I’ve navigated strange lands before using instinct to roam streets without maps and deciphering directions in foreign tongues. But I never thought I’d be such a fish out of water as I was on a long summer weekend south of the Mason-Dixon line. Thankfully, Twitter and some good ole’ fashioned southern hospitality led me to the doors of all I needed: food, beer and coffee. Moon River Brewing Even though there is a giant bridge that drops out of North Carolina into Savannah, Georgia, I completely missed it and ended up driving through the seedy underbelly of this pictorial town. So much for those...

Or How to Take the Train from Nice to Finale Traveling for me has always been a balance of letting go of my Type A tendencies to over plan and opening myself up to the unexpected things that happen when you move on the fly. While I’ve gotten better about arriving in towns without a place to stay, know the basics of city planning to find my way around without a map, and have ridden enough trains and busses to have a feel for schedules, every now and then I’m reminded that these are things I’ve learned over time. One quiet Sunday in Finale, it was by chance that I logged onto the social networks...

I’m always discovering different side trips to take from Finale – whether it’s up to France, down the coast to the Cinque Terre, or island hoping by way of ferry. With friends in town, we were looking for something different to do on our climbing rest days. The islands were too far, so we headed north to the Italian Alps. The Alpi Maritime are only 2+ hours by train and offer spectacular hikes between remote refugio huts in the summer, and Alpine skiing in the winter. There are also interesting mountain goats like the Ibex and the Chamoix. We made our way to the small town of...

This Easter was a good example of one of the best answers I have to the question of why I climb. Friday night I grabbed the fourth spot in a climbing quad going to La Spezia for the holiday weekend. The only thing on the agenda: climbing the walls of Muzzerone – a scenic area overlooking the heart of the Italian Riviera. La Spezia is a port town on the Gulf of the Poets which is something of a joke because at first glance, the only poets La Spezia might inspire would be Sylvia Plath or Edgar Allen Poe. The town has a fitting industrial and military feel with matching smells and sounds. But what La...

Things started early for a Saturday morning. Bago called at 7 am with a weather report: rain at Monte Cucco, and lots of it. My views one valley over and beachside were foggy but dry. Pier was next on the phone, shifting our start time back two hours. By 10:30 it was drizzly in Finale and still pouring on the mountain. Word from Pier: climbing would become hiking. But by the time we all coverged in Borgo, the weather – in a word – was brutto. Even walking around the piazza sounded like a bad idea. What was wrong with sitting in a café all day, Bago and I wondered, as we drank our second macchiato...