Mike Vouri - History

Mike Vouri: Black Ice, White Christmas and the Kindness of Strangers

I made it home for the holidays on San Juan Island after a tough week in the San Francisco Bay Area and a journey that seemed right out of the film, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” For…

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Mike Vouri: On Your Mark, Get Set, Go: A Morning in the Uffizi

“The only way to understand painting is to go and look at it. And if out of a million visitors, there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.” –…

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Mike Vouri: Reflections on Connections: The Heathrow Shuffle

(NOTE: This piece should have been posted a week ago, but it took a while to finish, thanks to the unwanted souvenir of Rhinovirus. I will have to admit that I was unprepared for the crowds…

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Mike Vouri: The Roman Forum: Ancient Days and Modern

If your planning on visiting the Roman Forum (Fori Romani) these days, arrive when the gates open at 9 a.m., otherwise you’ll encounter the same herds of humanity that you finally escaped at the exit of…

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Mike Vouri: The Invasion of the Veneto

Blood cells! That’s what I’m reminded of when navigating the warrens of Venice; those microscopic films of blood cells shooting through arteries, veins and capillaries, slowing, bumping, rushing, bound for the heart of whatever matters most…

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Mike Vouri: Finding your way to Michelangelo

Had a superb meal in Rome last night at the Fortuna Pantheon, which is just off the piazza where the Pantheon has stood for 2,000 years. There were three times the human beings in the piazza…

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Mike Vouri: A walk through the Basilica of Santa Croce

Thoughts on doing the celebrity walk through the Basilica of Santa Croce (completed 1442) on a rainy morning in Florence: You know you’ve arrived when you’re dead, but you’ll never know of course unless it has…

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Mike Vouri: The ghost on my shoulder: Remembering Larry

Wars begin where you will, but they do not end where you please. — Machiavelli I recently listened from start to finish to Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam, a Vietnam memoir by a former…

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Mike Vouri: The Pig War’s Last Victim: Free Land and the Heartbreak of Alexander McKenzie

Alexander McKenzie peered through the loopholes of his blockhouse prison and watched as the weekly steamer maneuvered in the shallow bay before tying up at the dock of the Royal Marine Camp on San Juan Island.…

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Mike Vouri: Tribute to Russ Illig

Russ Illig, one our faithful volunteers from the 1990s and 2010s, passed away on December 11. He was 94. Russ Illig photo We came to know one another in 1998 in the parking area of the…

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Mike Vouri: Dancing the Night Away on San Juan Island

“Say Herman, you want to get a pair of those fine dancing pumps at the Blue Front store before the next dance? Like everything else they are sold away down at the Blue Front.” Advertisement in…

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Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall: Bowness-on-Solway

July 17 Bowness on Solway We made it. Our journey along the Hadrian’s Wall path ended at about noon, following a final push into a west wind that plastered our clothing to our bodies and pelted…

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Mike Vouri: Along the River Eden and into the Marshlands

July 16 Easton - One night and five miles to go before reaching the end of the hike and a hut clinging to an embankment above the Solway Firth. We were up early with the Carlisle…

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Mike Vouri: Lost Rain Gear, Reivers and the Bishop’s Curse

Another bright morning in Cumbria, this one enhanced by mixed aromas emanating from the kitchen and the stables below our window at the Lanercost Equestrian & Country Inn.

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