Tuesday, September 30, 2014

WELCOME TO Travel Tales & Other Stories!


Hello, and thank you for checking my new website!

My previous blog...tmac-traveltales.blogspot.com...ran for 5 years and had more than 93,000 visits....it is time to move on to a different approach.

The image shown above is from my newest (and second) published book...more about World Travel Tales later on.

 The first, a local best seller, is a work of fiction titled "Mystery at Deadfall Lake." 

This story pits a retired security investigator against a person, or persons unknown, that threaten his life when he volunteers to aid the local small-town, mountain resort police in solving a 17 year old missing persons case.

  excerpt: "...all of a sudden I heard a loud BANG! The picture window shattered with sharp shards of glass showering me and my desk. "Holy shit" I yelled as I swiveled my chair and dove for the floor. WHAM! my forehead banged against the edge of the desk and I saw stars! I reached up and felt blood. I crawled around behind the desk for cover......"

Both books are available at Amazon,  Barnes and Noble, as well as independent book stores.

 

 

 

 .....who am I, and why the blog?

....OK, I retired in 2005 from 40 years of world business travel working in the high end security electronics industry: 77 foreign countries, logging more than 1&1/2 million air miles. The book WORLD TRAVEL TALES was published with Amazon.com in late July 2014. These are 20 true stories of my most interesting, scary, humorous, and adventurous travel experiences. You can also check it out at Barnes and Noble as well as independent book stores everywhere.

  http://www.amazon.com/    

I am interested in hearing from those travelers out there who had an unusual-interesting travel-related experience....or...anyone who might have a question about some of the pit-falls of world travel to far-away places.     The only catch is that you have to read the stories to find my e-mail address....well OK, maybe not for the pro.

The 20 "World Travel Stories" I have anecdotally documented in my new book release are those I most remembered, and wanted my family to know about. Since I really could not talk much about some of the proprietary nature of some of the trips, I plowed through 3 thick note books filled with my experiences, and finally was able to come up with the 20 stories that gave the family a pretty good idea of what I was about during those 35 working years.

 

Here are some photographs I took while working as a globe-trotting business road warrior....many come up on my screen saver to remind me of a time long ago and far away!







WORLD TRAVEL TALES will take the reader on journeys from a mugging in Amsterdam, Holland to major embarrassments in Zagreb Yugoslavia...Hong Kong to Moscow,  and other exotic
(and not so exotic) places.

   .....Street soccer in Dublin...the 'search' for Nessy the Lochness monster...enjoying coffee with a family aboard a Dubai Dhow...all made great memories that I have chosen to share in my new book!







...I made friends with a nosy Highland Cow in Scotland as well as horny Scotty dog. 


 ...Touring the back streets of Beijing helped me understand that people everywhere (some exceptions) were friendly, and pleased to engage me in conversation.

...One of my most fondest memories was to engage in my passion for running...ON top of the Great Wall of China with a young student from Beijing

 

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Weed, Calif. fire.....

The terrible fire in Weed...a small town 9 miles north of us, seems to have finished consuming what lay in its' path...more than 100 structures burned down...a church, the library...you can see dozens of pictures on line. No one was seriously hurt, but a lot of families will be struggling to put their lives back together. You can google the Weed-fire on-line sites, and if you want to help, can identify those charities helping the folks in this small struggling town.

California is in a severe drought, and combined with a 'no-snow' winter, conditions went from bad to worse!

Here are some photos of our bare mountain...no one can recall it being so barren of snow! The high winds that fanned the flames of our devastating fire, has produced the beautiful Linticular cloud formations in the pics below.