Category: Travels for Fun
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ALPINE SKINNY DIPPING
NORTH CASCADES, WASHINGTON – July 1980 Olympus OM-2 on Kodachrome I think I invented selfies. I always wanted to have people in my photos but often I was the only human being around … so I became the model. I travelled alone in my younger days so I had no choice. A tripod and a […]
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MY FIRST SLR
SINGAPORE – 12 January 1978 I bought my first SLR camera in Singapore in 1978. I was after an Olympus OM-1, a brilliant manual camera which was smaller than most of the SLRs on the market at the time. So it was perfect to throw in a backpack. At the time Singapore was supposed to […]
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THEY’RE TAKING ME TO MARRAKECH
I spent much of my youth hearing Graham Nash singing about the Marrakech Express. It was a big hit in the early 1970s and always on the radio. I often visualized about that train with ‘ducks and pigs and chickens’ and ‘charming cobras in the square’. Marrakesh seemed like some exotic, far off land in […]
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MORE CAMERAS THAN TULIPS
It’s tulip time and the bulbs are blooming in full force in Holland Zuid. So Padma and I set out to cure our spring fever and travelled to the land of tulips over the weekend. Our destination was Keukenhof Garden, a 32-hectare garden dedicated to all bulby things growing in spring. We first drove around […]
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BACHARACH
Every night before retiring, I see a book sitting next to my bed. A book I use frequently to dream about my next adventure: the Lonely Planet Guide to Germany. The cover shows a little village with a dominant church on a river. After some map gazing I discovered the cover pic was taken just […]
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OLAV OF BYNESET
I hit a brick wall once. A genealogical brick wall, that is. For five years I had been trying to find out where my great grandfather, Ole Erickson Gaustad, came from. I was getting nowhere and figured I’d never find out. But one night in 2007, I was Googling ‘Gaustad’ and the village where I […]
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A NIGHT IN COPENHAGEN
Padma and I preferred to drive everywhere in Europe, rather than flying. So when we decided to visit Norway and meet my family, we decided to drive. We arrived in Copenhagen in early evening after driving all day from Bonn. Just enough time to enjoy the long summer day and take a stroll through the […]
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SPRING INTO SWITZERLAND
Padma and I had a severe case of spring fever, so we drove to central Switzerland over the long May Day weekend for some hiking in the Schwyz Alps. The hike around Mount Rigi was really quite stunning and Spring really was showing off its true colours. The area around Lucerne is marked by numerous […]
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ON! ON! IN ALGARVE
After a long hiatus, the Halab Hash House Harriers re-grouped and held a run on 8 April. Regrettably it was not in our home base of Aleppo, Syria. Instead, we ran in the Algarve region of southern Portugal. Long-time ICARDA staff member and current resident of Praia da Luz, Peter ‘Beep Beep’ Eichorn, asked his […]
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