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Thank Goodness For Elephants
The drive from Port Alfred to George took us along South Africa’s dramatic eastern Cape towards the more well known Garden Route. We hugged emerald-clad cliffs dropping into the wild ocean on a road weaving along grades originally carved for trains. We made our way in silence, mostly out of sheer awe. When we stopped…
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Windhoek in Port Alfred
Unless you have an airplane, it’s not exactly easy to get to Port Alfred, on South Africa’s windswept Eastern Cape coast. On this trip, at least, it felt like a test of will. The flight school we’d visit suggested a guest house as opposed to the bland traveler’s hotel in town–for the same price I’d…
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Pubs: My First Real Pint
Pubs in England showed one face to me at first contact, like the “oldest pub in Oxford” where I went back in 2009–that had to be authentic, right? With its low ceilings and timbers so shellacked over the years by smoke and skin and paint to the point they looked plastic. We had ducked our…
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Yi, Er, Tsing Tao
Towered over by giant cans of the distinctive green, we made our way past tour busses into the shrine of Tsing Tao. The Germans brought beer to the city of Qingdao (the more streamlined Westernization of the name) in 1903, and today, the brewery captures 15% of the domestic market in China. Though the bottles…
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Colorado Native
Oh the bluebird-sky days of winter have returned as I sneak away to the slopes on a buddy pass and stolen time. The joy of living in Colorado versus traveling there to ski lies in choosing your mid-week day to escape, coming closer to the trifecta of good snow, light lift lines, and a wide open…
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Kölsch: The Beer That’s A Language Too
I took a late run in the day, when the train from Frankfurt dropped me off earlier than I expected in Köln (Cologne to the Francophiles and Englishmen). The rain had darkened the plaza and the Dom itself, not just the black soot of centuries tarnishing the cathedral’s façade and flying buttresses. Because the rain…