America’s biggest annual sporting event takes place a little more than two weeks from now in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yes, the World Cup will be there in the summer, but I’m talking about an annual event, the National Football League’s Super Bowl. The big game, Super Bowl LX if you want to be precise about it, or if you just love Roman numerals, will be held at Levi’s Stadium in suburban Santa Clara on Sunday Feb. 8. The city of San Francisco hosts the yearly Super Bowl Experience for fans at the Moscone Center from Feb. 3 to Read more
January 2026
As a junior reporter at City News Service in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, I was once assigned to cover a meeting of the group planning the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. I had grown up watching the Games on TV, and it was pretty cool to be at an Olympics organizing committee press conference. I had no way of knowing it, but that assignment was, to paraphrase “Casablanca,” the beginning of a great relationship. Ten years later I was reporter at the City Hall Bureau for the Toronto Star, covering Toronto’s bid for the 1996 Summer Games, which Read more
Bloomberg recently came out with nice recommendations on great places to travel in 2026. Among their suggestions were Taipei, Corsica, Lake Louise, San Francisco and Scotland. I’m a big fan of Corsica, a French island in the Mediterranean I visited back in 2009. The food (especially the wine, cheese and seafood) is quite good, the coastline magical, and the surprisingly rugged mountains great for hiking. Bloomberg noted a growth in new boutique hotels and called the island “the perfect blend between private luxury and uncrowded, European summer bliss.” Notwithstanding those comments, I’d aim for a visit in late April or Read more
Canadians have a fever, and the only cure is more travel. A new Flight Centre Canada report finds that 82% of Canadians feel vacations are not a luxury, but are instead essential to their health and wellbeing. Nearly seven in ten (69%) says doctors should be able to prescribe vacations to give them a needed break from work and everyday stress. (I like this. Instead of “take two Tylenol and call me in the morning,” it would be “take two weeks at the beach and don’t call a soul.”) The report also finds that 87% of Canadians would rather take Read more
If you’re flying in or out of Toronto today, good luck. With heavy snow falling in southern Ontario, Flight Aware at 3 p.m. (Thursday, Jan. 15) was reporting more than 250 cancelled flights at Toronto Pearson Airport/YYZ, as well as more than 300 delays. That rate of cancellation is roughly one quarter of all flights in and out of YYZ. It was reporting 42 cancellations at Montreal Trudeau Airport at 3 p.m., 21 for Ottawa International and 18 at Toronto City Centre/Billy Bishop airport on the waterfront (YTZ). Even if you count only 100 passengers on a flight, 250 cancelled Read more
