03
January’s photo shows The Remarkable Rocks, found in Flinders Chase National Park on Kangaroo Island off South Australia. Sixty-six of the 68 entries sent in were correct.
The winner of the drawing was FRED KOEHLER of Orange, California.
Our thanks go out to Robert Golden of San Francisco, California, for the photo.
(Part 6 of 6 on Spain)
By Julie Skurdenis, second of two parts (jump to part 1)
That cramped feeling you get from sitting in economy class could be a very real ailment.
—The Cruising World is written by Lew Toulmin.
We reclined comfortably, looking up at the thousands of brilliant stars overhead. The ship swayed slightly as she drove forward at 25 knots.
You’ve seen it dozens of times in movies and on TV: a bird’s-eye view of a red sports car screeching through hairpin curves one after another, racing down a precipitous granite mountain with a thousand-foot plunge below into inaccessible ravines. Don’t you wish you were driving the sports car?
Now the camera zooms down onto the sports car, but in this Mercedes commercial it isn’t a red sports car. It is a yellow postbus of the Swiss Postal Bus network negotiating with eardrum-blasting, trumpeting sounds the staggering curves of the Maloja Pass in Switzerland’s Canton Graubünden.
In need of a driver on our September ’04 trip that included Hungary, we were turned on to Gabor Stern (e-mail sabor.s@vivamail.hu, phone 0036-202238630) by the Hungarian National Tourist Office (e-mail info@gotohungary.com).
A very pleasant man with acceptable English skills, Gabor picked us up at the train station in an air-conditioned car and delivered us to our hotel. Several days later he met us on our return by train from an outlying town and took us to Statue Park, waited 90 minutes, then dropped us off in downtown Budapest.
On a trip to Croatia in June ’04, we found three restaurants which were excellent.
I was in Florence, Italy, on a Christmas-in-Florence tour, Dec. 21-28, ’04, and found several good places to eat in the Centro Storico area. Both are on the street that is about one block from the famed Ponte Vecchio.
• On Borgo Santi Apostoli is Il Boccale Ristorante (Borgo S.S. Apostoli, 33r; tel. 283384). I had pasta, grilled veal, salad, custard, a quarter bottle of red wine, a small water and coffee for €18 (near $24).
Travelers to Italy looking for a trattoria near the Milan train station can go with confidence to Trattoria La Baita (phone 02-6694173), just around the corner from the station at Via Lepetit 27, corner of Via Vitruvio. On the night we were there in October ’04 it was a cheerful, bustling place without any loud, obnoxious Americans. (Oops, showing my prejudices a bit there.)