Tag: bashful adventurer

Flashback Friday: Circling the Palatine

What I love about travel, aside from actually visiting a place, is the anticipation beforehand and then the memories afterward. I’m years and years past my first trip to Rome, and my memories of my solitary adventure there are a…

#TBT Remembering the Italian Lake District

It’s Throwback Thursday, so here is a photo from a 1989 month-long trip to Italy. What I have learned since that trip: label your photos while you still remember where you went. I’m pretty sure this is Lake Maggiore, but…

Paris: This Is the End

A fitting finale for our last day in Paris is a visit to Père-Lachaise Cemetery. On the subway ride there, I begin to doubt the appropriateness of this trek. Are we squandering our time by looking to the past? Will…

Reading Without Reservations

I pick up Alice Steinbach’s Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman (Random House, 2000) at North Salem, N.Y.’s Ruth Keeler Memorial Library book sale, so I don’t have a lot of money invested in it. The first 20…

The Ups and Downs of Mont Saint-Michel

First sighting of Mont Saint-Michele. Photo credit: V. Laino

I both love and loathe my experience at Mont Saint-Michel. I’m enamored of its history—how the Archangel Michael appeared to a priest some 700 years ago and told him to build this church in the water, how the priest equivocated…

Quality Time at the Eiffel Tower

Figuring that the Eiffel Tower will be a ho-hum stop on our tour of France, I buy tickets to go see it on the first night we will be in Paris. I’ve seen the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Corona Park,…

Dining Before the Revolution in North Salem

There’s just something alluring about having dinner in a low-ceilinged dining room with peanut shells on the floor and a fireplace and ancient-looking wooden beams holding everything in place and rippled views from the antique glass windows. That this place—Purdy’s…