Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts

08 December 2012

More big news

This was the week for big announcements. I was on the road for most of the week and I missed out on the hoopla that attended each of these announcements so I'm going to generate some of my own hoopla now.


For the second time in two years, I'm headed back to Germany to attend IMM. IMM is one of the world's largest design trade shows and my experiences there two years ago opened up a universe to me I never knew existed.

I'll be in Cologne (and later, Amsterdam) as part of Modenus.com's latest iteration of BlogTour. I was on the original Blog Tour last year in London for the Design Festival and it is a thrill to be selected to participate in another of these storied events.

I am one of 15 design bloggers from the US, the UK and the EU selected to take in the sights and sounds of this massive trade show and to report back. It's an absolute honor to be counted among some of the most influential people in the design world.

We'll be meeting up with hordes of people I know and I cannot wait to see everybody again. I've met some of my best friends through this blog and the places its taken me over the years and our regular get togethers are legendary. I'll keep the self-indulgence to a minimum while I'm on the road and will instead concentrate on the cool, new stuff I'll find over there. All of which will be documented here.

Beyond turning Germany into my personal old home week while I connect from people who are usually far removed from me, I'll be in Cologne. A city founded by Julius Caesar and a city whose Roman origins are everywhere. I'll get the chance to go back to the Cathedral and marvel at the fact that it was built by human hands and minds. I'll light a candle while I'm there and in a way, hold hands with a thousand years of humanity.

If you've never been to a Gothic Cathedral, make it a point to, regardless of your religious sensibilities. Nothing helps me see my place in the continuum of human history like walking into a thousand-year-old building does.

Thank you to Modenus and the sponsors of our upcoming adventure. This jaunt to Cologne and Amsterdam promises to be the most successful BlogTour ever. To see a list of my fellow attendees, click on this link.

08 November 2012

Architects and designers, wanna go to Spain?


Tile of Spain is running a contest they're calling Passport to Creativity. Four credentialed designers and or architects will be selected to accompany the Tile of Spain team from the US and Spain as well as six journalists on a week-long immersion in all things Spain. The trip will end in Valencia when everyone on the Passport of Creativity tour will attend Cevisama, one of Europe's (and therefor the world's) largest tile and bath trade shows. The four architects and or designers will earn 4 CEUs in addition to winning an all-expense-paid trip to Spain.

Entering takes just a few moments and you can find an entry form here. Hurry though, the deadline's December 3rd, 2012. Be warned, Spain bites deep and you'll come away from a trip like this a different person. I did at any rate.


Nearly two years ago, I boarded a plane in Tampa and I was bound for Madrid. I'd been selected to be a part of the press corps for Tile of Spain's "Reign in Spain" tour. My week in Spain as a guest of the Spanish Ceramics Industry and the Spanish Trade Commission was something I'll never forget. We were treated like royalty and in a country that still has a monarch, that's really saying something.



Though it was a press tour and though I was only there for a week, I came away from that experience with a far deeper understanding of the Spanish people and their culture than I'd had before I arrived. Between factory tours, a massive trade show, and some of the most extravagant meals I've ever eaten, I got to know our hosts from the Spanish embassy. I bonded with my fellow journalists in the press corps and the winners of that year's contest in ways I hadn't expected to. Our shared experiences in Spain more or less cemented us together and I've stayed in touch with most of those folks.



Wandering down the cobblestone streets of Valencia and Zaragoza in the wee hours with new Spanish friends and the conversations we had will stay with me for the rest of my life. The chance to sit and compare notes with people from other countries on their home turf is why I love to travel so much.



Spain's financial woes were just becoming clear while I was there and the truth of the matter was a bit difficult to come by in the US. So I sat in a hotel lobby in Valencia with the Spanish Trade Commissioner and we talked about it until around four in the morning. He explained to me what was really going on and further, he told me the story of modern Spain from the perspective of a man who lived through Spain's transition from Fascism to a Parliamentary Democracy.


Those experiences aren't something you get on a package tour to Barcelona or Málaga.


In that too-short week I saw some incredible sights, gorged myself on Spanish cuisine but more than any of that, I had extended to me Spanish hospitality and kindness.

I hope you enter this contest. Wonders await you on the Iberian Peninsula.

04 August 2012

Lovely, lovely Lancaster

A double rainbow as seen from my brother Steve's back yard.
I'm back in Florida after my month-long sojourn in the land of my birth, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. I needed to prove once and for all that I can be anywhere and still put in a solid, productive workday. I passed that test with flying colors. I wanted too, to spend non-rushed time with my siblings and their families and I did plenty of that. It was an ideal month and just how beautiful that part of the US is left me dumb struck.

Alfalfa fields

Daylilies and alfalfa

My brother Steve's back yard on my first morning in Pennsylvania, 30 June 2012.

An actual covered bridge. Lancaster County, PA is lousy with them.

What a covered bridge looks like inside. Most of them were built in the 19th Century and they are an exercise in wood framing as art.

Dusk from my brother Matt's deck.

Thunderstorms gathering as seen from my brother Matt's front yard.

When I moved away from there a long time ago, I could never see the place as anything but a small town surrounded by farmland. The combination of those two things 20+ years ago was all I needed to know in order for me to seek greener pastures. I wanted to live in a bigger city and I wanted to escape winter.

As I barrel toward 50 I can see the place through a different set of eyes and the things I once fled are the same things I now ache for. The very idea of winter weather still fills me with the same loathing it always has, but there's a lot to be said for market shopping with my sister-in-law, going to the movies with an army of my nieces and nephews, and just sitting and talking with my brothers. Seeing family friends and treading on familiar ground capped off a truly great month. Feeling wanted and loved involved nothing more than showing up, and that was nothing short of bliss. That those many, many people have known me my whole life, that they've stood by as I've worked through my conflicts and trials, and can still find love for me makes my head spin.

A covered hitching post at the Green Dragon market in  Ephrata.

Produce stand at the Green Dragon

This is a butcher's stall at the Green Dragon. The objects in the center of this photo are pig stomachs - pre-filled with fresh sausage, onion and potato. I think this qualifies as a convenience food.

A produce stand at the Green Dragon

Beets, broccoli and potatoes at Lancaster's Central Market

A shot of the stalls in Lancaster's Central Market.

Lancaster's Central Market as seen from Penn Square, the center of Lancaster City.
Lancaster's Central Market was established by King George III in the 1720s. It's the oldest open market in the United States.
 
A tobacco field in blossom. The flowers have to be removed by hand so the plant can make the leaves more robust.

Real tomatoes, fresh from the fields
My family's enormous and Sunday dinners usually involved at least 25 people. Baking bread and deserts for an appreciative audience of that size was far more enjoyable than I ever thought it would be. Whether it was a dinner built around a bushel of Chesapeake blue crabs or fresh pork loins, I ate better last month than I have in ages. Life in farm country brings with it the smell of manure that's true. But it also brings with it fresh produce that made me rethink my whole definition of that term. Buying sweet corn at $2 a dozen or tomatoes at 6 for a buck, corn and tomatoes that had been picked that morning, has me looking at the produce aisles at Publix with nothing short of disdain.

As much as I wanted it not to be true when I was younger, the rolling hills of southern Pennsylvania are part of me. They're in my DNA, figuratively and literally. Driving a truck down dirt roads and barking at my nephews about gun safety seemed natural - I was just flexing old muscles. Visiting the churchyards and settlements established by my ancestors nearly 300 years ago brought into sharp focus that I'm part of a continuum, a line of people who lived and died before me, just as there are many who'll live and die after my time on earth's done. My struggles and conflicts really don't mean a whole lot when they're splayed against a  history I can see and touch.

This is the grave marker of my first ancestors in the new world. Husband and wife Sampson and Agnes Smith are both commemorated  by this slab of marble. Though you can't read it from this photo, the whole surface of it is engraved with a testament to their lives. Sampson arrived in Philadelphia in 1740 and died in 1781 in Chestnut Level, PA in 1781. Agnes died in 1790. One of their daughters is buried next to them.

This is the Chestnut Level Presbyterian Church. My first ancestor on this side of the Atlantic, Sampson Smith, was this church's third pastor, from 1760 to 1781. He supervised the construction of this building. The home he built still stands nearby.

This is a shallow creek crossing near Chestnut Level. My brother's driving over it and our ancestors would have been intimately familiar with this creek in the 18th Century.


The part of Pennsylvania I once called home predates the United States and the fingerprints of the time when it was a British Colony are all over the place. That countryside and the buildings that still stand from that era lived through a war for independence, they witnessed the birth of a new republic, they stood by as that new republic wrestled with slavery and a civil war. That place and those buildings aren't just a testament to my ancestors, they're a testament to this country's ability to work its way through conflict and all of it's a celebration of the glory of human potential. If you get lulled into the belief that life's difficult now, imagine what it must have been like in the 18th Century.

This is St. James Episcopal Church in downtown Lancaster, it's been there for a very long time. It's where George Washington and his peers would have attended services when they were in town.

Like I said, St. James has been around for quite a while.

These are very typical, 19th Century row houses that make up the bulk of the housing in Lancaster City.

More row houses, probably built during the War of 1812.

I love the wording on this sign.

An 18th Century row house that's still a single-family home, downtown Lancaster.

So now that I'm back I'll make the best of it. I landed another big marketing client and've been cast on a nationally syndicated TV show in the last two weeks. Add that to my current work load and I have a lot going on and even more to be grateful for. I don't think I'll be moving back to Pennsylvania any time soon but I will be spending more time there as the next few years unfold. For now though, I'm back on my living room sofa and wishing I had a group of people to cook dinner for. Thanks to all of you I spent time with last month and to everybody I missed, I'll catch you during my next visit.

27 July 2012

Thomas Moser offers a vacation idea to end all vacations

Eclipse dining by Thos. Moser
The Thos. Moser company makes exquisite furniture by hand. I've written about them repeatedly in the past and the more I see fine furniture, the more convinced I am that my lede sentence is as true a sentence as I can compose. If it's possible for furniture to be lyrical, Moser's is that and more.

The Eclipse dining table

Moser's offerings aren't just pretty and poetic, they're the perfect marriage of form and function. Joinery is ornament; the promise of comfort and longevity whisper in the background. If it's possible for furniture to achieve timelessness, this furniture does.

The Eclipse dining chair

The people who appreciate fine woodworking tend to be fanatical about the creations that pour out of the Moser workshop in Maine. Thomas Moser's cabinetmakers still do things the hard way and the results speak for themselves. Ever since 2007, the Tomas Moser company has offered a program for its buyers that sounds like an armchair woodworkers fantasy come true.

The Customer in Residence program

Meet the Thos. Moser Customer in Residence program.

The Customer in Residence program they offer is a one-week apprenticeship in the Moser workshop during which fine furniture customers can work alongside a master cabinetmaker. These lucky customers will build the heirloom that will some day grace their homes. I'm solid in my belief that everything someone owns should tell a story. Now just imagine having a group of friends over for dinner and while everyone's sitting and enjoying a meal, starting a story that begins with "I helped to build this table during a week I spent in Maine..."

Thomas Moser offers the Customer in Residence program eight times per year and they've been conducting these working vacations since 2007. For people who can't take a whole week, there are now weekend programs available too.

Space is limited as I'm sure you can imagine and while working on an eventual heirloom, "apprentices" stay in the nearby Harraseeket Inn in Freeport, ME. Fine dinners every night allow participants to get to know the Moser family and the week wraps up with a signing ceremony. During that ceremony, the piece a participant helped create gets signed by the participant, the master cabinetmaker and Thomas Moser himself. Talk about furniture with a story to tell after all that. My head spins at the very idea.

You can find more information about Moser's Customer in Residence programs on the Thos. Moser website. There's contact information there too in case you're interested in attending or if you'd like more details about the program. If you'd like to read a first hand account, a writer named Dawn Klinginsmith wrote about her Customer in Residence experience for the Chicago Tribune last year.

It's easy to fall into the belief that craftsmanship is dead and Thomas Moser's Customer in Residence program proves yet again that it isn't.

20 June 2012

Trading palm trees for corn fields

I grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And no, I'm not Amish.

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Lancaster's about an hour west of Philly but it's a world away. As you drive west from The City of Brotherly Love, the clock seems to work backwards. The urban congestion gives way to the gently rolling farmland of Chester and Lancaster Counties. This is the place where the American Revolution played out and Lancaster is the oldest inland city in the US. My ancestors settled there in 1740 and those rolling hills are encoded in my DNA.

When I was younger and living there I felt the place to be a prison. Getting to Philly or Baltimore was a pain and I always felt like I was missing out on something because I lived in a small town. I longed for a change of venue, some kind of different scenery.

What I couldn't see back then was how beautiful an area it is and how fortunate I was to live just a bit removed from the harried nature of life in a major metro. I left the area for good in the early '90s and sought my fortune elsewhere.

A funny thing has happened here in the last couple of years though. The housing collapse reaped a pretty grim harvest in Florida and one by one, most of my friends left the area in search of greener pastures. As they left, I started traveling for work a lot. While this was going on I've found myself looking for an anchor time and again. I needed something to tie me to Florida, to home.

That anchor never materialized however. In fact, as people continue to move away I'm less tied to this place than I ever have been. Part of me knows that I could go out and make new friends, but another part of me doesn't want to put forth the effort.

While all of this has been playing out, I've begun to see the appeal of the land where I was born and raised. I've been back for short visits in the last few years and my beloved brother Steve's been offering me his guest room for a longer stay.

So I'm going to do it. I'm going back to Pennsylvania for the entire month of July. I'll stay with Steve, work from his home and get a first hand look at what life's like in Lancaster now. I can take the train to New York from there without any trouble and I'll have ready access to just about anywhere in the northeast, thanks to Amtrack.

Because it's farm country, the local produce I'll have access to is already making my mouth water. I'm looking forward to baking bread with my nieces and catching up with my nephews and siblings. I have an enormous family and our get togethers are as loud as they are legendary. It'll be great to cook for an army without the stress of having to leave right away.

Truth be told, I'm staying for a month as a test of sorts. I want to see if I can handle living there again. I want to see if I can handle trading palm trees for corn fields. I'm going into this with my eyes wide open and had someone told me five years ago that I would consider moving back to PA someday I'd have laughed hysterically.

July will be an interesting month, that's for sure. As I mentioned in a Let's Blog Off post last fall, my life in Florida has always felt like borrowed time, even after 20+ years. I'm a Yankee's Yankee as hard as I try to ignore that.


As much as I love walking down the sidewalk to the beach, it doesn't really feel real. People in the Northeast think faster, understand things better and forge deeper bonds than they do here. Pennsylvania has a sense of place I miss. Leaving when I did was difficult, I felt that I was severing ties that were supposed to last a lifetime. I hope to reconnect some of those ties next month.

So I'll be blogging like a madman while I'm up there. I'll be experiencing things and places I know already but it'll feel like it's the first time. I love living where I do, but something's missing. Maybe I'll find the missing piece next month. And maybe I won't but it never hurts to look.

03 June 2012

Sunday night traveler's tale

I spent the shank of last week in Costa Mesa, CA and my journey home started yesterday morning. I flew from John Wayne Airport in Irvine to Chicago for the first leg of my trip home.

Once in Chicago, I changed planes and flew home to Tampa/ St. Pete. On that second flight I met a man whose name I don't know. However what I do know was that he'd started his day in Beijing.

If you spend any time in airports, it's obvious that a lot of people fly between the US and China. This guy was different in that Beijing was his home and always had been.

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He was a businessman in his 50s and he was on the flight to Tampa so that he could go on vacation for five days in Sand Key, a beach area just south of Clearwater. Clearwater's a dump but I didn't come out and say that to him. However, Sand Key is one of the loveliest spots along this coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The beaches of Sand Key are broad and wide and the water is the emerald-clear I equate with the Florida I know and call home.

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Anyhow, I asked how someone from Beijing could decide that Sand Key was the perfect spot for some R&R and he told me that when he was young he saw a movie in China and he was completely taken with the surroundings where the movie was filmed. I have no idea which movie he was talking about but through years of research he'd figured out that it had been filmed on Sand Key.

As he navigated the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution and the upheavals attendant to China's rise to its current status, one vision guided him through it -- the beach at Sand Key. As his peers, professors and parents were "re-educated" and persecuted through the years, the idea of a white sand beach on the Gulf of Mexico was something that never left him.

Now that he'd made it in a newly ascendant China he was headed to the place that guided him like a beacon through the trials of his life.

My seatmate has no intention of leaving his homeland, he just needed to touch the place that had brought him so much solace.

I hope he finds there what he was looking for.

I'm used to seeing Chinese tourists in places like Rome, London and New York but I've never met someone who was heading to a place so close to home.

When I was a kid, we used to pray for the starving people in Red China. Over the course of the last 30 years things have changed a bit.

It's easy to rail against Chinese usurping the world stage, but it's the US's consumerist culture, one that demands forever cheaper goods, that brought modern China into being. China's willingness to buy US debt has allowed the US to engage in its constant state of low-level warfare without feeling the financial strain that normally accompanies military ventures.

The Chinese government is a human rights nightmare but how has the US fared with all of the "free" money China bankrolls? When US drones wipe out civilian populations abroad how are we any better off? The US's "War on Terror[ism]" has had us abandon the moral upper hand in the interest of national security and we've done it with Chinese money.

However, none of that matters when it comes down to having a conversation (let alone a two-and-a-half hour one) with someone who's actually Chinese.

Governments and how they behave are different from the people they purport to represent. All it takes sometimes is a flight from ORD to TPA to make that clear. My seatmate's not so different from me, as wildly different as our life stories are. But at the end of the day, the two of us want to make a buck, want to enjoy some R&R sometimes and we want to leave a legacy so our descendants will remember us once we're gone.

I used to fantasize about Pompeii and I saw it in person four years ago. My seatmate used to fantasize about Sand Key and he's seeing it in person right now.

Despite political differences, he and I are the same person and I'm a better man for having met him.


05 April 2012

Easter in the Bahamas



As many of you know I am presently in Eleuthera, Bahamas and this weekend is Easter and its a bit different than in the US. In the Bahamas, Easter is a big religious holiday and more the way that I remember it as a kid. For instance, this Friday is Good Friday and you will find very few stores or businesses open. Some may be open for a few hours but not many will be open at all. That's a memory that I have from childhood and I can't even remember why. Saturday is a normal day and everything is open and if you have forgotten anything this is the day to do so because you won't be able to until the following Tuesday.

Easter Sunday has many ceremonies and church services but you won't even be able to get gas.



The Bahama's as a region is a very Christian country with churches of every denomination.
Monday is Easter Monday and again everything is closed and is generally a day of celebrations. All the various congregations on the island set up great feasts at one of the local beaches and everyone goes, eats, enjoys themselves and as a general rule it is the first time Bahamians will go into the water for the year. That part is funny because the water here, even in winter will be 75-80 degrees and it can be 90 degrees in the shade but they won't go into the ocean. I have to admit I now have a bit of this too. Water that is 80 is what I now consider "refreshing" and below that well--- I just wait.

Ten Bay Beach

Easter Monday is celebrated on the calmer Caribbean side such as this and every settlement has its own beach. Here in Governor's Harbour everyone goes to Receiver's Beach which is about 6 miles away. Every congregation provides food and drinks and families from all over the community join in. Strangely it seems that almost every Easter Monday that we have been here it rains and I mean--- It Rains. Most of the time it seems to be at the end of the festivities so it isn't really a problem.

Life here and not just at Easter is much like it used to be as I remember from my youth. Things are slower and holidays are holidays- everything is closed. Yet in the last few years, I've begun to see changes happening and stores and some businesses are staying open longer. They have started on the trends of the US and I have mixed feeling about that. When I need to get something, I'm grateful they are open but at the same time it signals a change in the times. Even here.


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10 March 2012

Notes from New Orleans and the cities of the dead

One of these days I'll get back to writing about kitchen and bath design but in the meantime, I'm going to continue to write about whatever comes to mind. Bear with me. I'll get back to my niche eventually.

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I spent a good part of last week visiting some long-term friends (Kevin Smith and Brandon Bergman) in their new hometown, New Orleans.

While the rest of the world thinks of New Orleans in terms of Bourbon Street and the shenanigans that accompany Mardi Gras; or the horrors it suffered when the infrustructure failed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; there is much more to that city. It's a place that doesn't feel like the rest of the United States, and the city's conventions and norms make it unlike anywhere else. New Orleans feels like a place without a time or a country and it serves as pressure valve for the world.

I have a number of friends who've moved there over the course of the last four years from Florida. Collectively, I refer to them as economic refugees. People who moved to New Orleans to seek their futures as the city rebuilds itself in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

New Orleans is back in a very big way and it's a real thrill to watch my friends there riding the wave of the Crescent City's rebirth; FEMA, BP and the Army Corps of Engineers be damned.

Rebirth isn't really the right word though. New Orleans has been through the mill since its founding in the early 1700s as La Nouvelle-Orléans. The city passed from French to Spanish and then back to French hands before it became part of the US. Huge amounts of that pre-US infrastructure still exist and it's impossible when in the heart of the city to keep an accurate count of the 18th-Century structures that are still in day to day use.



Beyond its architecture, the culture of New Orleans stands apart from the rest of the US. While it's a thoroughly American city, it retains a feel for its founding cultures that the rest of the US has lost utterly. One of the things that amazes me more than just about anything is its numerous "Cities of the Dead," as cemeteries are known.



I had the pleasure to spend a leisurely afternoon this week in Lafayette #1, one of New Orleans' cemeteries in the city's Garden District. Lafayette #1 was established in 1833 and is a perfect example of how the City has sent her residents to their final repose since the city's beginnings.


Unique in the United States, New Orleans disposes of its dead in above-ground crypts rather than burying them. The going story is that the crypts are a function of the city's low topography but that's not really true. It's as much a throwback to its Continental roots and the reality of its lack of space as anything.



The crypts of New Orleans, like everything else about the place, have an interesting story to tell.

Crypts are owned by families or organizations and the crypts sit on leased land.

When someone dies, he or she is placed on the shelf shown here and the crypt is then sealed.


After a year and a day, the crypt keeper opens the crypt and with a ten-foot pole, pushes the remains to the back of the shelf. At the back of the shelf there's a slit and the remains fall through that slit and drop to the bottom of the crypt. The crypt is now ready for the next family death and it's re-sealed. According to the lore of New Orleans, this is the origin of the expression, "I wouldn't touch that with a ten-foot pole."

On All Soul's Day every year, the people of New Orleans lay tribute in front of these crypts in the form of flowers, beads and other mementos. It's a touching gesture of respect of the deceased.

Not all crypts are owned by families. Some are owned by fraternal organizations or charities. While at Lafayette #1, I came across a large crypt owned by the Society for the Relief of Destitute Orphan Boys, an organization that still exists in New Orleans.


In the most touching example of an already touching practice, the ledge on the face of the crypt was filled to overflowing with toys.




New Orleans is an amazing city and one with a legacy it's all to willing to share with anyone who asks. So head there some time and ask.