“We go to Europe to be Americanized,” so said Ralph Waldo Emerson. The great transcendentalist might well have meant that we feel most American when we are in foreign cultures.…
When I last saw the Gateway to India, way back in 1993 (from one of these rooms in the Taj Mahal Hotel (above), this was still Bombay. Mumbai, obviously preferred…
Was it some divine design that it should happen I would be reading biblical scholar Bart Ehrman’sMisquoting Jesus at the very time we were calling at the port of Sharm-el-Sheikh? …
Typically, in pilgrimage, it is the destination that seems the constant. Space has a permanence that outlasts us. But place is another matter. Place is a confluence of time and…
It juts out angrily, like the blade of one of those old can openers, ready to tear a gash into a freighter or a tanker, or even a passenger ship…
We came to Aqaba, Jordan by sea, so the cannons that the Ottoman Turks would have been pointed at us could have blow us out of the water. If it…
After a few failed attempts in the past to make a passage through the canal that knocked about 5K miles off the route from Europe to the Far East the…
“Gut morgan, mein herr.” I don’t get that salutation very often, although I was once addressed as “Herr Professor Docktor” in Austria, and I am beginning to look more and…
It was a breezy and chilly, but not a “dark and stormy,” night before I awoke to be greeted by a clear and bright view of Mt. Vesuvius framed in…
The journal is part of what I am calling My Year of Pilgrimage: Around the World in 60 Days. It began with a reunion of the Claps (yes that’s the…