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There is little I love more than travel, save my family and perhaps eating. So I travel with my family, and make sure to eat whatever the locals eat. On these web pages I'll bring you along on my trips; hopefully these travelogues will be better than a hastily-scribbled postcard.

It's been a challenge to present a large number of travel web pages in such a way as to make it easy to find a particular location or voyage. One vacation may include several destinations, and sometimes we revisit a favorite place. After much juggling I've decided to organize pages chronologically, and then by location. What does this mean to you? Well, you may see a listing of all of my travel pages at the Site Map but I'm betting that you'll be more satisfied by following along with us on one of our trips.

2008 2007

Somehow during this busy year we "only" do a trip to Burning Man 2007 and another to "London and the Canary Islands".

2006

In April my sister Felicia and I take a trip back to Mom's house in New Jersey to stage it for selling. At the end of the summer the family heads out to Burning Man 2006. Felicia and I return to New Jersey in the autumn (trip not yet broken out into its own section, but may be found as part of the archive pages, here). We end up the year with a return to Gran Canaria to spend some time with great-grandmother Omi Marga.

2005

In May I went back to New Jersey to help my Mom in the last stages of her ovarian cancer. She died while Felicia and I were airborne. We start the autumn at Burning Man. The surviving family has a memorial service for Mom in Ibiza, with a stop-over in Iceland on the return trip.

2004

In February and March we returned to Gran Canaria. In June we headed up to Truckee-Donner to enjoy Lake Tahoe. In July we headed out to New York City & New Jersey. And in August we returned to Burning Man.

Then, in mid-December, we return for a Gran Canaria winter break with three days in London thrown in for good measure.

2003

For the first time since the economic dot-com collapse in December of that annus horribilis, 2000, we're leaving the country! We're heading back to Gran Canaria & London; to visit great-grandmother Oma Marga and then to recover.

Later in the year, in August, I return to Burning Man, but this time with the wife and children in tow.

2002

A week after we walked in the 2002 Dykes On Bikes parade in San Francisco we flew to Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs for a week-long family get-together. And in August I head to Black Rock City, for Burning Man

2001

In the springtime of 2001 we visited Kaua'i and O'ahu, two of the Hawaiian isles. Isaac brought a coconut back to our room. In the autumn it's back to Burning Man.

2000

In November 2000 we spent ten days in Roma. What a wonderful time! Italy was just a joy, the people were gracious and attentive to Isaac, the food was excellent, and the weather was unseasonably warm.

We returned to Point Reyes, just north of San Francisco, for the August 2000 Huckleberry Hike.

Springtime 2000 we took sister-in-law Pamela on a train trip through Europe, including stops at London, England; Paris, France; Brussels, Belgium; Amsterdam, Holland; and Münster, Germany. We continued without her to St. Ives, Cornwall, England.

Come the end of summer I'm back in the desert dust of Burning Man.

1999

In the waning days of 1999 we took a trip to Africa which included stops in Barcelona (Spain), Casablanca (Morocco), and the Canary Islands (again).

In the summer of 1999 we attended a family get-together in the Austrian Alps, at the alpingasthaus Bergheimat, high above the town of Mühlbach am Hochkönig. We spent several days in Salzburg before moving on to London (England) and Munchen (Germany).

1998

August 1998 found us atop Mount Wittenberg, in Point Reyes, during our annual Huckleberry Hike.

In the spring of 1998 Rose and most of my side of the family went to Cortina d'Ampezzo (Italy) on a ski trip. This was thirty years after I learned to ski there, when I was four years old. We took a side trip to Venice the day before Carnival.

In the autumn Ranger Lefty and I spend a week in the desert at Burning Man.

1997

In 1997 Rose and I travelled to the wierd urban-desert mix that is Phoenix / Scottsdale / Tempe / Mesa (Arizona).

In August Rose and I head up past Reno, Nevada, to the Hualapai ("wall-a-pie") desert lake-bed, for Burning Man.

1996

1996 saw me in Kaua'i (Hawai'i), Minneapolis (Minnesota), New Jersey (for Passover), and skiing near Fleishmanns (New York).

I take my girlfriend, Rose, up to Burning Man. The relationship survives :-)

1995

In the autumn of 1995 I travelled to Eivissa and Gran Canaria in order to write a book, Internet TV with CU-SeeMe. My first on-line travelogue, updated daily through a creaky modem line a few dozen miles from the African coastline.

I love to travel. I love what I learn about other cultures, the contact I make with the locals (and sometimes with other travellers), and what I learn about myself and my culture. There's nothing like living out of a small bag and not speaking a word of your mother-tongue for months at a time. I love to travel.

I grew up speaking several languages (American English, Dutch, and German) because I was living in Holland, going to the American School at Soesterberg Air Force Base, and spending weekends, weeks, and months with my maternal grandparents in nearby Ahlen, West Germany. (That's when there was an East and West Germany.) Sadly, I've lost my Dutch because I don't ever use in the USA, but I've added hilariously broken Spanish and American Sign Language, and just enough Japanese to get myself into deep trouble. (I was going to say "deep kimshee", but that's another matter - and country - entirely.) I wandered into the waters of Esperanto, Arabic, and Swahili, but I need to have on-going practice to ever use these languages for anything.

A sore point with me is the "ugly tourist", those pathetic excuses for humanity who bitch and moan "that's not how we do it at home." Hey! We don't care how you do it at home. If you wanted it that way you should have stayed at home! Just so you're not dissapointed (and a pain in the ass) on your next trip, let me tell you now that the food is different, the market wares are different, the toilet paper is different, the bugs are different, the water is different, where you're asked to bed down is different, and, oh yes, the language is different. It does you no good to speak your mother-tongue louder at the locals; they're not stupid or slow, they speak a different language. If you can't be bothered with trying to learn the local language (or at least carrying around a phrase book and dictionary) then you deserve what you get. (Why did you bother leaving your perfect little nest in the first place?)

Whew! I'm glad I got that out of my system. Thank you for indulging me.