The San Clemente Pier reaches 1,296 feet into the Pacific Ocean. The concrete benches along each side of the pier’s length have messages written on them, with text provided by the people who donated that bench to the city. One of them reads: “Welcome to paradise.” That would seem presumptuous, nearly anywhere else in the […]

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Muscat is one of those names that seems to say “exotic city”. A place quite unlike Main Street USA. The name does not quite reach the level of Timbuktu or Samarkand, in terms of connoting images of Old World trade, and caravans and spices, but it’s not just another town with a souq. It did […]

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On the map, driving to Muscat looks straightforward. Get from Abu Dhabi to Al Ain, cross over into Oman, go through the Oman “border” post about 30 clicks inside the country … and make a right turn at Sohar. Eventually Muscat; can’t miss it. “On the map”, however, gave us no indication of possible delays […]

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Everyone who does a road trip of any significance knows … if at all possible, you want to return by a route different than the one you took for the first half. Not a lot longer, but a little longer is OK … because you don’t want to see the same stuff twice. Obviously. What […]

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(Above, the sunrise in Fujairah, over the Indian Ocean.) This is a pretty easy question to answer. If you live in the UAE and prefer to stay in-country for vacation … but want something not at all like home … where do you go? Fujairah. This is the emirate unlike the other six.

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Six years here, and we had not seen all seven of the emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates. Which was a wasted opportunity. Because the UAE encompasses only 32,278 square miles (a little smaller than Maine, a bit bigger than South Carolina, which are 39th and 40th among the 50 U.S. states) we […]

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Six days ago we left the Paris of the 11th Arrondissement, which today again was the Paris of Terror. In the deadliest day in the city since World War II, seven decades ago, far more than 100 people were killed in six terror attacks, four of which occurred inside the 11th we stayed in for […]

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A characteristic of weather in the UAE, and this part of the world, is that it is relentlessly hot in the summer — as well as the four extra “shoulder” months, two before and two after summer, proper. It was every-single-day, uniformly hot from, let’s say, mid-April, until today, when it the high temperature did […]

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It can happen, if you don’t have redundant systems in place. Separated in a Metro station, a realization a few minutes later, one person with a cell phone and an address for a meeting, the other person with a key to the apartment. And never the twain shall meet. This is how we managed to […]

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It was 10 months ago that terrorists entered the offices of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo and killed 11 people, most of them journalists, including the editor in chief. A 12th person was killed nearby. It was a few days ago that I realized the offices of Charlie Hebdo were in the Paris arrondissement […]

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