Mike Vouri - History

Obituary for an iconic 200-year-old Sycamore

A tree is gone. Chopped down. Reduced. Killed. And not just any tree. I had looked forward to seeing it in the eponymously named Sycamore Gap when my friend Jerry and I scheduled a trip along…

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Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall 2023: Hobbling from the Heavenfield

The following is the third installment chronicling my second journey along the Hadrian’s Wall path this past summer. The names have not been changed to protect the innocent. The Chesters bridge abutment. July 8 Woke up…

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Mike Vouri: Lambs and Lions: A Day with the Romans in Corbridge

What a day! The two smaller ones became separated from mama and let me know it beneath my window at 3 amAnd it all began at 3 a.m., when a contingent of woolly fugitives escaped the…

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Mike Vouri: Hadrian’s Wall return

I finished my second day on the Hadrian’s Wall path this afternoon, though it was a bit abbreviated due to that ankle I rolled the other day. Taking it slowly has its benefits, though. You literally…

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Mike Vouri: Walking Through History: The Frazer Homestead Trail

My setter Iris and I hiked the Frazer-Homestead trail recently at American Camp for the first time together in more than a year. We started out on the South Beach trail, but a bitter southeast wind…

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Mike Vouri: England’s Royals: A History of Troublesome Heirs and Spares

There’s nothing like a royal sibling rivalry to start tongues wagging by the town pump or emblazon the literature in the supermarket checkout stand. These days the buzz is all about Prince Harry Windsor’s sensational autobiography,…

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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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