We are almost at the start of summer and I can hardly hold back my excitement.  The kids have only four days left of school, my garden is in full bloom, the birds are singing and the sun is rising at 5 am.  Ah, the joy and freedom of summer!… Read full post »

After leaving Cordoba, our next stop on our driving tour of Andalusia was Granada, by far my most favorite place in southern Spain.  Granada is an romantic, beautiful city.  Located at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and tucked between two hills and two rivers, Granada has a lot of bang… Read full post »

Over the weekend, we had our good friends in town from Chicago and wanted to give them a tour of our lovely neighborhood in Southwest Minneapolis.  After stopping at my favorite coffee shop Patisserie 46 to get a cup of mi gasolina we headed towards the Rose and Trial Gardens near… Read full post »

There is no better way to spend the long holiday weekend than grilling out, drinking an ice cold beer, eating a brat, slurping down an ice cream cone, and hanging out with family and friends.  The weather has been cantankerous to say the least with bursts of heat and humidity followed… Read full post »

A fellow WordPress Blogger, Ailsa over at “Where’s my backpack” did it again with this week’s travel theme of Street Markets.  What a fantastic topic for who doesn’t love the vibrant colors and fragrances of a world market?  Markets are amazing as they give you such a… Read full post »

Jakesprinter’s Sunday Post of the week in a wonderful topic:  Doors. Doors are fascinating. They are also quite mysterious for who knows what lies behind the doors of a place. They are the gatekeeper when closed. Yet when opened, they offer you a look into a whole new world of possibilities i… Read full post »

I adore this week’s Photo Challenge topic:  Summer!  Yeah!  Who doesn’t love summer?  It is such a wonderful time of year to let your hair down and be free!  I actually already did this challenge just last week as a fellow WordPress Blogger, Where’s my backpack? came up with th… Read full post »

After creeping everyone out with my last post on the invasion of the caterpillars, I thought I’d share a nice and pretty post about the Twin Cities.  Overall, the comments about the tent caterpillars confirmed that there is an overall dislike for these slimy pests but I did hear some other… Read full post »

They are literally everywhere.  These greenish brown multi-legged caterpillars are practically falling out of the sky.  They coat the sides of our creamish-white stucco house.  They invade the sidewalks in mass.  They swing from the trees on their slippery, silky slime.  They cover the sides and… Read full post »

We left Madrid early the next morning and flew to Seville where we would pick up our car and start our driving tour of Andalusia.  When we had planned this trip, there were too many places that we wanted to see in too little time.  In retrospect, what we did in… Read full post »

In yesterday’s post, Rain and Shine, I mentioned that I was doing a two-part series about what I’d seen over the weekend. Part One described our hot steamy pre-summer day at Interstate Park along the St. Croix River which was followed by our first real sign of summer:  A loud, dark,… Read full post »

Two things happened over the weekend.  The mercury hit 90 degrees F, weather that we typically get in the dog days of summer, and then an enormous thunderstorm rolled into the Twin Cities on Saturday night producing heavy, damaging hail and weather that was 40 degree cooler the next day.  Talk… Read full post »

I have just become a member of Jake’s Printer’s 2012 Year of the Water Dragon’s Sunday Photo Challenge.  I have loved his topics so far thus decided to jump the bandwagon and join in on the fun.  This week’s Sunday Challenge is Pets.

I grew up surrounded by pets. We always… Read full post »

A wonderful blog I’ve started following, Where’s my backpack, cleverly began last week’s unofficial weekly photo challenge on WordPress with the theme “Reflections”. It obviously was a huge hit with WordPress bloggers as well as myself. I loved the challenge and am beco… Read full post »

“If you visit only a few Spanish cities in your lifetime, make beautiful romantic Toledo one of them”.  -Frommer’s Spain Guide 2004

These were the words that prompted us on a whim to take an afternoon day trip to neighboring Toledo.  Only an hour or so outside of Madrid li… Read full post »

This week’s photo challenge is another stellar one:  Hands.  There are so many amazing things we do with our hands that it was hard for me to decide.  We use our hands to love, to help, to survive, to live, to explore, to create and to feel.

I thought back over… Read full post »

I promised I would move on to my next series and here it is: Sumptuous Spain!  I am digging back through my archives a bit as I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from readers on it.  So, I am going to go for it even though (a) The trip was… Read full post »

As promised, I got the good old photo scanner out and scanned my eight year old pictures from my trip to Southern Spain in May 2004. These were the days before I took a zillion photos yet thankfully I kept detailed notes of my travels in my handwritten leather journals.  I have… Read full post »

Mother’s Day was quite the gift.  Not only since it was a day for me to be pampered it was also a gorgeous spring day here in Minneapolis.  The sky was baby blue, the cottonwood seeds were snowing white and all the fragrant flowery spring trees were in full bloom.… Read full post »

I felt like I needed to spice my blog up a bit.  Lately I’ve done an awful lot of posts on Minnesota and even have another one in the queue.  When I started this blog it was mostly for sharing my stories and photos from traveling somewhere else.  Yet I came… Read full post »

For this week’s official Weekly Photo Challenge, the subject is perhaps one of my favorites:  Blue.  I love the color blue.  It is my favorite color.  I thought I’d put a collection of all my favorite travel photos with the color blue below.  I couldn’t figure out what one to f… Read full post »

Saturday was a postcard perfect day with hardly a cloud in the sky.  The sun was shining brilliantly, the humidity was low and we were feeling energetic to try our first long family bike ride of the season, a 12-miler roundtrip to the falls and back (Note:  I had written in… Read full post »

Spring is in full force in Minnesota.  An early spring with its telltale signs of blossoming trees who have come and gone and now on to the white, fluffy cottonwood trees which are coating the skies white like snow.  We road our bikes on Saturday in a coating of white fluff.… Read full post »