Port Townsend is a wonderful vacation getaway on the northeastern tip of the Olympic Peninsula in the state of Washington that combines the perfect mix of charm, sophistication and the wild outdoors to bring me back again and again.

Finally, the West Coast has an answer to Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” and, most recently, “The Lost Symbol.” Like fans of those two mega-selling page-turners, readers of Stephenie Meyer’s vampire romance series “Twilight” can tramp around the tiny town of Forks, Wash. (pop. 3,120), and retrace the lives of the books’ beloved characters. [...]

If it’s true that one apple a day can keep the doctor away, gas up the car for the easy one-hour drive to Oak Glen, a mile-high community above Yucaipa that offers bushels of healthy heirloom pommes that you can’t find or taste anywhere else.   Forget about those supermarket apples that taste no better than wax [...]

On your way to Kernville, driving east on 178 out of Bakersfield, you eventually encounter Kern Canyon. Greeting you at the entrance is a large sign showing the number (248) of lives claimed by the Kern River since 1968. In what’s become a summer-time tradition, the Kern County Sheriff’s Department updates the gruesome count as [...]

One of the coolest things about strolling and browsing Long Beach’s Belmont Shore along Second St. is you are immediately familiar with many of the names of the 15 intersecting side streets – La Verne, Glendora, Covina, Claremont – that make up the business district. Obviously, one of ‘the Shore’s’ early developers must have had a [...]

Bill Gervasi is a chairman of an international standards group defining memory technology for the computer industry.  Traveling both for business and pleasure, he has visited 19 countries and most of the United States.  Rounding out an eclectic lifestyle, in his spare time he teaches aerobics classes for local health clubs, and he was a [...]