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When we say “Spain,” most people imagine beaches, palm trees, flamenco, castanets, and paella with sangria. But what if I told you there’s a part of Spain filled with wind, rain, deep green forests, perfectly grilled steaks, and lively, sparkling cider? Locals here aren’t as outwardly warm as people in the south—which, for many of…
Most visitors arrive in Sicily with plans to see Taormina, Palermo, and the beaches around Cefalù. Those places deserve the attention, though some of the island’s most memorable experiences happen far from the usual tourist circuits. Sicily has abandoned villages swallowed by earthquakes, prehistoric cave tombs hidden inside limestone valleys, and volcanic trails covered in…
The ancient Romans were so struck by the beauty of the Cies Islands in the Galician region of Spain that they named the stunning archipelago the “Island of the Gods”. The pristine turquoise waters, sweeping hills, and verdant pine forests of the Cies Islands have wowed visitors for centuries. Local lore states that the notorious…
Walter Inglis Anderson was a reclusive New Orleans-born artist who spent most of his life in Mississippi. In the mid-1940s, Anderson became enamored with a small island on the Mississippi Gulf Coast called Horn Island. Anderson risked his life on countless occasions to travel to Horn Island in a small boat to paint colorful portraits…
Like most mid-sized cities, Rockford, Illinois is home to an art museum, a natural history museum, and a children’s museum. What visitors don’t expect is a quartet of 12-foot stone statues that have been likened to stone gladiators, petrified robots, and golems that will spring to life at any moment to defend the town of…
In 1887, a catastrophic earthquake struck Northern Italy. The medieval town of Bussana was badly damaged. Residents had no choice but to flee the ruins and build a new town a short distance from Bussana Vecchia—or, Old Bussana. Bussana Vecchia languished until a wave of settlers in the late 1940s began to illegally inhabit the…
The owners, Steve and Wanda Wile have backgrounds in real estate and decided in early 2021 they needed a change and wanted to create a “happy place” for everyone, so, the idea of The Groovy Zoo emerged. At dinner one evening we drew a rendering of how we wanted The Zoo to appear on a…
In 1909, a riverbank collapse on the River Severn in Gloucestershire, England, led to concerns that a busy canal vital to the flow of goods and services would be compromised if the water level rose any higher. Old ships were intentionally beached to create a man-made barrier to protect the adjacent canal. Today, Purton Hulks—otherwise…
