I can remember the day Elvis died. I was a teenager, the most junior reporter at a TV news station in Australia. When the news broke, my boss immediate scheduled the Elvis story as the lead item for that night’s news. I was confused – the idealistic, university-student me thought news was about politics…
Like so many people, I’ve seen Gone With the Wind. My vision of the American deep south was very much formed by Clark Gable’s charm and Vivien Leigh’s accent. I didn’t really believe either were strictly accurate, so on our Mississippi River road trip, I was very keen to visit some of the plantations…
Continuing my blogs about my US road trip – I thought I should talk about the cause of the whole venture – the Mississippi River. At school we were taught that the Mississippi is one of the largest rivers in the world (4th longest I believe). We learned about its role in opening America…
I’m back from a fabulous road trip – crossing the USA from south to north along the Mississippi River – 1400 miles (or close to). Over the next few weeks I want to share some of that with you … There were a lot of literary references during the trip – and a lot…
Masada is a place of legend – and a place I had always wanted to visit – and on my recent trip to Israel, I did. It was spectacular in so many ways – it’s really hard to know where to start. There’s history and geology and tragedy and Peter O’Toole… I guess it…
I know – I’m too late for Halloween. But whatever the time of year – I do love graveyards. Old graveyards. Whether it’s a Neolithic burial mound, a stone cross on the moors or a marble mausoleum, each has stories to tell. It should therefore not be any great surprise that a certain amount of…
There’s bears in them there hills. Seriously. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park – which straddles the Tennessee / North Carolina border – claims to have bears. About 1700 of them. That was all I needed to hear and we were off, cameras poised, on a bear hunt. Entering the park, we stopped at the…
Museums are not about rare and fabulous objects safely locked behind protective glass. At least the good ones aren’t. Museums should be about people and the lives they lived. Museums should tell stories. And never have I found more stories in a single place than at the fabulous Museum of Appalachia in Tennessee. The…