AKtravelers' VirtualTourist Home Page

If you've stumbled upon this Virtual Tourist Homepage, welcome. Feel free to enjoy the rest of my site, too. Isuggest you pour yourself a a glass of wine, a pint of beer or a cup of coffee and take your time to look around. After all, I'm taking my sweet time to put all my pages together -- it will take a while! Especially given all the recent perturbations in my personal life!
Many people on virtual tourist use their homepage to say lots of profound things about travel. If I could, I'd say something profound, too. But don't expect that. In fact, if you see anything profound, please e-mail me and I'll delete it.

So, what you'll see here is just a chronicle of my travels and a few funny stories -- nothing more, nothing less. While I learn a lot when I travel (I'm not keen on packaged resort trips, as you'll see), I still do it just for the enjoyment and relaxation of it all. I like to enjoy the outdoors and wildlife, but find urban vacations to be fun, too. Many times, I'll just rent a car and drive around (like in New Zealand or Ireland), so some of my pages will focus on a wide area.
Of course, all my observations are tainted by my place of origin. I grew up in the northeastern United States (a dying industrial town in Connecticut), spent over 20 years near Baltimore before moving toHawaii and then Japan. So, unavoidedly, all the wonders of travel will be viewed through a prism that views my American experience as normal. Of course, this is a big world and I understand that no life is normal. But, human nature being what it is, I won't be able to help that. I hope you don't mind. In fact, I hope that will make you find me more interesting.

I've been traveling since my mother hooked up a pop-up camper to our station wagon and drove us across the USA in 1974. From all my trips since, I have a great deal of photos and a few stories that I'll share with you on my travel pages. As a person with opinions, I definitely have some favorites, which are:

Favorite hiking trail: Wilcox Pass, Jasper National Park
Favorite Mule Ride: to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
Favorite Horse Ride: The Sacred Valley of Peru to Moray
Favorite Campsite View: (tie) Monument Valley & Perce, Quebec
Favorite City: Paris
Favorite Island: Kangaroo Island, Australia
Favorite Beer: Murphy's Stout in Ireland
Best Mai Tai spot: Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Waikiki
Best Chocolate: Shoc Cocholate, Wellington NZ
Favorite Place for wine-tasting: Beaune, France
Favorite Place for Beer-Tasting: Belgium
Favorite Live Music Bar: The Quays, Galway
Favorite Dessert: Tiramisu in Rome
Favorite ice cream place: The Ben & Jerry's Factory, Waterbury, Vermont
Favorite Soup: Gaspatcho in Spain
Favorite Stadium; Camden Yards in Baltimore
Best Weather: Hawaii
Best Museum: Museii Vaticani
Favorite Bathrooms: Asia Brother Park, Taiwan (people get married in them!)
Favorite Ruins: Machu Picchu
Most beautiful coastal drive: Big Sur, California
Most beautiful mountain drive: Icefields Parkway, Alberta
Best combination, drive & music: crusing Australia's Great Ocean Road listening to AC/DC's "Highway to Hell"
Favorite Crustacean: The Big Lobster in Kingston, South Australia
Favorite Ski Area: Heavenly at Lake Tahoe
Best Whale Watching: Tadoussac, Quebec
Best Coffee Mugs: Starbucks, Seoul
Best Baseball Fans: Hanshin Tigers of Osaka
Best Helicopter Ride: Sunset on Franz Josef Glacier, New Zealand

Most Overrated National Park: Smoky Mountain NP (too crowded)
Worst Night Sleep: In a rented van half hanging over a drainage ditch on Hatteras Island
Worst ice cream: By the Plaza de Armas, Lima, Peru
Worst Beer (how could that be?): National Bohemian in Baltimore
Worst Beer Hall: Gambeer, Hanoi, Vietnam (see Beer & Rats)
Worst Restaurant: Any Waffle House
Worst Propaganda: The Milepost Alaska Guidebook
Worst weather: Seoul
Worst Museum; The Slovakia National Museum
Worst Air Pollution: Seoul
Worst hike: Temple of the Moon at Machu Picchu
Most pestering people: Tangiers, Morocco
Worst combination, drive & music: Sitting on L.A. trafic listening to Sammy Hagar's "I Can't Drive 55"

Through all our travels, I have not been able to avoid learning a few things. Of course, everything I learned was already obvious to the people in the places I was visiting -- thes things just seemed counterintuitive to me.
Anyway, I now know:
1. that the following are sources of food in some places (and taste good): Kangaroo, guinea pig, alpaca, frogs, snails, horse, lamb's head, raw sea urchin, fish-eye soup and fish stomach soup
2. the following are sources of food (and taste bad): silkworm larvae, dog, goose feet, lamb's brain crepes, durian, and stinky tofu
3. how it feels to be a millionaire (well, a Turkish one, anyway)
4. how to suck the eyes out of a fish
5. how to drink a flaming shot
6. that WC indicates a toilet
7. how to ride a luge
8. what the inside of a kangaroo's pouch feels like
9. how to pet a manatee
10. that llamas hum
11. there are worse things than getting pick-pocketed
and
12. that people always appreciate your attempts to speak their language, no matter how badly you mangle it!

When I started these pages in 2000, I lived in Maryland but I've since moved to Hawaii for three years and then on to Japan, where I landed in October 2009. I lived in three places in Hawaii, all in the Kailua/Lanikai area and I loved it! I considered living on the Honolulu, Peal City, Aiea side of the island, but it just didn't have that Hawaii feel. Kailua is a small, friendly town that seems like Hawaii should be.
....I used to live in Ellicott City,Maryland, a community between Baltimore and Washington that was founded in the 1770's. So, from 1985-2006, I considered Washington and Baltimore both to be my home cities and I loved them for different reasons -- so look to my pages on both places to get some local advice. Ellicott City is also worth noting, as it has a historic downtown dating from the 1840's when it was at one end of the first railroad line in the U.S. (the other end was in Baltimore). Have fun reading through my pages! Feel free to leave comments!

While my pages will be loaded with good outdoor, cultural and active travel tips, I'm afraid certain categories of travel won't be well-represented here. Do you want a good day spa recommendation? You won't get that here (unless Carmen posts a tip). Do you want to know about great shopping? Well, I'm probably not the best page to look at, unless you need dog clothes in Tokyo (though our pages aren't completely devoid of shopping information). But I hope most travelers will find something to enjoy among my tips.
Addfitionally, some people update their homepage regularly. That won't happen here -- even during major life-changing crises!

I tend to stop by my VT page a lot, so if you have any comments or questions about my pages, Hawaii or anything else, feel free to drop me a line. I can't promise who will respond to your query, however.

In September, I lost Zoe to a heart ailment. I still miss her. She was 11. Soju (19) and Carmen (13) have made the trip to Japan with me and are hanging on.