Blogs from North America - page 17

It was a perfect sunny day for a Caddo Native American festival. I arrived and saw that there was large attendance there. The Hasinai tribe of Caddo were very peaceful farmers that arrived there about 700 AD. They started building their three large earthen mounds about 1000 AD and finished about 1250 AD. Around 1300 AD they disappeared. The mound I visited was their burial mound; and the two larger ceremonial mounds were much farther away and I did not walk to or photograph them on this visit. I admire the Caddo, and other Native Americans for living well with nature and not overstressing their environment. The first thing I did was to visit their Visitors Center to see their exhibits and speak with the Caddo people. They did not have a visitors sign in log ... read more

For those of you who have never visited the famous Buena Vista Cafe in North Beach/Fisherman's Wharf, this story ought to entertain you. Maybe San Francisco didn’t invent Irish coffee, per se, but the city by the Bay sure popularized this cozy, whipped-creamy, whiskey-spiked coffee drink. The story goes: one November evening in 1952, Pulitzer-Prize-winning travel writer Stanton Delaplane was sitting at the bar of the Buena Vista Café on Hyde Street when the café’s owner, Jack Koeppler, challenged Delaplane to help duplicate the original, which the writer had tasted at Ireland’s Shannon Airport. They tried one concoction after the next, not quite getting it right. Finally, Koeppler returned to Shannon to ask the original inventor, Chef Joe Sheridan, for advice. Eventually, the recipe was perfected. Turns out there are two secrets: The cream needs to ... read more

I'm back on the road for a short three weeks, and not really a short trip for this little pre-Christmas trip. My first stop is one of the hippier places in the States that I haven't visited yet. I spent two days in Austin! Bali to Austin is not a short hop, and this is just the first stop of an interesting trip. I left Bali on a full flight to Taipei before connecting in premium economy to LAX. Eva air seats in premium economy are just a solid bargain that I could become nearly a regular. Point to note, sadly ANA doesn't fly to Bali yet! Food offering was better than last time, but the key here is the seat as the f&b offering is really not impressive. I got my little stop-over in Los ... read more

Last weekend, I headed out to New Orleans with my co-worker and long time friend, Christina. We were stopping by for our friend's birthday party on the way to a conference near Chicago. I started out with a huge fish and chips meal at the Canucks restaurant at YVR, boarded a plane to Houston, then on to New Orleans. United Airlines does not have movie screens and the app barely works onboard so read most of the flight. We arrived in New Orleans at 9:30 pm, dropped our bags at the hotel and headed out to the Abbey Pub to meet our co-worker, Claire, who was also in town for a conference. Her local friends (Lulu and Jason) gave us some great tips for seeing the best city sights in one weekend. After some beers, we ... read more

It was in turn fantastic, beautiful, heartbreaking, educational, exhausting, inspiring, disappointing, marvelous, exciting and just plain fun. We are back in Ocean Shores as of late this afternoon. I managed to change my pace almost immediately (think about nine weeks worth of mail). I think it will take until the end of the week to completely unpack the van, re-clean the house, re-stock the refrigerator etc. John has unfortunately come home with a chest cold. He started with a cough on Sunday. This morning he was feeling like he had a proper cold. I have doubled my vitamin C, started taking echinacea and I am washing my hands a lot. We don't have any plans or commitments this week, so he can rest, regroup and revive. We were so lucky with the weather and our health ... read more