Travels in the 2nd half

Regular readers know that one of my organizing principals in traveling is to avoid crowds. So, I scheduled my trip to Lake George in early June, the period when it is just waking up and preparing for the summer crowds. It is a time where this tourist haven is (mostly) open for business, but not yet overrun by crowds. In other wards, a perfect time for me. Lake George is located about two-hundred miles north of New York City, in the Adirondack Mountains. It is thirty two miles long and up to two miles wide. The Lake George valley is a rift valley, formed by the  stretching of the continental plate along a fault. The lake itself was created when the glaciers of the ice age left a terminal moraine along the southern end of the valley. This geologic history has created a beautiful valley, filled with a gorgeous lake. Together, they form one of New York’s most beautiful areas. One so pretty, it has drawn tourists for over one-hundred years. Today, the town of Lake Geo...

Tinglet Whale Hat Sometimes you are in a city with an hour or so to kill. Some people look for a coffee shop to spend that time. Some look for a bar. Me, I look for a good gallery or a small museum. Luckily, New York is filled with great choices. Two of them are on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, The Bard Grad Center Gallery and the American Museum of Folk Art. Bard College is a small liberal arts school, whose main campus is located about 90 miles north of the city. The college has a graduate program, based in New York City, that offers degrees in decorative arts, design studies and the history of material culture. The Bard Grad Center resides in a six-story building on West 86th street. The building houses its classes, research spaces and three floors of gallery space where they present exhibitions that highlight the history of culture through objects. When I visited in June, there were three exhibitions on display. The first was a show on the changes in typography and...

Planning my last day with a car in northern Italy, I thought I would try to drive around Lake Garda. It is less than one hundred miles around, I thought, and it is extremely beautiful. My experience with the holiday crowds in Verona reminded me to be flexible and ready to change my plans. I hit the road early on a Friday morning, and when I arrived at the outskirts of Sirmione, on the southern end of Lake Garda, it was clear that it was going to a crowded day.  I grabbed a free parking spot near Parque San vito, in the Colombare neighborhood, which is about 2.3 Km (1.5 miles) away, at the southern end of the peninsula on which Sirmione sits. There is a bus every twenty minutes or so from Colombare to the old town, but I decided to walk, and get a feel for the area. The peninsula is a resort are, with hotels and restaurants jockeying for space along the shores of the lake. The southern end of the peninsula has a beautiful park to walk in, and I walked along with others w...