Category: Travel
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Out for Pizza, Day 6
On the final day of our visit, we got breakfast, paid our bill, and dragged our bags through the drizzle down to Sorrento's harbor for the boat ride to Naples. It wasn't quite as dramatic as the previous day's voyage, for which we were grateful. The weather was maddeningly changeable: sun one minute, showers the…
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Out For Pizza, Day 5
After our visits to Pompeii and Herculaneum we wanted to see some of the actual art treasures from those cities, all of which were taken away in the 18th and 19th centuries as the sites were excavated. Most of the good stuff is nearby, at the National Museum of Archaeology in Naples. Accordingly, we got…
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Out For Pizza, Day 4
On the fourth day it wasn't rainy! In delightful partly-sunny weather we boarded the train for Ercolano, where we planned to ascend Mount Vesuvius by bus and then explore the ruined city of Herculaneum. Ercolano, it must be said, is a dump. I hope nobody reading this is a proud native of the town, but…
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Out For Pizza, Day 3
We made sammiches, put on our rain ponchos, and boarded the train for Pompeii. Pretty much everyone else aboard the Circumvesuviana rail line was also going to Pompeii, though we didn't learn why until we got there. Turns out we were very lucky in our choice of week to visit Italy. It was Culture Week,…
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Out For Pizza, Day 2
The rain continued on our second day. Not a hard rain, but an annoying rain, especially since our supply of clothing was limited and the only way to dry things was to hang them up in the sunshine. If there had been any sunshine, which there wasn't. So staying dry and keeping dry clothes became…
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Out For Pizza, Day 1
We decided to go out for pizza. Pizza originated in Naples, so that's where we went. The four of us (me, Diane, Emily, and Robert) set out on our trip to southern Italy on the 14th of April. Drove across Massachusetts after lunch, deposited the car at Alewife and rode the T to Logan Airport.…
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Ozblogging: The Road to Oz, Part 6
Party Like It's 1909! The guests begin to arrive for Ozma's birthday party, and L. Frank Baum demonstrates an early mastery of the Superhero Crossover subgenre. All the guests are either characters from other Oz books, or from some of Baum's non-Oz fantasies. This book solidly cements all of Baum's fantasies into a single fictional…
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Ozblogging: The Road to Oz, Part 4
After escaping the Scoodlers, Dorothy and Company come to the end of the road, literally. It reaches the edge of the Deadly Desert, an expanse of gray sand which completely surrounds the Land of Oz. In the course of the books the Deadly Desert becomes more and more Deadly. The first time we see it,…
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Ozblogging: The Road to Oz, Part 1
The Road to Oz is the fifth of L. Frank Baum's immortal Oz series, published in 1909. Like its predecessor Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, it follows Dorothy on another difficult journey to Oz with a group of entertaining companions. Sure, by this point it's a formula, but it's a winning formula and Road…
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Another Slice of Pi
As I was saying before I was interrupted, I'm going to be a guest at Pi-Con this weekend. Pi-Con is a science fiction convention in Enfield, Connecticut (just south of Springfield, Massachusetts). They've got me scheduled for a lot of events. See for yourself: 8/26/2011 8:00 PM — "Honey! The aliens are attacking again" 8/27/2011…
The Cambias Digression 