This year marked my 17th trip to Burning Man, the enormous arts festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, but Zevin’s first. Leading up to it, I was worried whether the heat and dust would make it too difficult for him, but for nothing. In the line to get in, a white-out dust storm […]
Brittany by Boat
From Nantes, we travelled two hours north to the village of Saint-Martin-sur-Oust where we started our week-long canal boat trip. The adventure originated when our friends in Germany told us they had found a German Groupon for a discounted rental of a live aboard boat, with availability in a couple dozen spots around Europe. The […]
Nantes and Les Machines d’Île
From Tel Aviv, we took a five hour flight to Nantes, once the capital of Brittany in northwestern France. This once grand city had been heavily bombed in the war, so much of it is rebuilt, but all in a grand style. Similar to Israel, where the shops are shuttered for shabbat, Brittany closes up […]
Tel Aviv
Our stay in Tel Aviv was short, just a single night prior to our flight to Nantes. Still, we managed to arrive before shabbat closed Breadberry, a gluten-free bakery Michelle had scoped out. Michelle and I took a walk around the city, but by that time, the shops had closed until the following week, but […]
Returning to Tzfat and Beit She’an
Sometime just after college, I spent six weeks backpacking around Israel on my own. I didn’t have any itinerary, and at some point found myself in Tzfat, a northern hilltop town where a number of important Kabbalistic thinkers and great rabbis settled after fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. At my hostel, I ended up chatting with […]
Ein Gedi, Masada and the Dead Sea
Heat was going to be our big challenge: temperatures in the area were climbing into the mid-90’s by late morning, and that was more than Zevin could tolerate, even had he not been recuperating from being sick. Fortunately, we were still jetlagged enough that we woke to a just lightening sky. We had our breakfast […]
Kibbutz Ein Gedi
Early Tuesday morning, we picked up our Budget rent-a-car and waved goodbye to the Holy City of Jerusalem, making our way east and south down to Ein Gedi, an oasis on the shore of the Dead Sea. We arrived at our Airbnb, situated on the grounds of Kibbutz Ein Gedi and its botanical garden, in […]
Jerusalem
The ten-hour time shift created the perfect storm for our jet lag: we found ourselves fighting sleep in the early afternoon and then wide awake somewhere between midnight and 2 am, ready to attack the day. On the bright side, this made getting a start before the heat of the day set in easy. So […]
All Humans Made It to Israel
Zevin played hookie from his last day of fourth-grade so we could make it to our flight to Israel on Wednesday, kicking off a three-and-a-half week trip that will include some time on the canals of Brittany and a stop in London. We flew Jetblue to JFK (Zevin’s favorite airline, due to their free seat-back […]
Rogue Camping Tips
We’re not much for KOA-type paid campgrounds when we travel. Our camper van has everything we need: a sink, stove, refrigerator, bed, even a toilet. So why pay $50 / night to park the car and go to sleep? And honestly, the money is the least of it. Campgrounds are so sterile and bland, we’d […]