We captured this image through the hazy, dirty, wet window of a tour boat on Lake Como, Italy.   With storms all day, our excursion from the town of Como to Bellagio was a bit rough and I had just a few seconds to brace myself…

 Reflections on driving in Italy    “Here I go down that wrong road again     Goin’ back where I’ve already been     Even though I know where it will end     Here I go down that wrong road again”    – John Hartford, Wrong Road…

There, I got your attention.  And yes, we kind of drove over a cliff.  Details soon, but do you have that dream ever?   That terrible frustration dream where you are in an out of control vehicle down an impossibly steep hill (the hill where your car…

Again I reflect on our winter trip to Italy.  The latitude in Tuscany roughly equivalent to Milwaukee but the Mediterranean climate brought signs of early spring to the February landscape.  We were fortunate to start with a stretch of sunny cool days, but as our…

Marcy called me at work one afternoon last fall and announced that Gate1 Travel was having a flash sale for independent travel to Italy – just $499 for an 8 day “Heart of Tuscany” tour including airfare from New York, car, hotel, and breakfast.   It…

It has been several months now since our excursion to Amalfi from Sorrento, but we remain committed to finishing video highlights of our trip.  Some of our productions came fairly easy, but we labored over this one for well over a month.   We were…

It is hard to believe that it has been two months since I last posted in this blog space.  Marcy and I were busy with the holidays and we spent most of our free time out taking pictures in the Smoky Mountains.   We still…

(Don’t miss the accompanying YouTube video posted at the end of the blog entry.) The golden brown clay soil of the Central Tuscan countryside was rain-soaked on the day we ventured to Siena. On the way, Our Gate1 tour director, Myriam, introduced us to the…

Our gondola ride was much more than we could have ever imagined.  The travel videos and National Geographic articles cannot capture the nuance of sight and sound nor the sense and emotion of being transported along these ancient waterways.   The voices of gondoliers calling…

In “The Art of Travel”, Alain de Botton wrote: “Travelers set off to investigate.  In 1739, the poet Thomas Gray undertook a walking tour of the Alps, the first of many such self-conscious pursuits of the sublime, and afterwards reported, ‘In our little journey up…