In late September 2007 I traveled to Japan with The Wife and several of our friends. It was our first time there, and in just over a week we traveled in and around Tokyo, Osaka, and Hiroshima. My dominant recollection of the trip was its overwhelming heat and humidity. But we managed quite a few [...]
Last weekend I took my Dad to Vegas – his first visit. While there we saw “The Beatles LOVE” Cirque du Soleil show (report here). But we also visited a few off-Strip attractions, including the Liberace Museum and the Hoover Dam. Following are photo albums of each. The Liberace Museum (originals on Flickr here, slideshow [...]
“The Beatles LOVE” is Cirque du Soleil at its Vegas essence, made even better with a beautifully remixed and reimagined soundtrack of the greatest pop songs ever recorded. I’m not much of a Cirque du Soleil fan, though somehow over the years I’ve seen at least a half dozen of their productions. Most were in [...]
In late September 2009 a few friends and I capped our trip to Oktoberfest with a visit to Bamberg, a 1000+ year-old town known for its beer. Bamberg is a charming small city of about 70,000 in northern Bavaria. It’s reminiscent of Bruges in that it escaped bombing during WWII, retaining a twisty medieval character. [...]
A few months back I went to Munich for the world’s oldest and greatest beer festival. I loved it – Oktoberfest wildly exceeded my expectations. I had been to Munich at least once before, but not during this time of year. I expected a New Orleans Mardi Gras-like crush of drunken screaming twenty-year-olds to ruin [...]
The highlight of my September 2007 trip to Japan was a visit to the Yamazaki Distillery outside Osaka. Yamazaki is Suntory’s best-known whisky (Bill Murray’s character endorsed it in Lost in Translation), and to my knowledge the only Suntory single malt brand distributed in the USA. However, the menu at the Yamazaki tasting room (“Whisky [...]
