Have you ever noticed how there’s just too damn many saints, popes, royalty and leaders for any person with a reasonable social life to keep track of? I’m even fuzzy about the ones that are still alive, much less the untold hundreds of dead ones that people with a good…

I love breakfast in Italy for three key reasons: 1. Wicked 2. Good 3. Coffee It’s one of the simple, given pleasures of being here. You can walk into the crustiest, backwater, hilltown train station café, order an 80 cent café macchiato (‘stained coffee’, an espresso shot, with a dribble…

I’m aware that I spend a lot of time complaining about my job and life in this blog. This is partly because my lifestyle, however desirable it may seem to the casual observer, is wrought with frequent obstacles, setbacks and surprises, with the ever-present threat of financial ruin looming overhead….

This is a bonus, second post this week, because 1) next week’s “Best of Tuscany” and “What Happened?” lists will be posted very late due to three days of lavish wine drinking and sleeping ceremonies I’ve scheduled to mark the end of my one month of high-impact travel in Tuscany…

I’m on the home stretch. Just under a week to go on my Tuscany road research. It’s been pretty great all around; sunny and in the upper 70s each day, the longest uninterrupted stretch of great food and wine I’ve had in my whole life and I haven’t had any…

Last year, very soon after completing my road research in Romania and Moldova, I wrote this post literally giving away the greatest reality TV concept of all time, that being following around a Lonely Planet author. Bafflingly, no one has scooped up the idea yet, probably because it was so…

I used to think that I was pretty damn amazing with my skills at direction and orientation. I always knew precisely where I was and the absolute best way to get to where I was going. Of course, this was because I lived in South Minneapolis, an Eden of grid-pattered,…

It’s awards season again.  And this time I’m actually a finalist for one.   The 2007 Travvies are run by Upgrade: Travel Better and an as yet unrevealed series of events has landed me in the category of Best Single-Author Travel Blog. Regular readers know that I’m not opposed to popularity…

It’s finally happening.  I’m forgetting how to speak English.  Will the eccentricities never end? Has this ever happened to you?  You just wanna say something simple to the girl behind the gelato counter like “I want to put your lips on one of those cones and suck on them all…

In our continuing coverage of dumbass blunders I’ve committed during my freelancing career, one of my budding gullibility lapses of all time is buying into the assumption that Italy has something approaching First-World internet service.  Now, I haven’t been to every corner of Italy, but judging from the parts I’ve seen,…