Category: General Interest

“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game—it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good,… Continue reading “They Wouldn’t Be the Cubs if They Didn’t Break Your Heart”: Faith and Futility on Chicago’s North Side

We visited Helsinki in November because, you know, why not? We saw a remarkably low airfare advertised, and decided to see what Finland was like. We hoped maybe to get a glimpse of the Northern Lights. That didn’t pan out, since it was cloudy and snowed nearly every day. But Helsinki knows what to do… Continue reading Exploring Helsinki

Estonia is the smallest of the Baltic countries, and its population of about 1.3 million people makes it one of the least populous of all the countries in the European Union. The capital city of Tallinn has a population of about 450,000, about the size of the greater Des Moines area. Small population or no,… Continue reading Astonished in Estonia

Riga is the capital of the Baltic nation of Latvia. With a population of 625,000, it is the size of Memphis. But it’s a special place unlike any you’ve ever been before. In the first place, the city boasts some 800 buildings in the Art Nouveau (or as the Germans called it, Jugendstil) style of… Continue reading Beautiful Riga

If you envisage heading for Europe any time soon in a wildly optimistic post-Covid (Ha!) gesture, you may be thinking of London or Paris or Florence. Maybe Oslo, Lisbon, Amsterdam. Vilnius may not pop up in your daydreams. But let me encourage you to think outside the well-worn box. Lithuania is an EU country (using… Continue reading Vilnius, Lithuania

by Stacey Margaret Jones Come for the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth and stay for the greatest American poet of the 20th century. That was my guiding principle on our June trip to the United Kingdom, where we arrived to see the Trooping of the Colour (and get great photos of the Cambridge kids as… Continue reading In Search of Sylvia

Sometimes travel can be pleasingly serendipitous, as it was for us when we traveled to West Yorkshire, to the town of Hebden Bridge, on the trail of my wife’s favorite, Sylvia Plath, and her husband, Ted Hughes. We soon discovered we were in fact a scant eight miles from the town of Haworth—where, it turns… Continue reading In Search of the Brontës

If you grew up reading and/or watching tales of the great medieval outlaw hero Robin Hood robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, you probably dreamt of visiting Nottingham and Sherwood Forest. I knew I did. I watched the Richard Greene The Adventures of Robin Hood TV series (1955-59) when I was quite young (“Robin Hood,… Continue reading Nottingham, Sherwood, and the Legend of Robin Hood