It’s easy to learn a language when your feet are on the ground. For the first time in many visits to Croatia, my hit-and-miss efforts to grasp the language are bearing fruit. Croatian has just enough similarities to Russian to have tripped me up in … Read more
In banking, when they’re trying to teach you about counterfeit money, they don’t give you counterfeit money. They give you real money, over and over and over again. You learn the feel of it. Then you can identify counterfeit money just from the feel of … Read more
Sometimes it’s the glances that remain with us. Glances that barely hold the eye, but are enough to tell the tale. I’ve been recalling the recent three weeks of intense travel during my last stint as a Smithsonian speaker. I confess that this voyage overwhelmed … Read more
Sometimes it’s more than I can take in. Too many impressions, too many new names, too much information. That’s how I felt when we docked in Muscat, Oman last week. We’d been enveloped in the deep green of coastal cities in Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, and … Read more
1 Van … 2 Parents … 5 Children … 5 Weeks … 32 States … 11,000 Miles … and countless songs to pass the miles! Last August and September, our family, with five kids then aged four to seventeen, traveled from our home in Richmond, … Read more
A neo-Gothic church almost touches the back of the Schweitzerhof Hotel here in Lucerne, Switzerland. The Matheus Church is where Richard Wagner and Cosima von Bülow were married on August 25, 1870. They had to convert to Protestantism to marry there, as their divorces were … Read more
This is my third tour in the past year as Study Leader on an intense, rewarding Smithsonian Journey called “Old World Europe.” Out my window shimmers the fairy-tale façade of the Hungarian Parliament, casting its reflection upon the dark waters of the Danube. The Margarite … Read more