Category: Terrain
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Faial – Pico Ferry
The Azores (Açores), Portugal (March 2001) In most cases the quickest way between islands in the Azores is by airplane. However Pico and Faial are exceptions, and are easily accessible to each other by regular passenger ferry service. The ferry runs several times a day and takes about a half an hour. This makes it…
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Ithaca, Part 2 (Waterfalls)
Some sources claimed the presence of “over 150 waterfalls within 10 miles” of Ithaca, New York. I guess it depends on how they’re defined. Even so, waterfalls seemed to pop into view just about anywhere we looked. As numerous T-shirts and bumper stickers around town reminded us, “Ithaca is Gorges.” We squeezed a lot of…
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Cross-Country, Part 8 (Bonus!)
Finally the end. Or was it? We’d driven most of the way across the United States. Then we spent a full week in Phoenix, Arizona. However, we weren’t completely done. Our rental home agreement ended two days before our return flight so we needed to spend a little time somewhere else. Originally my wife figured we could go down to…
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Cross-Country, Part 7 (A Week in Phoenix)
We drove for five long days and finally arrived in Arizona. However, the adventure did not end there. Phoenix had always been the ultimate goal. Our decision to go on a road trip sprang from that choice. My wife and younger son wanted no part of the drive and flew to Phoenix instead. There they…
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Cross-Country, Part 6 (The Western Half)
The first half of the drive seemed almost routine as it ran through terrain familiar to a lifelong resident of the eastern part of the United States. However we still had a couple of days to go and we began moving into unfamiliar territory. Here I captured a wide swath of previously unvisited counties straight through the…
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Australasian Adventures, Part 11 (Lists)
We’re getting close to the end with this penultimate article in the Australasian series. Thank you for bearing with me. I thought I would shift my focus and provide an update on various lists that I maintain. I’m known to be a bit obsessive-compulsive and I tally visits to places or objects that I consider…
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Australasian Adventures, Part 9 (Epic Runs)
All those large restaurant meals began to take a toll on my waistline even with our busy touring schedule. I hadn’t come close to my normal fitness regimen even with frequent walks and hikes to various sites. I was on vacation and I supposed that should be expected. Still, I needed to get out and…
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Australasian Adventures, Part 5 (Heading Inland)
As mentioned earlier, we didn’t spend much time away from the coastline during our adventures except for a couple of days on New Zealand’s North Island. I already wrote about the geothermal sites. We saw several additional noteworthy sites during our inland jaunt as well. Hobbiton My older son watched the entire Lord of the…
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Australasian Adventures, Part 4 (Geothermal)
New Zealand anchored the southwestern end of the Ring of Fire, a long strand of seismic and volcanic activity on the outer edges of the Pacific Ocean. Here the earth’s tectonic plates collided, with results particularly apparent on the nation’s North Island. No active volcanoes currently threatened although cracks and fissures hissed angrily in numerous…
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Australasian Adventures, Part 2 (On the Waterfront)
We rarely ventured more than a few kilometres from water. New Zealand made that pretty easy, being composed of islands after all. We also stuck to a rather narrow band of eastern Australia beginning with Sydney and driving north along the coast for about three hours. Almost every scenic vista we found included a body…