Category Archives: History

Wild West Wyoming ~ Cody, USA

The Wild West is a place of legends and stories… Few are more moving than that of Sacagawea (Bird Woman), the Lemhi Shoshone woman, kidnapped in 1800 by a raiding party of Hidatsa when she was about 12, and a year later, given or sold, along with another young captive Shoshone girl, to Toussaint Charbonneau, a French Canadian trapper. Thirty-four year old Charbonneau was…

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A Modern Take on Ancient History: Nîmes, France

It’s autumn in Australia at the moment, which makes me think of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. Defies logic, I know, but there is something about the freshness of the air this change-of-season that has me humming: “I love Paris in the springtime…” and thinking of my last time in France, back in the spring…

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“Escape to Pembroke Castle” or: “A Wet Afternoon in Wales”

I guess that rainy weather is pretty common in Wales. One clue is the council workers: as we walked from Pembroke Dock to Pembroke, splashing through puddles that wet us up to the knees, huddling under raincoats that whipped in the wind, and clinging to umbrellas that turned inside out and failed to keep the…

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A Mixed Legacy ~ General Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, Nashville, TN

How will you – or I – be seen in the future; say, one- or two-hundred years from now? What legacy will we leave? How will we stand up against the changes of mores and values that take place over time? I had cause to think about this last week while visiting The Hermitage, the…

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The Gift of Blarney ~ County Cork, Ireland

“Did you kiss the stone?” my daughter asked me by phone from London. “No, but I kissed someone who did,” I replied, laughing. “They say that that is the next best thing.” Now, I could tell you that I didn’t kiss the Blarney Stone because, as I end my second year of Weekly Wanders, I…

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