Another Christmas Adventure

It’s Christmas Eve and I am sitting in our hotel room in Cascais, Portugal, looking at a surprise Christmas treat the restaurant staff  just delivered to our room. We have a little balcony with two comfy chairs, where it is almost warm enough to sit and stare at a gorgeous view of a gray and…

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Road Trip Through History: Old Fort Madison

And now, back to the Great River Road after a brief detour to South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century:   We got to Old Fort Madison, outside what I suppose would be called new Fort Madison Iowa, shortly before the site closed. We had driven past the town where we planned to…

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Russia, Siberia, and the Fur Trade

And speaking of the fur trade, as I believe we were, the Russian fur trade did not begin in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest of North America. At the same time that French and British (and to a lesser extent, Dutch, and Swedish) fur traders were exploring the virgin forests of North America in the…

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