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Heat, drought, wildfires, and even a plague of locusts in Europe and North Africa around the Mediterranean may affect your travels, as communities are resorting to water-rationing and other protective measures. This interactive map provides more details. Take these safety precautions for traveling in extreme heat to avoid heatstroke.
Here's another development in the technology-fueled resources for Pennsylvania travelers. Following the recent launch of the travel blogger project, now come downloadable MP3 travel guides for iPods and similar devices to reach out in particular to younger travelers. But Queen Elizabeth II, you recall from this website, now has an iPod, so get with it, girls, this is clearly a new wave in the mobile travel future.
Forget about sandals and flops, a real girl wears Western boots in summer -- the out-of-season 
trendiness making them even hotter and you tougher. Manhattan has discovered cowgirl boots, along with Steve Madden, Saks, Urban Outfitters, et cetera, et cetera, requiring longstanding Frye boots stores to dust out their bins and dig out their classic styles. I bought my tooled boots a few years ago in good ol' Texas, where you can walk into a leather store even in out-of-the-way locations and find more choices than you can ever imagine. The sales hype is true -- cowgirl boots are extraordinarily comfortable, and, unbelievably, especially easy for Texas two-stepping.
My Santa Fe, New Mexico chronicles continue with random reflections on excursions in the area --mesmerizing summer lightning storms, travel up the road to 
Native American pueblos and pottery, visits to artist Georgia O'Keeffe's favored red rock landscape country and to the remains of the ancient Anasazi cliff dwellers...
The summer storms in the Rio Grande Valley outside Santa Fe come from three directions. By noon, a gray-bottomed 
mass or two begin to stand out in the vast big sky, and we look across the valleys to see who's getting the weather. A few hours later, as the lightning dances on the horizon, the wind shifts and a new storm arrives from the west. The thunder bounces off the mountains and mesas into the valleys and ricochets back and forth against the terrain in long powerful waves of echoing sound.
In summer, New Mexico experiences more lightning than any place in North America outside the moist edges of the Gulf of Mexico. Massive updrafts off the hot land surfaces surge into the heart of the storms carrying evaporated moisture from yesterday's cloudbursts rising back up into the roiling cauldron towers of churning moisture.
What follows are more random reflections for your next trip...
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Continue reading "Santa Fe Chronicles: In and Around the Region" »
Cyclists and other exercisers who drape themselves in health monitoring equipment shouldn't be obsessive about the data. While these abundant technology tools may be useful, they can be motivating for the very committed and possibly distracting or demoralizing for others. We're not all Lance Armstrongs competing in the Tour de France. Think about why you exercise and what's best for your mental as well as physical state, researchers advise.
The dinner at Geronimo in Santa Fe was everything you'd want -- a cozy but comfy banquette for two, white tablecloth and impeccable service, inventive and delectable food. Forgive 
me for sounding so uncritical, but my two dinners there have been consistently outstanding, and consistency is important when you're said to be one of the best.
It's difficult to have a bad meal in Santa Fe -- food and dining are so important in the local culture -- but it's easy to have an ordinary one that rides on reputation and ambiance alone. Chefs who have studied everywhere have relocated right here, an artistic small city (only 65,000 people) with customers who appreciate quality and indigenous ingredients that are fun to work with, colorful, and begging to be combined in unusual ways. The food of the Southwest is so, well, earthy, truly the food of the land -- beans, corn, and peppers as willing companions for seafood, fowl, and game.
More on Geronimo and my other favorite Santa Fe food places in this second article in a series on Santa Fe...
With more women traveling alone abroad for business or for pleasure, it's important to know the local customs and practices, as well as safety considerations. File this away -- the US State Department has a list of helpful hints for a solo womantraveler on its website, along with other useful information and advisories for international travel.
LA Style is whatever you make it. Anything goes,and, for some reason, people with really bad taste like to copy each other. That goes along with feeling (not necessarily being) young and free and experimental. This clothes horse has a clever beat on LA fashion for regular viewing.
In my several visits to Santa Fe, New Mexico, over the past 10 years, there are several lasting 
impressions that keep me returning -- the simple yet overpowering beauty of the landscape, the respectful influence of Native American and Hispanic culture, and the perfection of daily pleasures, such as meals and shopping. With the upcoming annual Indian Market -- the world's largest Native American arts show and sale during Aug. 19-22 -- it's the right time to share my insider view of the real Santa Fe.
A womantraveler remembers these things vividly, and often quietly, in the perspective of time of life and context of the moment. How will I trade the days at Rancho Jacona, 25 miles northwest of Santa Fe, living for several days my first August there in a comfortable casita, watching the Little League World Series with my son when we weren't venturing out, celebrating spectacular sunsets over the lights of Los Alamos on the mountains in the distance with a glass of wine, meandering among the peacocks who walked among us on the property like chickens and preened on rooftops like protective gargoyles?
In this first of a series, this post will talk about the best places to stay in the Santa Fe area...
Capri? Majorca? Take me there, baby. Love of nature? Lust for shopping? Get the insider view of Italy's seductive Capri from the International Herald Tribune...Around the Mediterranean, Spain's Majorca capital of Palma is one of Europe's hottest weekend escapes...When do we go?
