Travel

(Monday, March 10, 2025) by Ann Silverthorn with Jim DeDad This day, which was also the birthday of our middle child, was the first of our eight flights during our trip, in addition to the ones coming and going to Australia and New Zealand. This three-hour flight from Sydney to Cairns, the gateway to the…

(Sunday, March 9, 2025) by Ann Silverthorn with Jim DeDad As mentioned in yesterday’s post, we had the day free until 4:30 p.m., when we would leave by coach for our dinner cruise on Sydney Harbour. Our tour manager, Cam, had provided many options for Sydney activities in one of his frequent, informative emails, and we…

(March 8, 2025) – by Ann Silverthorn with Jim DeDad We enjoyed a delicious hotel breakfast at 7:00 a.m. and then met our group at 8:00 a.m. to take the coach down to Sydney Harbour (which we walked to yesterday). Cam was a great narrator on the coach and shared volumes of information with us,…

(March 5, 2025 to March 7, 2025) – by Ann Silverthorn with Jim DeDad) After eight months of waiting, it was finally departure day for our March 5-24, 2025, AAA/Collette “Australia’s Outback to New Zealand’s South Island” tour. We slept until 7:30 a.m., because our plane wasn’t scheduled to leave until late afternoon. I made scrambled eggs,…

Have you heard of Brockway, PA? Have you been there? Well, we were recently, there and a few things impressed me that I’d love to tell you about. Why were my husband and I in Brockway? Because he’s nearly 100% Italian, and he wanted to explore his roots. The Brockway area happens to be one…

Dear Visitor: I thought you might be interested in reading a little about our recent trip to southern Germany. There were eight of us, including our guide, Derek, a German teacher at a local high school here in northwest Pennsylvania.

My writing friend, Sue Henninger, had a great idea recently to visit the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, NY, for a break from the editing of our novels, neither of which are funny. She learned that the center has a new Carl Reiner exhibit that shares his creative process, career highlights, and also sketches the type of human…

There’s a boulevard in Curtea de Argeș, Romania that never sleeps. The one-way traffic on Bulevardul Basarabilor is constant and oblivious to a speed limit. Pedestrians amble the sidewalks along the narrow, tree-lined thoroughfare at a steady pace.  Young and old, fast and slow. Here and there people pause in clusters to converse in patches…

If only I had more time. . . I’d visit every one of the areas of interest in the Wallachia, Dobruja, Transylvania, and Banat-Crisana regions of Romania I’m highlighting in this post. I’m going to share with you from Welcome to Bucharest and Romania, gifted to us by the concierge at EuropaRoyale Hotel Bucharest in 2019. We will…

Romania has a rich and complex history, which I never quite understood, until I decided to study and summarize the history section in Welcome to Bucharest and Romania, gifted to us by the concierge at EuropaRoyale Hotel Bucharest in 2019. After finishing this project, I understand the many changes in power that make Romania what it is today, a…