Illinois Beach State Park was established in 1948 and dedicated in 1965 as the nation’s first nature preserve. Today we visited the Southern Unit of this 4,100 acres state park near the Wisconsin border. More »
Today we visited Woodstock, IL, to see the set of one of my favorite movies, Groundhog Day (1993), featuring Bill Murray. Groundhog Day was filmed here 13 years ago, but everything still looks just as in the movie. You can retrace Bill Murray’s footsteps from Ned’s Corner to Tip Top Bistro to the place where he stepped into the puddle, then across the street toward Gobbler’s Knob in Square Park. More »
Earlier this year I learned that Ewan McGregor would be in a West End revival of Guys and Dolls. Being a fan of both the Scottish actor and popular musicals, I decided we had to see a performance. So in May we booked the major components of a long weekend trip: the easyJet flight; the easyHotel room and the theatre tickets. More »
Did you know that the Pilgrims lived in Leiden, the Netherlands, for 11 years before boarding the Mayflower in 1620? They lived around the Pieterskerk, where today the annual Thanksgiving Day Service is held at 11:00am. More »
Leiden is a great place to live for a lot of reasons. It is picturesque, with cute small streets and old shop fronts, a moat-like canal around the center and several waterways passing through the middle, plus city gates, a castle fortification, and windmills. More »
Last weekend we flew with easyJet to London Luton, then took the easyBus to central London and then we stayed at the easyHotel. At GBP 2 per person for the bus and GBP 35.60 for the room per night this was our cheapest trip to London thus far. Everything was very basic, but pretty great. Except for a few things … More »
Last week we received United Airlines’ newsletter with the wonderful news that they have added extra flights from Europe to Chicago, namely from Zurich and Munich. What they don’t tell you in this happy press release is that they scrapped Amsterdam from the list. We bought two tickets earlier this year for December, and now our flight’s been cancelled and we have a stop in Washington DC. More »
Every time I fly out of one of the London airports (Luton, Gatwick or Heathrow) I am flabbergasted by the disorganization of it all. It’s like every person working there is on their first day and doesn’t know what they’re doing. Even the passengers are standing around in confusion, gaping at the blurry old monitors waiting for their gate to be announced. More »
A cafe near the Opera metro station in Paris named Footsie (a play on words on FTSE, the London stock exchange) has screens above their bar with the prices of their drinks. The clever thing about this place is that the screen refreshes every four minutes, and the prices go up and down, depending on demand. Customers at the bar are gazing at the screens looking for bargains. More »
From 17 to 24 September we went to Hurghada in Egypt to dive. It was our first diving trip after getting our PADI Open Water certificates here in the Netherlands in July. We made two dives a day for five days with Colona Divers, a Scandinavian dive center, and saw giant morays, a sea turtle, stingrays and millions of colorful reef fish and corals. More »