tech conference in London, my wife and I took Eurostar to Amsterdam for vacation: Keukenhof, the Vermeer exhibit at the Rijksmuseum, an open-boat canal tour,…
Pre-Internet Foreign Travel
In the mid-1990s, I went on a personal Austrian-Hungarian Empire Tour: fly into Munich, pick up a rental car, and drive south towards Austria. In those embryonic days of the…
Minnesota Landscape Arboretum
On a surprisingly-comfortable June Sunday - 68°F/20°C, sunny, slight breeze, not a cloud in sight - my wife and I visited the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum to spend the afternoon walking…
The Joy of Suica
Pre-pandemic I knew I mostly paid with credit or debit cards, less and less with cash. And I'm not the only one: cash transactions in the US have decreased from…