Here are a couple of blog posts from British Columbia… VANCOUVER – Downtown Vancouver’s Art Gallery is a great spot, with a big patio out front and big steps and a feel, to me, anyway, of a public square in London. The best part? Food trucks. Food trucks all over the damned place. It’s not bad enough we don’t have a public square in Toronto as nice as the one in front of the Art Gallery of Vancouver (not in my mind, anyway). No, they have to lord it over us with trucks selling the most wonderful of foods; a Read more
August 2013
Here’s a post from a great trip to New Zealand a few years back. Awesome golf, great food and unforgettable scenery… NORTH ISLAND, NEW ZEALAND—You drive down a dirt road a half hour outside Kerikeri, a town of maybe 6,000 permanent residents. Suddenly there’s a plain, wooden gate that looks for all the world as if it’s meant to keep sheep off the road, which it probably is. It’s a level of modesty that befits this country that one local described to me as “second-gear.” But the golf resort that lies behind the plain fence is sheer glory. Kauri Cliffs Read more
This post is from a great visit in December, 2010… PARIS – It wasn’t what I expected. And I couldn’t have been happier. When someone from the French tourism office in Canada suggested I take in a jazz brunch on Sunday, I had pictures of a bunch of guys Woody Allen’s age bopping on the clarinet in front of a well-heeled group of visitors at a semi-swanky hotel room. Or something like that. Instead, when I arrived at a place near the Marais district called Le Reservoir, I was mildly surprised – in the best possible way – to find Read more
LOS ANGELES – It’s impossible to encapsulate a city of such diverse neighbourhoods into one, so I’ll keep this focused on Hollywood and downtown L.A., which has seen an incredible resurgence – resurrection, even – since the bad old days when this correspondent toiled nightly in what was then a wasteland at Fifth and Figueroa. SLEEPING The Roosevelt, a Thompson property, was home to the first Academy Awards ceremony, which lasted only minutes (if only). Marilyn Monroe used to do photo shoots at the palm-surrounded pool and used to sleep there regularly, amongst other things. There’s a cool, old-fashioned, two-lane Read more
Here’s a post from one of my favourite cities in the late fall of 2010… SYDNEY – Still pretty rainy here in Sydney. Unusual for this time of year, but we can probably blame El Nina. Or El Nino. Or some kind of weird climactic situation. It was close to 30 degrees here a week ago, and it’s usually in the mid-20’s by now as Sydney approaches the summer. This would be the equivalent of early May for them, so it’s usually a brilliant time of year. Instead, it’s gone from beautiful to bizarre, with daytime temperatures in the teens Read more
