Planes, Trains and Orthotics: A Middle-Age Woman's Guide to Travel

  We arrived safely in London and no sooner did we  drop off our bags in the room, my husband said, “We have to find a bank.”  Apparently, the same conversation was taking place in our friends’ room. We immediately reconvened in the lobby and armed with our Google maps, set out to find a reputable bank—never one of those suspect Exchange kiosks! The need to have hard cash in your pocket is clearly a generational thing. To those of us above 50 or even way above, there is comfort in knowing that you can successfully  participate in the day-to-day commerce of the country in which you are visiting. Of course we have credit cards—how else could we pay for the hefty city prices of food and lodging?  But there’s all the other things, like tipping the maids and the porters, who I have yet to see carry around a credit card machine, need to be appreciated by providing them with a pound or two.  This is not the case for our children’s generation. It absolutely astound...

 I love PBS television shows—particularly when they come from the United Kingdom. Give me a Masterpiece Mystery from London, Glasgow or any small island off the coast of Scotland, where murder and mayhem seem to be an everyday occurrence and I’m thrilled to death—once the closed-captioned is turned on so that we can understand what is being said. Sometimes, it’s the only way we can follow the plot! There’s nothing like hunkering down on a cold Sunday night and watch the PBS line-up with the remains of my wine from dinner and an Oreo…or two. And it’s because of those Sunday night shows that our bags are packed and we’re headed to the Dales of Yorkshire.  For the last three Januaries, we (mostly me) have waited with bated-breath for the beginning of new season of “All Creatures Great and Small.” The program is based on the books of James Herriot, a Scotsman who came to the Yorkshire Dales, pre-World War II, as a young veterinarian to work with a somewhat quirky, older vet, in a ...