Conor and his friends enjoy their annual pilgrimage to the Maryland Renaissance Festival, and frankly, so do I. Is there a better place to people watch?
Jujuy, north of Salta, is Argentina’s northernmost province and it shares a rugged border with Bolivia. Life here moves at its own pace: Adobe villages bake beneath multicolored cliffs; llamas wander the foothills; and villagers seek shade under scraggly trees and towering cacti.
A young girl prepares to take the stage as part of a Chinese New Year celebration. Chiang Mai has deep historical and cultural ties with southwestern China.
For centuries local Andean Indians have honored Cotopaxi (“Throne of Moon”) as a sacred mountain and worshiped it as the “rain sender” that made the land fertile.
Weddings are big business at the scenic Church of the Good Sheperd, set on Lake Tekapo, New Zealand. Locals will gladly organize a church wedding, a garden wedding – or even a “glacier wedding” in the nearby Southern Alps.
More New Zealand stories here.
In 1959 Walt Disney began looking for land for a park to supplement Disneyland, which had opened in Anaheim, California in 1955. Disney’s vision had outgrown the existing park, and he did not like the businesses that had sprung up on adjacent properties.
Eight years before the Good Friday Agreement and well before the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger, my friend Rich and I rode a thousand miles around Ireland.
At the time we traveled, “The Troubles” were considered one of the world’s intractable conflicts, and from the east coast of the United States, Northern Ireland appeared to be a dangerous war zone.
Still, we felt it was important to at least get a taste of life in Ulster.
From Sligo in County Donegal we rode north, turning east at Ballyshannon. As we approached the border, we saw a British army officer next to a small shack. He waved us through.
About three miles further on, we came to a checkpoint. The road was heavily blockaded and closed off to one lane. Another officer, in full field gear, stood near a heavily fortified bunker (complete with camouflage and a gun turret). He was searching cars before allowing them to pass through.
The officer waved us through without bothering to search us, and soon we were making good time on the best paved road we’d been on in Ireland.
After spending an uneventful night in Enniskillen, the site of a notorious Remembrance Day bombing in 1987, we mounted our bikes for what appeared on our map to be a twelve mile ride to Cavan, back in the Republic.
A few miles out of town we saw a sign that read, “Barrier, 2 miles ahead,” and we knew something was amiss.
