Dave Saari's Blog

Welcome back for Part 3 of this travelogue series. Part 2 concluded as we sailed away from Kotor, Montenegro, down the Adriatic Sea toward Greece. Here’s a map showing the places I’ll describe in this part of the travelogue: Corfu, Olympia, Santorini, and Athens, all in Greece.

Now let’s continue the story …

Corfu, Greece (Wednesday, November 5, 2025): After sailing overnight from Kotor, we docked in the Corfu Cruise Port Terminal on the island of Corfu (known as Kérkira in the Greek L...

Welcome back for Part 2 of this travelogue series. Part 1 concluded in Venice, Italy, as we had returned to our ship after a brief jaunt into the city to begin the Ocean Cruise portion of the trip. (I’m not going to spend time discussing the ship, the Viking Neptune, since it is nearly identical in layout and features to the Viking Star, on which we sailed previously in 2023. I described that ship extensively in “Pat and Dave’s Tremendous Tropical Trek, Part 1,” so readers interested in learning...

Preamble

Here comes another in my ongoing series of travelogues documenting our domestic and international travel experiences. Since the fall of 2018, I’ve produced fourteen of these travelogues (see INDEX). As past readers will know, the domestic travelogues have been road trips (either with the RV we formerly owned or with one of our two our electric cars) while the international travels have mostly been with the Viking River Cruise or Viking Ocean Cruise lines. We took our first Viking Riv...

This is the second and final part of a travel blog installment describing some of the places we visited during the summer season of 2025. Part 1 covered some interesting sites near our cabin on Lake Superior’s North Shore (the titular Summer Sanctuary) as well as several places along the shore that we visited during June of 2025. In this post, I’ll describe some additional places along the shore and in our great neighbor nation to the north over the course of the summer season (my generous defin...

Readers of this travel blog series may recall that it was born back in 2018 when, at the urging of family members, I began documenting a 10,200-mile RV trip. Since then, I’ve documented a total of thirteen domestic and international trips. Next up will be our fourth trip with Viking Cruise Lines, this time starting at Lake Como, Italy, and ending in Athens, Greece. As I was looking over the list recently, it dawned on me that I have neglected a major aspect of our travel experiences. We are most...

Part 2 of this travel blog series described the places of interest we saw in and around Green Valley, AZ. This final installment describes the fun stuff we did as we drove back home to Minneapolis. As a reminder, here is a map of the overall journey, including the main points of interest covered in this installment:

Grand Canyon West: We departed from the Canoa Ranch Golf Resort at 8:30 AM on Friday, March 28, heading northwest toward Kingman, AZ, where we stayed the night. On Saturday mor...

Part 1 of this travel blog series told of our decision to head south to escape the Minnesota winter and described our travels to Green Valley, AZ. We arrived at the Canoa Ranch Golf Resort at 7:30 PM on February 17. We spent a total of five weeks at the resort, and except for about ten days during which first I and then Pat came down with rather severe upper respiratory ailments (the first real illnesses we’ve experienced in about five years), we thoroughly enjoyed our stay. During that time, at...

While we truly love our homes in the great state of Minnesota, a condominium in Minneapolis and a cabin in Grand Marais, we love them a lot less during the winter than the other three seasons. By the time February rolls around, we’re usually tired of the snow and ice and cold weather, so we start looking for a getaway to someplace a bit more hospitable to human habitation. This year, we hit on the idea of trying an extended stay in one place as well as a bit of a road trip. In fact, the extended...

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, most people in the United States – even a few Republicans – still respected science and engineering and the earnest, hard-working people who studied and practiced in those fields. A seemingly brilliant and altruistic engineer named Elon Musk was well along in his admirable quest to build a world-class electric car company. With its high-tech American-built cars and extensive nationwide charging network, Tesla was the absolute best choice for anyone intere...

Welcome back for the final episode of this narrative of our recent trip to the Iberian Peninsula. Part 3 described three of the shore excursions we took during the river cruise, leaving off in Pocinho on November 15th. This episode describes the last four shore excursions and our trip back home.

Favaios and Quinta da Avesado (November 16): On Saturday the 16th, we disembarked from the Helgrim at 8:30 AM for a 50-mile bus drive through the beautiful Douro valley to the town of Favaios. In Fava...