Category: Travel (Page 1 of 2)

The Louvre Top 10 Tips & Observations

October 15, 2022 / Conal

There I sat on my hotel bed in Paris. My artist wife lay beside luxuriating in the white hotel bathrobe as we unwound from our busy day in the City of Lights.

She was reading a story while I was tapping out another 500-word Saturday Morning Story on my new MacBook. It was her 15th anniversary gift to me. We had just used my gift to her — a membership to the Louvre.

As I tapped out the story, I decided that it could wait. Instead, today I provide you — free of charge — 10 of my immediate observations about the Louvre fresh from that same night, mere hours after I returned from the world’s most famous museum.

The Giant Bean

August 20, 2022 / Conal

Fe, fi, fo, fum.

In front me was a giant bean… with no giant nor a beanstalk in sight.

The bean was silver, highly polished, and 33 feet tall. It was surrounded by thousands of paving stones covered in hundreds of human beings gazing at it. Further afield, there were towering skyscrapers overlooking it from the west and north.

A month earlier, I had given my artist wife an annual membership to the Art Institute of Chicago for our 10th anniversary.

Of course, living in a western Canadian suburb rendered this gift utterly useless without a trip to the Windy City, which I had previously — and conveniently — booked.

The New York City Trip

August 6, 2022 / Conal

“I’ve got a great idea,” I blurted out with a cautiously enthusiastic tone one evening about three months ago as my artist wife and I got ready for bed.

The idea had been percolating in my mind for years by this point. Travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic had left it closer to a distant dream, no different than the planned trip to Cooperstown.

She stopped brushing her teeth and looked at me.

“What is it?” she asked plainly through a toothpaste-filled mouth with zero enthusiasm. Zero.

The Top Five

June 18, 2022 / Conal

This post marks the one-year anniversary for this website. Instead of writing a new story, I thought it would be interesting to reflect back on the last year of Saturday Morning Stories.

I’ve written 50 stories over the past year (I took one week off and this week would have been 52). I’ve enjoyed writing them, but there are certainly stories that stick out more than others in my mind.

So, here is a list of my top five stories from the last year (in alphabetical order) and why I enjoyed the story so much.

If you haven’t read any the stories on this list, I encourage you to do so as a starting point for catching up. And, if you have already read some or all of them, I encourage you to re-read them. I’m sure you’ll discover a new detail you missed the first time.

The Ballpark Princess

April 23, 2022 / Conal

We took our kids to Disneyland in April 2017. Their first trip. The excitement was palpable for the month leading up to the trip.

This trip was also going to feature a Toronto Blue Jays road game for me and our then-six-year-old son. He loved baseball. It was his passion then and remains his passion to this day.

This would be his second-ever MLB game. As excited as he was for Disneyland (very!), he might have been just as excited to go to a Toronto Blue Jays game.

The Cactus Car

November 20, 2021 / Conal

The sun was setting as I flew down the A1 in northern France in my grey cactus.

I had left work in The Netherlands two and a half hours earlier that Friday several years ago. In that time, I had driven across Belgium in my rented Citroën Cactus, apparently a popular model of car in Europe.

Despite the prickly car model, Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Ghent were all in my rearview mirror. I continued to cruise down the highway in my little hatchback with the same glorious song repeating itself every 3 minutes and 48 seconds.

My wife is driven nuts when I listen to the same song repeatedly for hours, but I make no apologies because it helps me focus. Plus, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with hearing an enjoyable song 42 times on the same drive. Right?