Tag Archives: history Cold. Dark. Completely dark – but for the stars overhead – and cold. And early! Way too early. It was 5:15am in California’s Eastern Sierras. A small clutch of cars and a congregated group of people with their hands shoved deep in their pockets, huddled against the kind of piercing cold that only a dry […]  It was pouring. Of course it was! It rained every day of our visit to Ireland last June. Not all day, but every day. The silver lining was that were were going to be comfortably seated on a bus tour of County Clare all day, and not walking the wilds of the Dingle Peninsula, County […]  Every city has a “past”. Even an eclectic and worldly city like Seattle – the home of grunge and Dr. Frasier Crane; Microsoft and Starbucks Coffee – has a rough and colourful story. Scratch the surface of the modern architecture and you will find a wild pioneer history, traces of which survive beneath the modern city streets. Literally! […]  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 […]  Thailand is a treasure-trove of tropical plant life and ancient religious ruins. I like it best when the two coincide, as they do in Kamphaeng Phet: crumbling temples located on spacious well-tended sites, shaded by trees. Kamphaeng Phet Historical Park is part of the awkwardly-named UNESCO World Heritage Site: “Historic Town of Sukhothai and Associated Historic […] |
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