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Hill City of Orvieto Windows along stairway While visiting Italy and Austria in October and November 2025, Michele and I visited the hill city of Orvieto in the province of Umbria. One of the mandatory sights is to visit St Patrick's Well and it's useful to
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The cycads are an ancient group of plants that have survived to modern times. The oldest fossil evidence of cycads dates back to the Permian period, but it wasn't until the Triassic and Jurassic periods (200-65 million years ago) that these plants became the predominant flora on
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During 1990’s I was saddened when I read about the impending flooding of the Three Gorges on the Yangtse River in China, and resolved to see them before they were inundated. A massive new hydroelectric dam was under construction by the Chinese government, and the resulting reservoir would spoil
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The Appalachian Trail (AT) was first envisioned by the forester and planner, Benton MacKaye and his proposal was published in the Journal of American Institute of Architects in 1921. After 16 years of trail construction, the AT was declared completed in 1937. Since then a rich lore of traditions has
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I went on my first backpacking trip in the Pecos Wilderness near Taos, New Mexico, while a senior medical student. Years later, when driving through North Carolina, I crossed the Appalachian Trail and pulled over to inspect the trailhead. I felt a strong attraction and vowed that someday I would
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Over the centuries, humans have had an astonishing proclivity to cut holes in their heads. Known as trephination, it is the oldest operation we know about and was widely practiced by ancient surgeons. Other surgeries may have been performed but since soft tissues decay, the knowledge of such operations no
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When the weather warmed up during the months of May and June at our homestead in Arkansas, swarms of June bugs would emerge from the ground, and take to flight, buzzing like a bumblebee. These beetles circled around the trees in our yard, careened wildly and glanced off objects, and
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I was taught to identify birds from the paintings of the ornithologist, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, by my older brothers when I was 4 or five 5 years old. My oldest brother, Victor, was fanatically devoted to Purple Martins and claimed to have the largest colony of these swallows in the
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Florida’s ghost orchid (Dendrophylax lindenii) is found only in Florida and Cuba where it requires a highly specialized microclimate to grow and reproduce. When my daughter, Megan, first mentioned a mysterious ghost orchid found in the Florida swamps I had no clue what she was talking about. Due to
The diet in my Amish household in the Ozarks had many of the attributes that are now considered to be a healthy diet. We ate fresh vegetables and fruits in the summer and in the winter we relied heavily on large quantities of canned vegetables and fruit in Mason jars
During their childhood Amish children learn to speak three languages―at least in some measure. Their primary language is Pennsylvania German that originated in the Palatinate region of southwestern Germany and was the language the Amish immigrants brought with them when the earliest settlers arrived in Pennsylvania in 1737. Unfortunately,
My wife, Michele, and I returned from an extended trip to Italy and Vienna where we experienced art and history to the degree not possible in our country, whether seeing an opera in the venerated Teatro de Scala in Milan, the magnificent St. Stephen’s Cathedral from our hotel window