Category: International
-
Kaiserslautern
I hope to stay longer than 72 hours the next time I visit Germany. I don’t recommend such a short visit. However I went there for work as I do occasionally, and I had no choice. So that’s what I did. I landed in Frankfurt on Monday, drove down to Kaiserslautern, stayed through Thursday morning,…
-
Costa Rica, Part 8 (Completing the Circuit)
Too soon the Costa Rica adventure approached its end and it was time to wrap things up with a final few activities. The route involved the usual complexities, driving down the mountain from Monteverde and heading towards the airport outside of San José. We also took a little divergence along the way for something rather…
-
Costa Rica, Part 7 (On To Monteverde)
Next we began our trek to Monteverde, into Costa Rica’s famed Cloud Forest. This is one of the nation’s smallest microclimates and one of its most intriguing. High in the mountains, a thick blanket of fog frequently envelopes the landscape and creates a gentile moisture. A steady drip supports thick vegetation, lush mosses and more…
-
Costa Rica, Part 6 (Beyond the Beach)
My flirtation with idleness ended. I simply couldn’t sit around Tamarindo another day doing nothing or I’d grow increasingly frustrated. So the relaxation was fine for awhile but now I needed to find something else to do. Surfing lessons didn’t seem like a thing for me but plenty of other activities sounded interesting. Tamarindo Estuary…
-
Costa Rica, Part 5 (Relaxing in Tamarindo)
Rainy season doesn’t mean the same thing across the entirety of Costa Rica. Nor does it start suddenly or retain consistent intensity. So our drive to Guanacaste Province’s drier Pacific coast during the earlier part of the season promised plenty of sunshine. That was our plan anyway, and it actually worked. We could take a…
-
Costa Rica, Part 4 (Brew Day)
We hadn’t visited any breweries in the first several days but that was about to change. It turns out Costa Rica has a fairly lively craft brewery scene and we were moving into an area rich with them. Several fell within our direct path between La Fortuna and Tamarindo and that let me grow my…
-
Costa Rica, Part 3 (Exploring La Fortuna)
The second full day in La Fortuna promised abundant showers although not continuously. It was the rainy season after all and it rains, and people deal with it. Frankly, the bright sunshine of the previous day was a fluke. So we understood all of this ahead of time and we devised a plan. We’d stick…
-
Costa Rica, Part 2 (In the Shadow of the Volcano)
We landed at Juan Santamaría airport in San José on a Friday afternoon, clearing Immigration and Customs nearly effortlessly. Then we got a taste of rush hour traffic riding on the shuttle to retrieve our rental car. Driving conditions became a lot more difficult later in the trip although I didn’t know it at the…
-
Costa Rica, Part 1 (Intentions and Observations)
This was supposed to be the younger kid’s trip. It was his turn to select a destination — anywhere in the world — as a present for his upcoming high school graduation next year. The older one chose Australia back in 2018 and we expanded it to include New Zealand too. England seemed like a…
-
Asia-Pacific, Part 9 (Postscript: Brew It)
This is it, the final stop on the Asia-Pacific series, and this one is especially for me. I always have mixed feelings about the brewery articles because they’re rather self-indulgent. So viewers should feel free to skip past this one and wait until the next series begins because I’m being selfish. These snippets exist primarily…