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Ballybunion – Why Tom Watson Loves It
This the third post from last fall’s amazing golf trip to southwest Ireland with Barry McGuigan’s Golf Travel NI. The first post featured the one and only Old Head of Kinsale and the second, Arnold Palmer’s Irish masterpiece, Tralee. In between we played Waterville, but the weather was so nasty that I couldn’t get a […]
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White Sands – New Mexico’s Snowy Desert
Our journey through New Mexico continues with a stop at Roswell, site of the alleged crash of an alien spaceship in 1947. The International UFO Museum & Research Center sounds like a pretty serious institution, but in reality is actually a hokey tourist trap with plenty of photo ops with ETs of all kinds. From […]
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Carlsbad Caverns – Absolutely Nothing Like It
I’ve been visiting caves and cave systems around the world for many decades and thought I had seen some of the best, for example the caves of Nerja, Spain which I wrote about in this post and described as phantasmagorical, which they are. But, until you’ve been to Carlsbad Caverns and experienced the excellent way […]
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Guadalupe Mountains N.P. – Smith Springs Hike
For such a large state, Texas has surprisingly few national parks; only two in fact – Big Bend which opened in 1944 and the much newer Guadalupe Mountains which only opened in 1972. After the recent SATW conference in El Paso, Alison and I set out to explore west Texas before moving on to New […]
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Puerto Vallarta – Revolution Day Surprises
People are always asking me why I go to Mexico, a place they consider, only because they haven’t been there, one of the scariest and most dangerous places on the planet. They don’t know what they were talking about. That was my opinion until today, when on a visit to the Malecón in Puerto Vallarta […]
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Hueco Tanks S.P. – Great El Paso Day Trip
We had just wrapped up a great SATW conference in the west Texas city of El Paso that I wrote about in this post and the plan was to do some exploring in the immediate area before moving on to Guadalupe Mountains National Park and then New Mexico. A little online research quickly revealed that […]
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Fort Sumner – America’s Unfinest Hour?
After visiting White Sands National Monument, I went to Fort Sumner, New Mexico to visit Billy the Kid’s grave and instead found a far more important story, that of Bosque Redondo and the forced ‘Long Walk’ of the Navajos and the confinement of the Mescalero Apaches. It was one of the lowest points in history […]
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El Paso – Be Prepared to be Surprised
When El Paso was announced as the 2019 SATW conference site in Barbados in 2018, I know a few eyebrows went up. After all this organization has been hosted by New Zealand, China, Iceland, Germany, Mexico, Bermuda and a number of much bigger American cities to name only a few. Was El Paso, at less […]
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Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument
We had just wrapped up our visit to southeastern New Mexico with a visit to Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands National Monument and it was now time to start heading southwest. Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument in southwest New Mexico is not easy to get to, but well worth the effort as you will be […]
From the road
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April 20th, 2023
I’ve had a bad case of writer’s block since getting back from Southeast Asia, but I did finish this post on the fan… https://t.co/HoJjP4jeha
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April 12th, 2023
One of the main reasons to visit the Galapagos is to see the giant tortoises. This latest post explains where you c… https://t.co/mQ8PWha8j3
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April 11th, 2023
Spring is very late this year so it’s nice to see the crocuses finally show up. https://t.co/7HD6wvsEJ6
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April 9th, 2023
Sunday morning is a good time to reflect back on another Sunday in Reading, England which I wrote about here:… https://t.co/EJ4Is2NSqz