I’ve never seen a hotel quite like Arolithos Traditional Cretan Village before. I only stayed there because I took the gamble that Hotwire offers, and I thought that I’d lost the gamble. I’m still not sure one way or the other. Disclosure: If you click and book a room using a link in this article,…
The town of Rethymnon on the north coast of Crete is a popular destination for visitors who want to venture away from their all-inclusive resorts for a bit of local color. The narrow streets of its old center wind between rows of narrow houses with balconies, often overflowing with flowers. Shops sell everything from made-in-China…
Just a week or so after visiting the Ter Apel cloister, a place of peace and contemplation, I arrived at The Holy Monastery of Arkadi in Crete, a similarly contemplative religious place. Arkadi is Eastern Orthodox, while Ter Apel was Catholic and then Protestant, yet it looked to me as if the monks in both places…
On my recent trip to Crete to lead a workshop, I was able to visit just a couple of sites, one of which was Knossos, a UNESCO World Heritage tentative list site (along with the four other Minoan palace ruins in Crete). I was looking forward to seeing these ruins of an ancient civilization, the…
The village of Ter Apel has been in the news a lot lately. A huge refugee center there is the first home for hundreds of Syrians, Eritreans, Afghans and others seeking safety and a new life in the Netherlands. Ter Apel’s claim to fame, though, if you can call it famous, is a medieval cloister…
Disclosure: The following is a sponsored post; I received payment for writing it and including a link. All opinions, however, are my own! My 17-year-old son, Robert, is not a traveler. That’s not to say that he hasn’t traveled, however; we’ve dragged him along with us on vacations all his life. Rather, he just isn’t…
Frequent travelers often express a certain disdain for places that are “touristy,” meaning crowded with tourists: San Marco’s square in Venice, for example, or the Tower of London, or the Forbidden City in Beijing. Many of us avoid such places, preferring the more off-the-beaten-track destinations. Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you click on…
When you think of the Netherlands and gardens and flowers, what comes immediately to mind? I assume your answer is “tulips.” Tulips are cultivated here in huge quantity and they or the bulbs are exported all over the world. Keukenhof and Giethoorn One of the biggest attractions for tourists in the Netherlands is Keukenhof, a tulip…
If you find yourself with a few hours to kill at Amsterdam Central train station, there’s plenty to do right nearby. First of all, if you have shopping bags or luggage with you, don’t schlep them with you. Inside Amsterdam Central, on the right side of the building if you are looking at it from…
The first thing you see on entering the Sex Museum Amsterdam is a life size statue of Priapus, the Greek god of fertility, and he’s … well, let’s say he’s pretty turned on, and well-endowed. Review of the Sex Museum Amsterdam The rest of the museum goes downhill from there. Unfortunately, if I want to keep…
Disclosure: The following is a sponsored post in that I received a free SIM card with credit from Tellink in return for reviewing it. All opinions are, as always, my own. Those of us who travel frequently, and especially those of us who travel for work or who blog about travel, often struggle with telephone…
The following post is sponsored content. It was originally published on IHG’s blog on May 9, 2016. Planning a visit to London? After booking your flight and picking the perfect London hotel, the next item on the list is figuring out where to dine in this British metropolis. London is packed with everything from expensive, swanky…
A lawsuit against FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, was filed back in 2014 by Senator Rand Paul and the Republicans Overseas and, while I am certainly no fan of the senator, I support this lawsuit. It was, however, dismissed in April 2016 because the Ohio federal judge who heard the case decided that…
When I first arrived in the Netherlands back in 1997, one of the first bits of sightseeing I did, besides exploring my new hometown of Groningen itself, was to go on a driving tour of village churches in Groningen province. The idea came from my favorite guidebook: the Michelin green guide to the Netherlands. The…
A Grimm Fairy Tale Once upon a time, a rooster, a dog, a donkey and a cat, realizing they’d outlived their usefulness and under threat of being eaten or killed, set out toward Bremen. Their plan was to make a living as musicians: the Town Musicians of Bremen. On the way, they passed a cottage…
My husband and I recently spent a weekend in Bremen, which is about a two-hour trip from home. We didn’t choose Bremen because of anything in particular except that we wanted a weekend away, and we also felt we needed to be close enough to get home quickly if anything went wrong with the three…
If you visit the center of the German city of Bremen, you can’t possibly miss seeing St Petri Dom, the huge church whose massive, chunky twin spires dominate the central squares. St Petri Dom doesn’t have the beauty or grace of, for example, Notre Dame in Paris. As a matter of fact, my first comment…
While I didn’t do any shopping in Dubai, I did manage a quick walk around the Bastakiya District: also known as Old Dubai. Dubai was originally a small port that made its living from pearl diving, fishing and trade, especially with Iran. Besides the nomadic Bedouins, who lived in tents, the populations who settled here…
Shopping is A. Big. Deal. in Dubai. Whenever I asked people who live there what I should see and do, the answer usually included shopping. (Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. That means that if you click on the link and buy tickets, I will get a small commission.) I am very much NOT a…
On my recent visit to Dubai on Emirates Airline, I was pleased to discover that I’d be flying on a plane I’d only seen from a distance before: the enormous Airbus A380. The A380 The A380 is a behemoth of a plane. Like Boeing’s 747, it just doesn’t look like it should be able to…
“If Trump gets elected, I’m leaving the country.” I don’t live in the US, but I have read comments like this on social media and in the news. Apparently, sometimes this isn’t just an idle threat. The Guardian cites a Luminoso survey which found that: … about 4% of 4.5 million Donald Trump-related tweets contained threats…
Almost five months after my renunciation day, I received my Certificate of Loss of Nationality today. It seems ironic that it arrived on Tax Day. People keep asking me how that feels, but I have trouble formulating an answer. Certificate of Loss of Nationality = divorce papers The best analogy I’ve been able to find…
A couple of times a week, I commute to my part-time job in Leeuwarden, in Friesland province. Sometimes I drive, but as much as possible, I like to take the train. I start by bicycling to the train station in the center of Groningen, parking the bike and boarding the train. The train trip takes about 35…
About a year ago I wrote a post about Groningen, the small city where I live. I mapped out a route that started at the train station and wound its way through the city, ending at the landmark Martinitoren. The Martinitoren Today, for the first time in several years, I climbed the Martinitoren, and it…
Last fall I attended the World Travel Market in London, a three-day sensory overload of networking with travel industry and destination exhibitors (5000 stands and 50,000 visitors!). I stayed with a friend and fellow blogger, Shobha of Just Go Places, who lives in London. Each day we got in her car and drove across the…
Perched high on an escarpment overlooking Lake Malawi, Livingstonia was established by missionaries from the Free Church of Scotland back in 1894. The story goes that they tried several times to establish missions down on the shore of the lake, but kept losing missionaries to malaria until they moved up the escarpment to higher, less…
I received a message recently from an American airline pilot living and working out of Hong Kong for a major airline. He told me the story of how America’s citizenship-based taxation affects him and I felt I had to write about it. Ridiculous I already thought the way overseas Americans are taxed by the US…
Nyika National Park is a lovely and little-known park in northern Malawi that looks like the Scottish highlands, but with zebras!
There’s something special about the medieval churches in the Val d’Aran, Spain. All are quite small, stone-built in Romanesque style, and date from the 11th to the 15th century. Disclosure: I went to the Val d’Aran as part of a discounted package provided by Pyrenees Experience. I’ve already written about what to do in the Val…
Skiing in Spain? Yes! It’s possible in the Pyrenees in the Val d’Aran. Read here about the ski resort and other things to do there!
On my return from a short vacation with my family, I was surprised to find a letter from the Department of Elections of the City of San Francisco waiting for me, offering me the opportunity to vote in the Democratic primary. Before I moved to the Netherlands back in 1997, I lived in San Francisco, so San…
Our tour guide from Italian Days Food and Wine Tours was far too cheerful for such an early start. We had been picked up at seven in the morning—before sunrise in mid-January—and denied even a cup of coffee before leaving. Our hotel’s breakfast only started at seven, so we had run downstairs and grabbed a…