Altea is amazing. Benidorm is appalling. Altea is a few blocks of 19th-century charm crowned by a 115-year-old church atop a hill. Benidorm is miles of urban sprawl built around “the most high-rise buildings per capita in the world”. And the amazing thing about this … is that these two cities are about five miles […]

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One of those random things that happen when traveling: An unpredictable intersection of simpatico people. In this case, nine Americans meeting at a mojito bar early in the evening in the Old City of a small Spanish seaside town in the autonomous region of Valencia. When the whole of the city of Altea may not, […]

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Seems like the older a town is, the more likely it is to have been founded on a hill. Such is the case for Altea, a city of 25,000 between Valencia and Alicante on Spain’s Costa Blanca. People have been living here for 2,000 years or more, and eventually they gravitated to the hill near […]

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How many consecutive days of eating plates of tapas (Spanish for snack) for dinner would a person need before he or she became tired of it? A week of it? A month of it? Ten years of it? We have had tapas on consecutive nights here in the Valencia region of Spain, buying seven or […]

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I have written about this before. About the moral cowardice of coaches who dump the pressure of the final moments of a football game on the heads of often the smallest and most vulnerable members of their team. Kickers. And, in the case of the celebrated Jim Harbaugh, a punter. Harbaugh today, with 10 seconds […]

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So, some time off, and we wanted to go to Europe and be somewhere with a bit of light and sun, and here we are on the coast of Spain. It may not be the smartest choice, this time of year, given that the UAE finally is cooling off. But everyone in Abu Dhabi knows […]

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I have been watching soccer/football for six years, here in the UAE. Seen lots and lots of matches. But very few big crowds. And very little passion. That changed tonight. Perhaps because the teams involved were imported from Egypt. Al Ahly and Zamalek, the two biggest and most successful clubs in Egypt, played the country’s […]

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This is the perfect sea vehicle for the UAE executive who has everything. The Seabreacher, which can dive about 16 feet below the surface but also come out of the water with sufficient energy to sail into the air before returning to the surface of the water.

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I don’t know how it was that I became the town crier for “longest scheduled nonstop commercial flight in the world”, but it feel as if I have gone there. OK, I do know how it happened: Airlines where I live, in the UAE, began making nonstop flights from Abu Dhabi or Dubai to Los […]

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It is odd for me to follow the Dodgers in the playoffs. When I am not paying close attention, when my subconscious is the ascendant, I am rooting for the Dodgers to win. That is what I did during my formative years. I was a fan of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale and Maury Wills […]

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