On the morning of April 3, 2020, the T-Boy Society of Film & Music met in Studio City, CA for the final vote in our top 20 Road Songs of all-time. Due to the coronavirus mandated quarantine, our 15-member group transmitted their lists via zoom. Veteran member, Phil was the only member at corporate headquarters.
This celebration happened to be in Valladolid, the de facto capital of Castilla y Leon, Spain, also known as the garden city, and the city where Christopher Columbus died. The celebration was incidental to the trip, and something I didn’t expect, but my friends carefully planned to surprise me with a party – and they succeeded!
Let me give you two intriguing books to consider. One this month and, in May, a truly remarkable tome about Field Marshall Rommel, and why you should consider buying both the Churchill and Rommel books.
This is the third installment of Ed Boitano’s series on Pilgrimages. In the second installment, Places I’ll Remember, Part 2, Boitano covered Vincent van Gogh’s final days in Auvers-sur-Oise, the Leaning Bell Tower of Pisa and Princess Grace in Monaco. Still quarantined at home in Southern California, Boitano is doing even more reminiscing these days.
In early 2015, a group of my friends decided to hike up Mt. Whitney, a peak of 14,505 feet in the Eastern Sierras of California. The idea came from our buddy John Marsden. He often was the catalyst of our adventures, and he liked it when his friends could join him on these trips. Many of us in this circle of friends were hikers, and have even done hikes together.
Forty pairs of eyes scan the countryside looking for movement, any movement. With binoculars and cameras at the ready, we hoped for a bear or a moose, but were willing to settle for some Dall sheep high up the mountain. Not a passenger aboard the bus maintained a semblance of composure.
You may not be traveling to far-away places in the immediate future, but we can bring them to you. Here's a series of T-Boy’s virtual trips, and we hope you'll be able to go there and to other distant destinations soon.
On the morning of February 28, 2020, the T-Boy Society of Film & Music met in Studio City, CA for the final vote on our top 20 Road Movies of all-time. It was one of those beautiful Southern California mornings where the sun was out, the air was fresh with just a hint of dampness on the world-famous Los Angeles River ‘s concrete riverbed.
This is the second installment of Ed Boitano’s series on Pilgrimages. In the inaugural installment, Pilgrimages: Places I’ll Remember, Boitano covered Dylan Thomas – Laugharne, Wales, Antoni Gaudí – Barcelona, Catalonia, Frida Kahlo & Leon Trotsky – Coyoacán, Mexico and The Barbary Apes – Gibraltar. Now quarantined at home due to the coronavirus, Boitano is doing a lot of remembering these days.
Like a war correspondent, The Palladian Traveler files his last dispatch in this series from a platform overlooking a re-creation of the Battle of Borodino, the bloodiest battle of the Napoleanic Wars that signaled the beginning of the end for Emperor Napolean I.