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14 hours in Tel Aviv

How much can you really learn about a city in 14 hours? Not much, especially when at least half that time will be dedicated to curing jet lag after escaping a deadly tornado by only a couple of hours on our journey to Israel.

Tel Aviv was the first stop on our Israeli adventure, and while it wasn't the highlight of our travel package, this Mediterranean beach town would not at all be a bad place to spend a weekend of R&R.

"If I could stay in Tel Aviv full-time, I absolutely would," said a flight attendant on our flight from JFK to Ben Gurion Airport in TA. She looked to be in her mid-30s, had clearly seen her share of beach towns and bar crawls across the world, and if she would pick this town as a permanent location, there was probably something more to it than merely a jumping off point to all the major religious attractions.

Our company tour guide said that while Jerusalem is the religious center of Israel (and, I suppose, the world), Tel Aviv was the place of excitement, always hopping. He compared it to New York City (although obviously a lot smaller). It reminded me a lot of some of the coastal towns in Greece, with lively restaurants, cafes, bars lining an extensive boardwalk where the ocean meets the land. There are actual sandy beaches in Tel Aviv though, a rarity in Greece.

It was also hard to ignore the hundreds of small, business-card sized ads showing only photos of voluptuous women in lingerie and displaying a phone number littered throughout many city streets. Someone in our group speculated that these were merely creative advertisements for realtors or hairdressers, but the evidence seems stacked against that hypothesis. On some street corners, you couldn't cross the street without walking on them. Quite - I would hope - different from Jerusalem, where in a few short days I'll be walking through the gate where Jesus entered the city walking over palm fronds to give us Palm Sunday.

In addition to the restaurants and bars, Tel Aviv had nice public beaches with lounge chairs, volleyball nets, even exercise equipment all available for public use. Bikes and motorbikes battled with pedestrians for right of way along the promenade, and joggers bounded through the painfully slow gawking tourists and speeding cyclists.

We only had time for a brief stroll through the seaside town before dinner, and another one after. Tel Aviv at night was an incredible array of light shows, both man-made and naturally-occuring. Lightning flashed over the Mediterranean, as we wandered aimlessly through a maze of neon red, blue and green signs and fake palm trees lined with strings of lights. More photos on my Facebook page.

Now, finally, time for bed. Tomorrow it's off to Nazareth, Acre, Caesarea and Cana, the site of Jesus' first miracle.

This sports journalist found his swagger covering the Gulf of Mexico oil spill

It's been more than a month now since my first trip to the Gulf of Mexico to report on the Deepwater Horizon/BP/Transocean oil spill/leak/explosion/debacle. Covering this ongoing story has been the highlight of my journalistic career (eclipsing even a college football national championship game), yet it has only come as a result of a national tragedy, the scope of which is barely being realized.

It was easy, even a pleasure to tell the story of people like Mike Reynolds, Alabama's Turtle Tsar. The Gulf Shores real estate broker has given countless hours of his time over the past six years organizing an army of volunteers to identify and protect sea turtle nests.

Reynolds' regiment of retirees marches over 47 miles of Alabama coast line every morning before most tourists get out of bed, marking new nests with protective barricades and signs warning the frolicking masses of the $100,000 fine imposed on those who disturb the nests. It's a purely volunteer organization, run with a precision that would make Nicholas II proud.

2010, the year of the (my) blog?

 

 I seem to have picked up a knack for starting years off on a high note. Or, more appropriately, the Alabama football team has managed to find itself in good places each January 1, and I happen to be along for the ride.

I started 2009 in New Orleans' French Quarter, raising glasses with two of my best friends from college, watching a giant fleur de lis descend atop Jackson Square and wondering what the year would hold. I was there, of course, because the Crimson Tide was in town to play Utah in the 2009 AllState Sugar Bowl.

Italy Day 1: Catania and Taormina, Sicily

The first stop of our Italian adventure (aside from the airport in Rome) was Catania, the second largest city in Sicily (to Palermo, which is later on our agenda).

Due to our hectic travel schedule, our time in Catania was limited to a bus tour and 30-minute stop at a coffee bar, but that was more than enough to remind us all we were very far from home. Most of all the age of the place leaps out at you in a way that Americans can't fully comprehend on our side of the Atlantic. Catania was a bustling city before Christ was born and has been ruled by Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, and Spanish all before Columbus stumbled upon the West Indies.

Better late than never

I'm ready to acknowledge that I've been probably the worst travel blogger in the history of travel over these past few weeks.

I spent two weeks in a completely foreign land, saw thousands of things I'd never seen before, took about 1200 pictures, and all I could share with you was a cursory update about a travel bug I picked up.

I fully intended to do better, but a confluence of things worked against me. I got sick, our travel itinerary left us with barely enough time to catch our breath, and the wireless Internet over there was ridiculously expensive.

Dennis takes on Italy, Italy fights back

Buon giornio from Roma, where I've got a fever, and the only prescription is... amoxicillin. That's right, for the past few days my throat has been swollen more than Marlon Brando's in The Godfather, and I've randomly burst into intense sweats from time to time. The condition was annoying but manageable until Monday, our first day in Rome. Then after a flight from Palermo to Rome, a tour of the Coliseum and the Roman Forum and Mass at the Santa Maria in Trastavere church, I was done.

We stopped into a pharmacy in the square at Trastavere and asked for antibiotics. The pharmacist asked my age, symptoms, known allergies and then sold me a regimen of amoxicillin for 3.15 Euro (less than $5) without holding up the line more than a couple of minutes. I've heard different arguments about why universal healthcare wouldn't work in America, mostly that the quality of care would decline, lines would become impossibly long, etc., etc.

All I know is that in the states, I'd have had to find an after-hours clinic, wait a couple of hours for a doctor to see me and confirm what I already knew (I had strep throat). Then he'd write me the prescription for a drug that was neither habit-forming nor any kind of narcotic, and I would probably have to go somewhere else to get it filled.

Also on our tour, one of the women fell and hit her head on the cobblestones. They took her to the hospital to make sure everything was ok, and she met us two hours later after her MRI. So she fell, got taken to the hospital, put through an MRI, got the results and a clean bill of health and rejoined the tour in two hours. Would that happen in America? Just curious.

Anyway, aside from my illness, the trip is fantastic, the country is fantastic and I promise more detailed updates at some future date, with lots of photos.

Roman Holiday

Hello my peoples, from the breathtakingly beautiful... Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta. OK, so breathtakingly beautiful may be stretching it, but I have an hour or so to kill before I board the plane to Rome, so I thought I'd fill you in on my itinerary.

We're flying into Rome, and connecting to Catania on the island of Sicily. Our first hotel in Sicily is in the resort town of Taormina. It has a pool, which is nice, but not much room around the pool deck because of some silly cliff.

Still, we'll do our best to get by and relax after our long flights.

Wednesday will bring a day trip to Syracuse, which has to be nicer than the one in the United States. We'll return to Taormina that night and try not to fall off the cliffs.

Thursday afternoon, we head for Agrigento, which I'm told also has a lot of old Sicilian stuff.

Quick trip to see the Bobcats not a fiscally sound idea

Published Jan. 3, 2006  in The Robesonian

There I was, just before noon on a slow Wednesday at the office, twiddling my thumbs and wondering how to fill this space.

The high schools' sports had adjourned for the holidays and The University of North Carolina at Pembroke wouldn't play another home game until January.

That's when it hit me like a 2 a.m. Taco Bell craving: The Bobcats had a home game that night against the Chicago Bulls.

I still hadn't been to the new Bobcats Arena, and the team was actually on something of a roll, having won four of its last six games.

My first thought was to try to secure a media pass, but then I had a change of heart. Instead of sitting in a good seat, where I could see the game and enjoy the free food and drinks most professional franchises provide anyone with press credentials, I would buy a seat, pay for parking and really experience things from a fan's perspective. I figured that with the NBA's $10 seats, plus some money for parking, gas and fast food on the road, I could make it a night for less than $40.

The five people you meet in Cleveland

*The following post was first published on DatelineAlabama.com in March 2005

I've already mentioned the cab driver, who was the first person I met in the fair city of Cleveland. On most weekends, he would easily qualify as the most unusual person I encountered. Not in Cleveland, however.

In Cleveland, they set the bar high and strange. The following are a few of the people I encountered on my four-day trip.

The Man I Thought Might Kill Us

The first and last people I met in Cleveland turned out to be the most interesting. The desk clerk at the hotel told us we could save money on a cab ride by walking to the metro station and taking a subway to the airport. So, Sunday morning at 5 (our flight left at 6:40), we hit the mean streets of Cleveland for the last time.

Cleveland looks the same at 5 a.m. as it does at 11 p.m. Dark, deserted -- except for a few homeless people -- and still too early for those 6 a.m. drink specials. My friend Buddy and I carried our luggage toward City Center, where the nearest subway station was located. Our suitcases had rollers that made quite a bit of noise as they bounced along the sidewalk.

That's when a homeless man approached us, saying "This is my street, what are you doing making all that noise on my street?"We kept walking, but he followed us to City Center. I figured he would leave then, but he followed us in, all the way to our track. At this point, I thought, "He can't hurt us here, there are at least three witnesses … right?"

That's when he made his pitch. He claimed he had just got out of jail the day before, after serving a 27-year sentence. He didn't say what his crime was, and I didn't ask. Then came the proposition. "I just want to get my [Richard Nixon] sucked," he said.

"I can't help you there," I answered.

Cleveland rocks... until 9 p.m.

"I've been in 40 states and 10 different countries, and the only place I've ever paid for [feline terminology for female anatomy] was here in Cleveland … twice."

That was one of the first things our taxi driver said to us as we rode from the airport to our hotel in Cleveland. Perhaps I should have seen that as a bad omen, a precursor for a weekend of disappointment. But to be honest, I didn't think much of it at the time.

I had hopped a 6:15 a.m. flight out of Birmingham to get to Cleveland that morning after getting to bed "early" (around 2 a.m.). I suppose after getting only two hours sleep the night before, all kinds of things make sense that shouldn't.

Which is why it seemed perfectly natural that 50-something cab drivers in the Great Lakes area would pay for sex. Or that he would share that information with two sleep-deprived college students at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday, also mentioning "it's a crime to pay for it at you guys' age," as if it were legal to purchase sex after age 50.