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Florence spent her early family winter vacation years skiing in the French Alps, in the village of La Clusaz. As it was her birthday coming up, we decided to have a family vacation and revisit La Clusaz, and invite her mother Paddy along.
Continue reading “Skiing in La Clusaz, France”
Since selling our home in Mexico we’ve been looking for a place to replace it, an escape from the cold in the winters but somewhere a little closer to Lisbon. Our searching first took us to Madeira, but that wasn’t quite warm enough. The next place to check out was the Canary Islands, which we visited in January of this year (2023).
Continue reading “The Canary Islands – Tenerife”
When in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico we used to have a place to the north of the city, situated next to the beach, where we could go on weekends with the kids to enjoy the ocean. As everyone in the family loved the water, we all enjoyed surfing, waterskiing, paddle boarding and swimming.
Continue reading “Next Adventure: Building in Lagoa de Albufeira”
I had no expectations going into Santorini, and perhaps that’s the best way to first get to know it. I had done very little reading about it prior or during our trip, just knew it was our last stop before flying back to Portugal. My education on Santorini began when Hariz, who we rented our car from, picked us up at the ferry port and brought us to his office, a few blocks from our beachfront hotel. On the way he told us about Thera, the volcano, and what we should see and do in Santorini.
Continue reading “Cruising the Cyclades – Santorini”
In the Spring of 2015 we cruised the eastern seaboard of the United States, from Florida to Washington, on board the yacht Sockeye Blue with our good friends John & Tina Philippson. Their 80-foot Nordhavn was a beautiful ship, and we enjoyed three fun-filled weeks exploring this coastline. They would eventually sell Sockeye Blue, but in 2021, eager to get another Nordhavn and this time to explore the Mediterranean and the rivers and canals of Europe, they bought Prosecco III, a 41-footer fresh off the production line in Turkey. Prosecco was purchased purposely smaller, so it could fit inside the locks and canals.
Continue reading “Cruising the Cyclades Islands on Prosecco III”
For the second time in two years we decided to drive up to northern France from Lisbon for our summer vacation, rather than fly. Covid is a primary reason as flying is rather complicated these days, but even more so we really enjoyed the drive last year and the places we visited along the way.
Continue reading “Portugal-to-France Road Trip”
Mid-July we ventured into Paris to attend the wedding and enjoy the city when Parisians are at the beach and the number of tourists is dramatically down because of Covid. We decided to spend the summer on the island of Noirmoutier and this trip helped break it up a bit.
Continue reading “Back to Paris (by Train & Bike)”
In the north of Portugal, just above Coimbra but below Porto and a little east towards the Spanish border, lies a region known as the Dao. Through it the river Dao and alongside it were once tracks for a train that ran between the towns of Santa Comba Dao and Viseu from the 1890s to the 1980s. It is about 50 kilometers in length and back then it provided transportation for locals and delivered them supplies. When it was discontinued a “Rails-to-Trails” was put in its place. This is the process of converting abandoned rail lines (“Rails”) into bike paths (“Trails”), and it has become very common in both Europe and North America. In Portugal these bike paths are known as “Ecopistas.”
Continue reading “The Dao Region of Portugal – Biking & Boarding”
We’d been wanting to visit Madeira ever since our first visit Portugal some five years ago and learned that the island group was also part of Portugal (along with the Azores). Covid caused us to cancel our planned trip last year, but in March we decided to try again as Madeira was open to Portuguese residents only as long as you’d recently had a Covid test done. Our flight from Lisbon was just a little over two hours and we arrived to wonderful weather, about 20º (the average temperature throughout the year) with bright, clear blue skies. Madeira’s weather is similar to parts of thew Med with a mild and moderate subtropical climate. It varies dramatically, however from north to south and east to west creating small microclimates. The northwest is much wetter whereas the southwest is arid and dry.
Continue reading “Madeira, Portugal”
At the start of this year I didn’t think we’d be able to generate enough content for another issue of Flojohn magazine with travel being so limited because of the Covid-19 crisis. But we did manage to get in quite a few trips, especially by car, which is a lot easier during this type of a crisis. Matter of fact we ended up with enough content to increase the size of the magazine to 80 pages.
In this issue we visit Northern Portugal, Costa Verde, Spain, Noirmoutier, France, The Algarve in Portugal and Marrakesh in Morocco.
For this edition I decided to take advantage of the interactive features of InDesign, the software I used to create the publications. This allows me to make the page design more dynamic, and to embed videos that can be played right inside the document.
Click here to see the 2019 version of Flojohn Magazine.