Back to B-Town! Don’t really need an occasion to visit Barcelona, but we have one: The 50th anniversary of the wedding of Leah’s parents. We went west from the UAE and they came east from Los Angeles … And it involved one major surprise:

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Down here around Abu Dhabi and Dubai, approaching the outer edge of the Empty Quarter, nature is boring. What we have is hard-baked sand and miles and miles of flatlands. On some of that, buildings have been constructed. The whole country is not like that, however. The northern emirates, especially, have hills and mountains and […]

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I went to the U.S. Embassy here in Abu Dhabi today, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would security be a bit more obvious? Would the contingent of Marines be visible? Would everyone be a little edgier? The UAE is near the eastern edge of the Middle East, much of which has exploded in […]

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The long journey back to the Gulf begins at 12:15 p.m. tomorrow. So, what does a person do on the final day of a once-a-year visit to Southern California?

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Consider yourself fortunate if most of your air travel is international. Going across an ocean or a major sea … is generally still not awful. Practically every airline in the world is a meaner, coarser version of what it was a generation ago, but generally less mean and less coarse on long hauls. To fly […]

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