Do you know your home's walk score? This number weighed heavily in our search for a place to live. Plug in your address on the Walkscore website. The higher the score, the more walkable your neighbourhood. Our previous house had a score of 25 out of 100. This one is a 92, can't do much…

When I managed a family life education, aka "edutainment," program, a popular and highly emotional course was "Moving from the home you have loved."  Last week we drove by our old place, the house that I lived in for the longest period of any place  in my life, and saw the beginning phases of demolition. Several…

Back in Spain for a few days, laying low. I picked it up first, Camel Fever we're calling it. AKA Montezuma's revenge. Was it that wonderful salad or shaking hands with the souk vendors, agreeing on a deal? We thought we were being so careful, Ali Baba and I. In the five days in Morocco…

This was our last day in Marrakech. Half way through our shopping we went back to our riad to drop off our finds passing an open area featuring food items for sale. The chickens were so fresh they were still alive: An escape attempt: We decided to have lunch at first restaurant we visited upon…

This is the educational experience. We should have read up more on the culture of haggling specifically to Morocco. I'm not into that, based on my experience in Mexico, where I'd rather pay a bit more to support a family in a poor economy. It's the social worker in me. I once got too good…

The Medina has areas dedicated to specific craftsmen. For example, in the leather souk the morning starts with the leather auction, skins brought from the tannery by donkey.  The craftsmen make the stock distributed to the individual stalls. Besides leather, there is the metal workers souk featuring Moroccan lanterns.  The spice souk Is located in the…

6:30 a.m. is wakey wakey at camel camp. It was different being on the camper end of things after so many years as camp staff. They wanted us up dark and early for brekkie – bread and coffee or tea – so we could see the sunrise and get back to the minibus for the…

Have we only been in Morocco for two days? We've done so much in that time. Back to the camel ride. We gallomphed into the sunset in our caravan until we arrived at camp. Actually we were heading out of the sunset but 'into' sounds better. Look at their soft little two toed feet, not…

I never thought I'd hear myself say that I'm going to spend a night in a Berber camp on the Sahara and we'd be riding camels to get there. Today's the day, it looks like it's really going to happen. We were picked up by a driver at 7:00 am, dropped off at the staging…

Chuck has a new persona. No longer called Hemmingway, as on the Camino, in Morocco people call to him "Ali Baba!" It's the beard.  Back to the tour. We walked through the Jewish Quarter ins on to The Bahia Palace, built in the 1800's by Si Moussa, the Grand Vizier of the Sultan, and named for…