Kim sings Fado on the ukelele

We arrived in London on March 16, in the rain and fog. "A foggy day, in London town...." Our flat is in Camden Town, about 25 minutes from the center of the city by underground. It is a vibrant neighborhood with lots of parks, stores & restaurants. There is a canal nearby. We took the tube down to the center of town. There we saw government buildings, Big Ben, and walked along the Thames from the Embankment tube stop around to St. Paul's Cathedral. We took a tour of St. Paul

Slow travel is not the same as moving to another place, but it’s not quite a vacation either. Sometimes it feels more like the former, sometimes more like the latter, and sometimes it feels like an experience we’ve never had – a terrain we’ve not traversed before. When does it feel like a vacation? The first weeks of a new destination offer an endless array of tourist “must dos” and photographable moments. You make a list of all the things you have to do before you leave.

Family singing and a song written by a gay nightclub singer in the 1930s

We've had a lot of good meals, but the best was at Biarro do Avillez, a pricy (but worth it) restaurant near our apartment. They actually have several restaurants: a bar, a pizza place and Pateo, which is where we ate. We had a variety of small dishes, with a nice white wine: amazing bread & olives, lobster & avocado salad, and clams cooked in garlic and lemon. Then, we shared curried chickpeas and a pork steak served with the inevitable french fries (batatas frites) and a w

I retired in December, 2021, and a few days ago I had the honor of being asked to present a lecture on what I learned from my career. In that lecture, I discussed five "lessons" I have learned that made my career more productive and more enjoyable. You can see that 30-minute lecture by clicking below: Reflections on a Career: 5 Lessons I realized afterwards that those same lessons apply equally to slow travel. Lesson #1 Don't be afraid to have original ideas In work, we fr

When I was 10 years old, my Aunt Doll bought me an ukelele. I taught myself some basic chords out of a book and learned some songs, and enjoyed it. After a few years, I stopped playing. After I went to college, the instrument was given away. Decades later, Paul bought me an ukelele for Christmas, 2017. It looks like this: We were in New Zealand and it was at home, so I didn't even see it until the end of April, 2018. On our way home that year, we stopped in Hawaii and