Barbados is celebrating its 60th anniversary as an independent nation. I first visited in 2009 or so, and have been at least four or five times since. It’s one of my fave places in the world; beautiful and safe and relaxed, but with many elegant places to stay. This list is mostly about food and drinks, so here’s a link to a story I wrote after a great food tour of the island a few years ago. Barbados Food & Rum Festival – One of the Caribbean’s premier culinary festivals brings together renowned local and international chefs each year. Meet Award-Winning Read more
China
A new list of the 30 most beautiful destinations on earth, a fabulous grizzly bear-viewing trip to British Columbia, and new Canadian visitor numbers for Florida. All in today’s blog post. THE 30 MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACES ON EARTH: REALLY? Condé Nast Traveller is one of the top names in the biz. It’s an excellent magazine with informed editors and readers. But I’m baffled by their latest list, which claims to show the 30 most beautiful places in the world. There are a couple of entries here that I know nothing about or that don’t appear all that amazing in the Read more
Okay, so here’s an odd/interesting list of the world’s great cities. TimeOut magazine asked 24,000 people in 150 cities around the world about their fave cities, and then balanced that with views from their team of city experts to come out with a new ranking. I’ll give them credit for including some smaller or lesser-known destinations such as Bath, England and Antwerp, Belgium, as well as Lagos, Nigeria. But, for the life of me, I don’t know how ANYONE can come up with a list of great cities of the world and put Paris in the 22nd spot. That boggles Read more
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
London, New York City and Paris made the podium in the newest list of the world’s top cities. Resonance Consultancy, which has been analyzing world cities for 11 years, looked at everything from livability to education, parks and public transit to come up with its list, which I think is always one of the strongest in the biz. London came out on top (it has won the award 11 years in a row), followed by New York City and Paris. Toronto was the top winner in Canada, coming in at number 17, while Los Angeles was the top US city Read more
