All Blog Posts from Travel Guru

My goodness, London was absolutely gorgeous last week when I arrived for a short visit before embarking on a trans-Atlantic cruise. St. James and Green Parks were indeed green and lush, the sun was shining and the flowers around Queen Victoria’s statue were in full bloom. The city has been enjoying a long, lingering summer. The rains will come soon enough, but for now London is looking her best. It was a great visit, even if it seemed to cost me $80 every time I stepped out of my hotel room, given that the pound is trading at nearly half to a dollar. Which makes a nice, reasonably priced five-pound sandwich a hefty ten bucks, a fifteen-pound cab ride suddenly whooshes up to thirty smackers, theater tickets and hotel rooms are doubled, and so on.

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Aw, shoot, gas prices are ridiculous. The airlines now want to charge us to check bags (so maybe we should charge them when they lose them). It’s pouring in the Midwest, sweltering in the Northeast and freezing in the Northwest. But it’s still June, and there’s only one thing we can do: Let’s get married, honey, and I’m not talking about down at the county courthouse. We need a lavish trip to do this right, and that’s where Lisa Light comes in.

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You know, it does my heart good when I see a chef drag himself out of the kitchen, like a prehistoric, reptilian creature evolving before your eyes, stand up on his two hind legs and make something of himself. Chefs and cooks are, without a doubt, the hardest working people in the hospitality industry; but what a terrible price they pay for spending all day reducing pots of veal stock into a thimbleful of exquisite demi-glace, or figuring out new ways to flavor a dish. They rarely see the light of day, they aren’t paid especially well for their trouble, they don’t have the faintest idea who is leading the American League standings, and the turnover in their business is horrific, as is the failure rate of new restaurants.

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Hail to the Queen! Anyone in New York this weekend who enjoys seeing majestic cruise ships has the unique opportunity to watch all three of Cunard’s “Queen” ships sailing together for the first time ever, and probably the last. These are the Queen Elizabeth 2, the Queen Mary 2, and the brand-new Queen Victoria (see artistic rendering above), which just launched last month in England and is making her maiden voyage to the States, where one hopes she loosens up a little, hangs out at smoky jazz clubs and has a quiet fling with a pauper.

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They may be hitting the beaches in Australia (see previous blog), but in Montreal, everyone heads underground at this time of the year, because it is so amazingly, intensely cold outside. After a relatively balmy 33-degree high earlier this week, the temps are reported to reach a high of nine this weekend, and a low of four. And I don’t care how hardy a hockey player you are, four is four. From there, it’s all downhill. When I went last winter, I arrived to minus-30 degree temperatures, which was the coldest thing I’ve ever felt in my life, and that includes dates in college with philosophy majors.

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If you’ve been keeping score over the last few months, the Hawaiians have been steadily winning the battle against the Hawaii Superferry, a new service that is attempting to run passenger and car ferries between Oahu, Kauai and Maui. But now it’s the bottom of the seventh and it looks like Superferry has managed to at least tie the score, if not creep ahead in the game, which has been going for the better part of this year.

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Ten years after the fact, I’m still embarrassed by how I got scammed by a street urchin in Jamaica. He approached our car as a photographer and I were stalled in traffic in Montego Bay and said, “Hey, you’re going the wrong way. It’s me, from the hotel.” He talked his way into the car, chattering about how he worked at the hotel where we were staying and had seen us there, showed us how to get out of the traffic jam, but then led us into a seedy neighborhood, grabbed a bag of drugs from a guy who ran up to the car, tried to sell it to us, got kicked out of the car, and demanded payment for his expert tour guidance.

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You know, I've always maintained that it's good to be the Marquis, or the Vicomtesse, as I found out again last week while touring the Loire Valley in western France. And it's good to visit the Marquis and the Vicomtesse, too. I found the Marquis at his little family home, the Chateau de Brissac in the town of Brissac-Quincé, near the city of Angers. For those of you keeping score, the Marquis is the son of the Duke, and in this case, his father is one of thirteen Dukes of Brissac who can trace their genealogy back 500 years, almost of which took place in this home.

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