Donna and I made our latest trip to our beloved Dingle, Ireland recently and it only deepened our love for this amazing piece of the world. From our first interaction, with the easygoing Customs officer at the pleasant Shannon airport, to the conversations we struck up with virtually everyone we came in contact with – locals or fellow American tourists at pubs and restaurants, in shops, on hikes, to visiting old haunts and discovering new places, to just taking in the natural beauty of the Dingle Peninsula, which National Geographic has called the most beautiful place on Earth, we feel almost at home here as we do in Maryland. This trip we stayed an unprecedented three weeks as an experiment to see if we would become bored or restless for that amount of time. We decidedly did not. It was a blessing to have so much time to just be here without immediately eyeing the calendar to see how few days remaining we had. We were able to tune out the vitriol plaguing our country and fully ...
Donna and I recently capped off a whirlwind week of travel, to New York City and Washington, D.C., by spending a few nights in Las Vegas to celebrate our wedding anniversary and to check out the re-created The Wizard of Oz , adapted from the original 1939 film for the amazing Sphere. We also visited Hoover Dam, an engineering marvel that everyone should see. The Wizard of Oz at The Sphere We had wanted to see the Sphere version of The Wizard of Oz since it debuted last August. Our son and his wife saw it a few months ago and confirmed it was worth the trip and the hefty admission price. So we decided to make a trip west to see for ourselves. The new Wizard of Oz blew our minds like the original version must have done in its day. We climbed up, up, up to our seats very high inside the Sphere. Far in front of us appeared to be a traditional rectangular movie screen curtain. A live orchestra to supplement the original movie’s soundtrack was tuning up out of view. Finally, the li...