Travel Blog

Ten years ago today I began this blog – with an account of our visit to Little Havana (specifically Café Versailles) on the 50^th anniversary of the Cuban revolution.

The previous year I had been laid off from my newspaper, after 19 years as the travel editor, and gotten a friend to design this website. I had been blogging that last year at the paper, so I knew to write short and consistently. The lesson I never learned – the one that would get me legions of followers – was to provide practical information.

In fact my own blog, not surprisingly, became more personal – not in the sense of private revelations but in its focus on the things that interest me. So there’s been a lot about writing (‘this writing life’ is a recurring subject head), books, media, travel, sports, and – perhaps most frequently – everyday observations. It is not quite a politics-free zone – that’s hard with the current occupant of the White House – but it’s close. Occasionally an entry consists of only one sentence (which shows up later on Twitter). I’ve described this blog – because it’s the first thing I do when I sit down at the computer in the morning – as being analogous to the stretching a player does before a game. I’m delighted if people read it but – except for the rare posting on Facebook – I’ve never publicized its existence.

Yesterday, on the 60^th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, we drove down to Little Havana and had lunch at Versailles. There was a short wait – the crowd made up mostly of tourists – and after our lunch (vaca frita with moros and churrasco steak with chimichurri sauce) we walked over to the window serving cafecitos. Ten years ago there had been some old-timers lambasting Castro; yesterday it was like any other first day of the year.