Posts in Category: United States
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911 Memorial – A Must Visit in New York City
This is a photo of Manhattan taken only minutes before the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 and changed the world forever. Nobody who lived in North America will ever forget exactly what they were doing when they first heard the news. Unlike other tragic […]
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The Iroquois – Location is Everything in NYC
I’ve made no secret over the years I’ve been writing this website that I’m a big fan of the Small Luxury Hotels brand. You’ll find posts on SLH hotels in Rome, Venice, Nairobi and even my native Nova Scotia among others on this website including The Quin in New York City. Recently Alison and I made our […]
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Universal Studios VIP Tour – Worth Every Penny
Anyone who has read many of the posts on this website will know that I am not a big fan of the artificial and that includes theme parks. You will find only one other post on a theme park and that is about a trip to Legoland in Florida with my oldest grandson two years ago. The […]
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Joshua Tree National Park – Two Beautiful Deserts
On a recent spur of the moment trip to Las Vegas, which did not overwhelm us, Alison and I decided to explore some of the southwest’s natural wonders starting with Death Valley, which was truly amazing in winter. We followed that up with a drive to Palm Springs and then Indio which we used as […]
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Death Valley in Winter – Simply Awesome
I recently made my first and possibly last visit to Las Vegas which lived down to my expectations. After five days of total artificiality I couldn’t wait to get out of town to see something real, experience something natural and breathe fresh air. Looking at a map of the west, I realized that Death Valley […]
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Ketchum Idaho – Hemingway’s Last Stand
Ernest Hemingway is one of those writers who people have little ambivalence about – you either really like him or you hate him. Whether these dispositions are based on his actual writings or on his unabashedly mysogynistic lifestyle doesn’t seem to make a difference. I can overlook his adulterous womanizing, lying and ridiculous braggadocio because […]
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Hells Canyon Adventures – Snake River Rafting
I’ve come to Idaho for a number of reasons, including visiting Ernest Hemingway’s grave in Ketchum, but the top one is definitely to travel through Hells Canyon. It is a ten mile stretch of water on the Snake River just below the Hells Canyon Dam that links Idaho and Oregon in the middle of Hells […]
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Colonial National Historic Park, Virginia
When I was a boy there was a monthly event that I looked forward to with almost as great anticipation as Christmas morning – the arrival of the latest National Geographic magazine. I loved poring over the maps and looking at the pictures for which the magazine was justly famous. In 1960 National Geographic started […]
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Philadelphia – A Day in the City of Brotherly Love
On our most recent mid-Spring journey to Florida from Nova Scotia Alison and I decided to stop in Philadelphia for a few days as we’d never spent any time in what is one of America’s truly great cities. Our visit began at beautiful Longwood Gardens which I wrote about in this post and ended with a way too […]