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Showing posts with the label High Atlas Mountains

Looking for Good Reasons to Travel, Visit Northern Spain and Morocco

Summer's almost here and it's time to think about planning vacation travel. Wanting to ease some of the difficulty traveling, I applied for and received a  Global Entry  pass so at many airports I breeze through domestic security (thank you  TSA Pre ) as well as international points of entry. I would definitely recommend Global Entry to everyone who travels more than a few times a year. The cost is minimal ($100 for 5 years) and the online paper work isn't too time consuming. Email me and I will give you all the details. Last fall I took a trip to Morocco on a press trip with half a dozen other journalists. We traveled from Fez in the east to Marrakech and the High Atlas Mountains in the west and then to Essaouira on the coast. In the High Atlas Mountains, we arranged for a cooking lesson in the kitchen of a local cook. To get to her home on the grounds of a remote boutique hotel, we walked underneath walnut trees up  a steep dirt switch-back trail we  shared with

Morocco, Closer than Paris and a Lot More Exotic

To get a good photograph of Casablanca's  Mosque Hassan II  took a lot of backing up and avoiding the crowds of international tourists who had come to visit one of the world's largest mosques. The building is not only about size, but details. The mosque invites visitors to appreciate the scale of nature and the intricacies of life as represented by the exquisite metal and tile work. As if it were the land's sentinel protecting man from the violence of the world, the Mosque stands on the edge of the North African continent, on the edge of a palisade overlooking the turbulent Atlantic Ocean. A trip to Morocco often begins in Casablanca and frequently tour guides make the Mosque one of the first stops. After the majesty of the Mosque, we traveled north-east toward Fez, stopping in Mouly Idriss, a historically important hill city where we had lunch at Restaurant Alaambra with an open air-patio and grill. The Mosque and Restaurant Alaambra were two good tent poles for