Speechless. Astonished. Flabbergasted. Those are just three superlatives that I can use to describe my elation at having spent an hour with mountain gorillas in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park. Uganda, neighboring Rwanda, and the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo) are the only places in the world where these great apes still roam free. And I saw them.
Continue reading “Gorillas (Not Quite) in the Mist – Part Three”
Bwindi Impenetrable National Park was just 50 yards from our lodge, Lake Kitandara Bwindi Camp. Our driver, Matthieu, escorted us to the park gate, where we signed in and met the park staff and other trekkers. We showed our permits – a whopping $500 apiece – and were led through orientation. The head guide was a female, something of a surprise in this male-dominated part of the world.
Continue reading “Gorillas (Not Quite) in the Mist – Part Two”
I can hardly believe that five years have passed since my three-country safari and hiking trip to East Africa in August, 2010. I wrote about the trip’s climax – a successful summit of Mount Kilimanjaro – last fall, and thought you might like to hear about the Uganda portion of trip, in which my friends and I had one thing on our minds: gorillas!
Continue reading “Gorillas (Not Quite) in the Mist – Part One”
This month’s feature takes us back to Europe. Ukraine has been in the news for the past two years, courtesy of Vladimir Putin’s push for returning Crimea and Eastern Ukraine to Russia-proper.
Although I have never traveled to that part of Ukraine before, I did have the opportunity to visit the country’s vibrant capital, Kiev, in 2011, and it remains one of my favorite cities in Eastern Europe. Kiev’s Caves Monastery is the city’s most-visited sight, and draws camera-toting travelers such as myself as well as devout pilgrims of Orthodox faith.
Two paragraphs of my last blog entry, A Potpourri of Updates, referenced a recent day trip to Jonesborough, Tennessee. I finished labeling and uploading my photos from the day, and, after viewing them again, thought I’d write a bit more about the day.
My parents and I had heard good things about Jonesborough, and my parents said that the town was featured on a recent episode of the PBS series “Tennessee Crossroads.” We visited Jonesborough on a sunny, moderately-humid Tuesday. I happened to have the day off, and woke up to sunny skies that simply beckoned.
It has been almost three weeks since my last blog post. So much has happened that I’ve barely had a chance to come up for air. But for the next 13 days or so, I’ll have a respite from the usual craziness, and even a chance at my first solo vacation since My (Not Quite) Coast-to-Coast Trip Report of 2014.
Meanwhile, I thought you might appreciate a CliffsNotes-style update on my life, and on things that are of interest to me. I am still alive and well, Loyal Reader. I promise not to be offline for so long before my next post.
Last month’s entry took us to a green space in the middle of a large U.S. city. For this month’s feature, we remain in the U.S. but get closer to nature.
Yellowstone National Park is the country’s oldest national park. It is also one of the biggest, occupying the northwest corner of Wyoming as well as several thousand acres in both Idaho and Montana.
Ten days ago I visited the Knoxville Museum of Art. This free museum, built on a bluff above World’s Fair Park, houses five galleries over three floors. As art museums go, the exhibits are only so-so, but it does include a nice collection of 20th-century art by Tennessee artists and/or about Tennessee itself. Most of what remains is abstract contemporary in nature – in other words, the kind of art that you don’t immediately “get” on a first viewing.
My genealogy is fairly straightforward: mostly Polish on my mom’s side and Norwegian on my dad’s. There is a smattering of other ethnicities as well, most of them Anglo-Saxon: Lithuanian, Scots-Irish, Welsh, Dutch, English, Danish, etc. And Cherokee Indian. No, seriously. According to a family tree that my father sketched out as far back as he could, my great-great-great grandmother was a Trail of Tears-era Cherokee by the name of Running Fawn. I wish there was a photograph of her in existence somewhere.
Where am I going with this? Well, Father’s Day was 10 days ago, and I’ve been spending a lot of time with my own father these past few weeks. My mom has been visiting her daughter and granddaughter on the other side of the state, and it has given my dad and I time to get to know each other better. Our recent time together has confirmed something that I long suspected: although we are sometimes so different that I wonder – jokingly – if I was adopted, I know that most of the time, I am my father’s son.
So far in this monthly series, I’ve taken us once to Asia, once to Europe, and three times to Latin America. The most recent entry transported Loyal Readers to roaring Iguassu Falls, at the “Triple Frontier” of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.
But it is officially summer as I write this, and I thought I would take us to a site near my hometown that looks great during the summer months, a site that, despite its name, celebrates its 11th anniversary: Millennium Park, Chicago.
GringoPotpourri 