Category Archives: Travel

Hola, America, que tal?

I have not lived in the States for almost 25 years now, and every time I come back  there are surprises. One that gets me is the need to “remember to order the smallest size” because volume creep has meant that what *$s calls a “Tall” coffee, their smallest size, would feed a European coffee

The miracle of modern communications

We have house guests here at Casa Fitzgerald, one of whom emailed his grandmother back in the States.  She was overjoyed to get an email from Amsterdam: “I didn’t know the internet worked across oceans!”

Back from Amerika

I kept a vacation eye on the news while I was in the US.  Which meant I was extremely well informed about local issues, American politics, and not much else. Floods in the UK? Didn’t hear about them until I landed in Europe.  Earthquake at a nuclear power plant in Japan? It got a couple

Blog Crime!

Guilty as charged. I failed to post yesterday. Can I use the impossibly fortuitous (if not quite glorious) Italian win of the world cup as my get out of jail free card? You gotta understand, the first cup I paid attention to was 1994, and I was LIVING in Italy, when Roberto Baggio missed a

Italian pix

Here’s a slideshow of our trip to Italy. I used one of Photoshop’s prepackaged slideshow gizmos for this and it’s unspeakably awful. Apologies for that, I’ll try to improve the presentation with my favorite widget for this stuff, Slideshow Pro, when I get a chance.

The Green Heart of Italy

I used to have a pet theory that in a truly civilized country, the phone system doesn’t work. I’m updating that to “there’s no broadband in paradise.” La famiglia and I just had a great visit back to our old stomping ground in Italy where we reconnected to some old friends and a different way