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Following our first port of Cabo San Lucas and three days at sea, our second port of call on the Viking world cruise was the famous tourist city Puerto Vallarta.  Puerto Vallarta is the capital of the Mexican state of Jalisco, a state which is approximately the size of South Carolina.  Tourism is its main “industry.”  Susan and I joined a city tour with a local guide who spoke perfect English.  We toured the downtown area including the cathedral, followed by a half-hour drive out of the city to tour a tequila factory...

Our parents’ generation all remembered where they were when Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941. I was in high school in Columbus, Georgia, when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963…at Florida State University when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in 1968. On September 11, 2001, I was in Reno, Nevada, with my wife Susan, and a nurse friend, Rosemary, who was visiting us from Oregon for the purpose of recording guided imagery meditations with Susan’s and my music. . .

This blog was written in September, 2009, following my first and (up till now) only trip to Iceland.

We flew overnight via Iceland Air, leaving Minneapolis in the early evening, and arriving in the early morning after a six-hour flight.  We rented a car for our island travels (which was very expensive--$560 for four days in a Subaru station wagon).

This blog describes a visit to ancient Petra and a conference of Middle East Nurses United in Human Caring.

It is a great privilege and blessing to be able to visit Portugal twice within three months, first in December on a Viking River Cruise tour, and second in March on a Go Ahead Travels tour to Spain and Morocco commencing in Lisbon, Portugal...

Our third (and final) Vietnamese port of call was Saigon, the former capital of South Vietnam, which was renamed Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) after the victory of North Vietnam at the end of the Vietnam War.  HCMC is a large prosperous city.  We were lucky to be met on two consecutive days by our old friend Bob, who is married to a Vietnamese lady and has retired to live in Vietnam following his long career in Reno as a counselor and professional musician.  I played many gigs with Bob in Reno over the years.