According to weather.com, at 2:24 p.m. local time today … the temperature in the UAE capital was 100 Fahrenheit. Toasty. But here’s the key:

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Always nice to come home, but also a little melancholy. The economic dislocation of the region can be followed from Abu Dhabi, but not really felt without being in SoCal. The recession was almost two years old when I left for the UAE in October of 2009. And the SoCal economy seems hardly better — […]

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Desert-dwellers love green. The color. But particularly the notion of living flora. Grass. Leaves. Trees. Shrubs. Because where we live, nothing like that occurs in nature. It can be replicated, at significant cost, and with prodigious amounts of desalinated water, but otherwise … our natural world is 100 shades of brown. So, a place like […]

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I could never live in the NYC. Too intense, too crowded, for a suburban SoCal kid. But for a day or three? Yeah. NYC can be a rush. My daughter and I did a week in an afternoon today, or so it seemed.

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More peregrinations. From Abu Dhabi to the middle of New Jersey in eight “easy” steps covering 25 hours.

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This has been an ongoing story for the past two weeks, here in the UAE, and it has gotten lots of attention. The 11-year-old English boy whose fear of flying is so intense that he cannot or will not fly. And how will he get home to Somerset?

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We continue to think of travel as difficult, but it really is not, in the abstract, compared to 10 years ago, never mind 50 or 100. Multiple flights, multiple varieties of ground transport … So, in Coventry, England. Going back to Abu Dhabi, UAE. How to?

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This was the final day in the London 2012 Games for the UAE football team, and my 25th consecutive day writing about them, for The National, from Austria, Manchester, London and Coventry. They didn’t quite cover themselves with glory, but they managed a 1-1 draw against Senegal, and they leave the Summer Games with one […]

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Three-plus decades in this business, and I still can be surprised by what can happen when you call someone. I was working on a piece about the future of Mahdi Ali, the capable and popular UAE Olympic soccer coach who led his team to the London Olympics, and I decided to check in with the […]

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This is a bizarre story, now that I review it again. Because I could not get credentialed for the Summer Olympics in the way I have for 14 Olympiads before this one — with an actual “E” (press) credential — I became worried about getting into events at London 2012. Specifically, into UAE soccer events […]

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