When I went to the NYC Easter Parade, the most creative hats I saw were on a family who were victims of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. Well, Recessionwire, which covers the cultural and practical aspects of this economic downturn, liked them too and asked me to write something about it for their site. You can […]

New York City's St. Patrick's Day Parade showcases planning and execution at its finest, followed by a less fine display of drunkeness and disorder at the bars near the parade route. But New York's Easter Parade is the opposite — it's a much less formal affair with a rather sober aftermath. Every Easter, the city […]

I wish I could say that getting to the Cano Negro Wildlife Refuge was half the fun — as I described in yesterday’s blog post, I enjoyed the two-hour ride through the Costa Rican countryside with a stop off at the Iguana Tree. However, our boat trip was on the Cano Negro section of the […]

When I was planning my trip to Costa Rica, I kept reading about how I should take a day trip from Arenal to the Cano Negro Wildlife Refuge. It was hard to tear myself away from the hot springs at Tabacon, but I'm very glad that I did. As our boat rode up and down […]

In Costa Rica, zipline tours (also called canopy tours) are popular tourist attractions: they hook you up to a harness and then you glide through a network of wire cables high up in the trees. Although I liked the idea of getting a bird’s eye view of the rain forest, I had no interest in […]

(photo of Snowbird/Alta by Nickehret/Flickr) The ski/snowboard season may be wrapping up, but someone must have forgotten to tell Utah because it's still getting tons of snow. Alta and Snowbird have gotten 12 feet of snow in the past 12 days, and the Park City resorts aren't doing too bad either. If you want to […]

(photo by Cardoso/Flickr) Yesterday, I wrote a post pondering why Jaco, Costa Rica, was completely empty when I was there on Tuesday. Well, today I have my answer: everyone had ventured northwest to Santa Teresa to get ready for Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen’s wedding! Santa Teresa is a surf town on the Nicoya peninsula […]

The last 20 or so hours of my trip to Costa Rica were spent in the beach town of Jaco. I had been warned that Jaco would be touristy, crowded and Americanized, but we decided to spend our last night there anyway so we would have a quicker trip to the airport than we would […]

(photos by Jeremy Dies) Last month, Jeremy Dies went skiing in Verbier, Switzerland, with a group of friends.Here, Dies explains what it's really like to stay in a chalet and shares his advice so you can plan a fantastic Swiss ski vacation too. Skiing in Europe vs. U.S.: Having spent part of my childhood living […]

It's my last night in Costa Rica, and thankfully I have wireless internet access again as I'm now at the Poseidon Hotel in Jaco. (How come the cheaper hotels always seem to have the best — and free — internet access, while the more luxurious ones either charge you extra for it or it doesn't […]