Category: Travel Stories

DRIVING Rented a Peugeot in Izmir so that I could see many sites not accessible easily by public transport. And what an experience!! Unlike Italy where the signage is infuriatingly useless, the signs in Turkey are easy to follow and available in plenty of time before a turn. Plus the roads are good. So what’s…

Just two hours train ride south of Rome but worlds apart, Naples was a five day wonder for me starting with the Hostel of the Sun, a gathering place for many nations–people from Brasil, Poland, Canada, Israel, Italy, the U.K., even a Roma Druid sat around on pillows in the evenings and shared in the…

As I write I am hearing the waves of the Sea of Galilee breaking on the rocky shores beneath my hotel room in Tiberius, a city in the north of Israel which I am visiting with an Archeological Tour group. All of this country seems to have the Bible writing its history; at least I…

VENICE began for me in the front row of the Basilica Cathedral of San Marco where I sat beneath stunning gold and rainbow colored mosaics depicting Jesus and his Apostles, the life of Mary, the four Evangelists and innumerable other subjects al framed in glass mosaic tesserae. Biblical figures carved in marble, angels everywhere, and…

It’s been a little stressful here in Italy. The Airbnb apartment I rented in Venice that cost a fortune was a dump and I nearly slept under a canal bridge because the landlady didn’t answer the phone when I arrived at night in the rain without my suitcase because Iberia lost my luggage. The place…

Following my joyful two weeks of harvesting tomatoes and planting cauliflower at Tamera in the hot dry hills of southern Portugal I set off for southern Spain to discover Islamic architecture first hand. I’d seen picures of course but nothing prepared me for the magic of the architecture and gardens of Al-Andaluz, the Musim kingdom…

I am living and working in a very remote part of southern Portugal–in the interior of the country where the residents of an intentional community called TAMERA have created a 100% sustainable garden out of a semi desert They use permaculture, recycle all water, have 27 ponds that comprise the water system for 150 hectares…