What
are some of the “things” or activities that people do
for fun in Wales?
ANSWER:Try ‘coasteering’–
it’s great – dressed in wet suites you jump of a cliff (around
30 ft.) into the sea, swim a little, then climb up the cliff to do it
all again.
Walking is also great in Wales – with
the 870 mile Wales
Coast Park, making Wales the only country in the world you can walk
around its entire coast.
What's one thing the public probably
does NOT know about Wales?
ANSWER:Did
you know that Wales has 641
castles – some of which you can stay in!
ANSWER:Slate
– at the end of the 19th century almost all of the slate used for
housing came from Wales. The history of slate mining is kept alive by
the National
Slate Museum in Llanberis. Also, famous poets, entertainers and
actors like Dylan Thomas, Dame Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Sir. Anthony
Hopkins, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Richard Burton and more!
Three Musical Pilgrimages: Mozart, Grieg and Hendrix
Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)
could read and compose music, plus play the violin and piano, when he was
five years old. Born into a musical family in Salzburg, Austria (then the
Holy Roman Empire), he had a unique ability for imitating music, which first
became evident when he recited a musical piece by simply observing his father
conducting a lesson to his older sister. This led to a childhood on the
road, where the young prodigy performed before many of the royal courts
of Europe.
Treasures of Ireland: The Irish Goodbye (Dispatch
#20)
The Palladian Traveler brings to a close his 20-part
series on the Emerald Isle from an upscale restaurant in downtown Dublin
where he files his final dispatch and then quietly slips away.
Two "MUST SEE" Truly Spectacular Places
in Europe. Here's Why.
The Han Grotto and Culzean Castle. As the name
of my Traveling Boy feature is "Travel With a Difference," it's
important to me to always bring you offbeat and unusual tourist places around
the world you may not know about. These two fit that category to a T, and
they're absolutely worth a visit. One's in Scotland and one's in Belgium.
Culzean (pronounced CULLANE) Castle is located near Maybole, Carrick, on
the Ayrshire coast of Scotland.
Highway 49 Revisited: Exploring California's
Gold Country
In the 1840s, the population of California was only
14,000, but by 1850 more than 100,000 settlers and adventurers had arrived
from all over the world – and they came for one reason: gold. James
Marshall had discovered the first gold nugget at Sutter’s Mill in El
Dorado County, creating the largest gold rush in history.
Lake Charles’ Family-Size Low-Key Mardi Gras
The Southwest Louisiana Mardi Gras in Lake Charles,
the second largest in Louisiana, does not need parents there to avert their
children’s eyes. This is family entertainment and children are very
much part of it. The main office of the Lake Charles CVB has costumes from
last year’s Mardi Gras but it also has figures to fascinate little
ones from country boys fishing for their dinner to alligators who have already
fed and are rubbing their stomachs.
Puerto Vallarta: Magic and Mayhem on the Malecon
So I heard that you could spend from dawn to dusk on
the Malecon in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and never get bored and I thought,
"Okay, I'm up for that challenge." Well, maybe not the dawn part
– I'm not a morning person – so I had no problem leaving those
early hours to the joggers and those seeking an early start to catch their
red snapper for dinner.
NOLA: New Orleans, Louisiana
Mardi Gras, the French Quarter, the Garden District,
the streetcar (now a bus) to Desire, the jazz clubs, the beignets at the
Café du Monde and breakfast at Brennan’s come to mind when you
think of New Orleans. But that’s not all there is to this unique American
city, filled with treasures both culinary and cultural.
Monte Verità: In the Footsteps of Anarchy
Just as I reach the end of a squiggling, multicolored
path, an acorn plummets from an oak tree above me. It lands at my feet,
just as the path culminates at a mandala of Venetian glass, eight feet in
diameter. On the worn-out front lawn of Monte Verità, the Mountain
of Truth, this path, Chiara's Rainbow, evolves through the colors of the
spectrum – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and finally violet
– before arriving at the mosaic mandala where psychic energies supposedly
prevail. The falling acorn brings me to the present moment.
