Days after returning from Tenerife,  I found myself on a plane headed back to Venice.  Mic and I were there last month, but this time I was meeting my good friend Tonda, who I knew from Washington DC.  She is now living in Frankfurt, Germany.  We were both flying to Venice to meet Joey and Jeremy.  When we lived in DC, we both knew one of my two 'sisters from another mother', Stephanie.  Sylvia is the other one, in case you were wondering.  Stephanie was the most amazing person I've ever known and we bonded the instant we met.  If you look back thru my blog posts, you can read about the trip Stephanie, Sylvia and I took to Costa Rica.  (Costa Rica 2nd Time Around).  Stephie and I also went to St Maartin, if you want to find that one.  She and I had so many great adventures together and last fall, we were talking about where our next trip would be.  A few weeks later, I got a message from her sister Joey.  Stephanie had suffered a massive stroke.  I of course

About six months ago I had a $300 voucher for a condo in Tenerife for 7 days so I picked an arbitrary date in May.  Mic had lived there for 18 months and absolutely loved it so I had to go check it out for myself. As it turns out, it was 3 days after our return from Madrid and Mic couldn't miss that much work, so I went by myself. It's the first time I've traveled alone since I got to Europe. Well of course I would miss my most excellent travel partner Mic, but I had a friend Nick who recently moved from Malta to Tenerife, so I would have some company.  Tenerife is the largest and most populous island of the seven Canary Islands.  It is 2034 sq kl (785 sq mi) with 898,000 inhabitants.  I picked up my car from the airport and proceeded to drive from the southern part of the island to the north and half way down the other coast to Puerto de la Cruz. It was an hour drive, that had I been able to cut through the middle of the island, would have maybe been 30 m

Most of the places we traveled to have been in mainland Europe. We decided this time to go to the Greek island of Crete.  It's very very different from Malta. First of all it's huge.  Malta is 17 miles long and 9 miles wide.  With a population of 400,000, it is one of the worlds smallest and most populated islands.  Crete is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands.  It is 167 miles long and 37 miles wide and has a population of over 600,000.  Flying in, we could see mountains and green landscape. We rented a car to better explore the island and even from the airport to the hotel, we could see how beautiful everything was. That's one thing that always strikes me when we leave Malta, how green it is everywhere else.  They don't call it the rock for nothing, I guess.  The main road was basically a coast highway. On one side you had sandy beaches and on the other, mountains. We couldn't wait to start this vacation. In other blogs I have t