Blogs from United States, North America - page 7076

With Family, Mayot & Joelette... read more

Two and a half weeks after I returned from Canada, the family left for the States on home leave. This was the first time that all the relatives would see Will who was now almost a year old. But first we would visit the Pacific Northwest to include British Columbia, fly to California, and drive from California to Colorado. I believe in breaking in our kids at an early age for road trips. Tamara was almost five and Rosanna was almost three, and they all did great. 20 July 1990 Friday. We flew from Brussels to Chicago where we spent the night at an airport hotel, having learned previously that it is better to avoid connections late in the afternoon when there is a possibility that thunderstorms could disrupt the follow on flights. 21 July 1990 ... read more

OK, here I go.  My first blog.  It isn’t recent; I actually culled it from an old travel account that was never finished.  Maybe the cheers and attaboys I get will spur me on.  Who knows?           The Antitourist.  I hate tourists!  I hate crowds!  I love to travel, to see new places, actually old places mostly, to go where no man has gone before, except the early explorers, the Rogers and the Clarks, the homesteaders, the surveyors, the civil engineers, the operating engineers with their multi-tired hundred ton machines, the moveable stationary cement plants of the road builders, the sign puter-uppers to tell you where you're going, where you are, where you've been and how many people have been there before your discovery of, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, New York City and Indian pictographs done with ... read more

We were due to arrive in New York in the late evening, so again we were taking no chances and we’d booked ahead. The hostel was on the 24th floor of a hotel on 43rd Street. Finding it was a doodle, once we’d worked out in which direction the street names go up and in which direction they go down. Anywhere else, the view from that high up would be fantastic, but in New York all we could see was the side of the higher building opposite. We loved New Your, despite the fact that everything was almost 50% more expensive than on the West Coast and being constantly asked whether I wanted to buy any drugs started to get extremely annoying. Obviously I had been travelling too long and I looked like someone who took ... read more

The manager at Jim's Place told us that they had another hostel in Venice, so he booked ahead for us. It would be infinitely better than that German hippy commune. Despite booking ahead, the hostel itself was still full, but they would let us stay in a camper van that was parked out back. It was great and we had it all to ourselves. Greg went off to the gym and I went along with him. I was basically the smallest person there, including the women, and the looks of total disgust when I walked in were a bit disheartening. We were there for about an hour, taking it in turns to do the various exercises, with me using a pathetic excuse for weights. Every so often Greg would point-out some world champion. I couldn't bend ... read more