Author: Edward Pizzarello

My goal in life is to fill my family’s passports with stamps, creating buckets of memories along the way. You’ll find me writing about realistic ways for normal people to travel the world, whether you’re on a budget or enjoy luxury. I also enjoy taking us on the occasional detour to explore the inner workings of the travel industry.

Obama Picks Lobbyist for #2 Spot at Defense

I’m a couple of days late on this story, but I wasn’t keeping track of the news closely while I was gone. Barack Obama selected a veteran of Raytheon to be Deputy Director of Defense. William Lynn is a very accomplished man. He served…

A Deep Run at Venetian (Again)

So, I played the Noon tournament at Venetian on Tuesday. The tournament got 130+ entrants, which was both good and bad. Good, in that it was a decent sized field for payouts, bad in that we got just enough players for the tournament to…

Fire Coughlin (Subtitle:Or Hope He Retires)

So, the title of this post will sound like I’m bitter from today’s loss. No question, I’m very bitter about today’s loss. But I see very little to blame on Coughlin. Eli really looked horrible all day. The defense was playing great. But how…

Barcelona Revisited

Sorry for the delay in posting. Cutting our trip short, we were able to get back and see Michelle’s grandmother. She’s still hanging in there, good days and bad. We stayed at two enjoyable hotels, Le Meridien Barcelona, and Le Meridien Ra Beach. First,…

Bill Richardson Withdraws Nomination

Well, this definitely comes as a surprise: Bill Richardson withdraws his nomination as Commerce secretary. I’d be really surprised to hear he actually did something wrong. He has always struck me as a pretty honest politicians, as far as politicians go.

Interesting Airline Geek Thing

Sent to me by a family member, I’ll paste the description here, rather than trying to summarize myself: “It is a 24 hour observation of all of the large aircraft flights in the world, (recorded by the ‘plane flight transponders, via Geo-stationary orbital satellites),…

Barcelona: Sagrada Familia, Part 2

We’re back home now, but there’s still lots more to discuss about Sagrada Familia. I left off the last post talking about the Passion facade, which was to be sculpted by Josep Subirachs. He has been quoted as saying that he departed from Gaudi’s…

Returning Early

Michelle’s grandmother is expected to pass away shortly, so we are returning today. I will summarize the rest of Sagrada Familia and Ra Beach as time permits over the next few days.

Barcelona: Sagrada Familia

Day 2 started out oddly. Michelle nodded off at 2 am, but I couldn’t get to sleep. I started trying to sleep at 3am, but didn’t fall asleep until 5am. My alarm went off and woke both of us up at 1:30pm. Yikes! Most…

Barcelona, Day 1

We arrived in Barcelona this morning at 9am after taking the red-eye from JFK. We had an enjoyable dinner on the plane and nodded off about 10PM, with 4.5 hours left on the flight. It was a pretty bumpy ride after we nodded off,…