ABOARD THE M/V CAPE HENLOPEN—My favorite thing about the ferry ride from Orient Point, NY, to New London, CT, is a daydream, one that easily converts the short hop across Long Island Sound into an Atlantic crossing. Your imagination has some work to do; the ocean does the rest.

Orient Point, at the eastern tip of the Long Island’s North Fork, is tiny, with not much more than a snack bar and picnic tables along a rocky spit of beach. When a boat comes in, you notice. They’re big, hovering on either side of 1,500 gross tons, not exactly the Queen Mary 2, but they loom large in their scaled-down setting. You know these boats can handle big waves and bad weather. As one glides into its berth, just before docking, the prow slowly opens like a hungry shark, here with a belly full of cars. A blast of the horn, and you get the message: Respect us, be a little bit frightened, take us seriously. Heavy metal.

New London is a worthy destination, a busy harbor, full of clutter and activity beyond the imagination of Orient Point, 90 minutes in the rear-view wake—past the lighthouse on Plum Island, home to the recently decommissioned USDA Animal Disease Center; in clear sight of the cigarette-slim beacon on deserted Little Gull Island; almost smack into the Gothic dollhouse on Race Rock that warns sailors of the danger when shifting tides push trapped water through a narrow drain, right where the Sound pinches tight before opening to the sea. Everything watched over by squawking gulls.

The ferry slows as you approach the harbor. The ghosts of submarines line the channel across the water in Groton, officially Submarine Base New London, a naval station since the tail end of the Civil War and America’s second-oldest submarine base, dating to 1915. (Point of pride: America’s first submarine base, established in 1899, is in New Suffolk, on the North Fork. I have a tee shirt to prove it, with America’s first submarine, the U.S.S. Holland, embroidered on the front.) Not too long ago, a sub sighting was guaranteed.

Everyone I know loves the ferry crossing. But they think all the boats are the same. God, are they wrong. One outranks the others by miles. The Cape Henlopen, the one I’m on, is a converted LST that saw action at Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944 before its long journey to conversion as a Cross Island Ferry. (It once passed Delaware’s Cape Henlopen on its run between Lewes, Delaware, and Cape May, New Jersey.)

How the ferry—a.k.a. LST 510, its doppelgänger name proudly displayed on the boat in front of “Cape Henlopen”—got from the beaches of Normandy to a peaceful shuttle service in New England is a long story. Fortunately, it’s all on vivid display in the 510 Lounge, with stunning photos of the banged-up hull of a beached landing vessel. Three enlarged reproductions of front pages from The New York Times coverage on June 6, 7, and 8 shout the news of the D-Day landing in banner headlines: You can read all about it.

There’s another reason to opt for Cape Henlopen for your crossing, and it’s all about comfort. While most ferries in the fleet are shipshape, none have anything like the 510 Lounge. Its swivelly cushion chairs, all white-and-mauve swirls, could be the lobby of a Courtyard by Marriott anywhere off an Interstate exit.

All the main boats have what I call “under-the-el” Irish bars, the kind that still existed along Third Avenue when I first moved to New York, 20 years after the el came down—big friendly boxes with tin ceilings, here wrapped in windows for generous views and drinks, jumbo pretzels, and somebody behind the bar who knows your name, at least for the next hour. They’re nice. but they’re not the 510 Lounge.

A nondescript door to the lounge goes unnoticed by first-timer passengers, who queue for cellophane sandwiches, unwrapped and nuked before serving. Those in the know head straight for that heavy iron door, pry it open like Alice might, and head up a tight staircase to a wonderland encased in salt-stained glass. Pull yourself up to a stool, and a bartender will take your order, maybe a beer and a tuna melt, a proper one on toasted rye with a pickle on the side.

Susan Anne has a promenade deck, like the Cape Henlopen‘s but not nearly as long, but also sooty chimneys instead of proper smokestacks. Her sister, Mary Ellen, has the nautical stacks but no promenade deck, and that’s bad for imagining yourself on the open seas. John H. sports a promenade deck, with lattice-iron trim, suggesting it might have once served as a steamboat on the Mississippi—great if you want to sing “Ol’ Man River” on the way to New London on the River Thames (rhymes with James, ouch).

The Cape Henlopen has all the nautical frills of the other boats, plus sturdy Adirondack chairs along the promenade deck and those View-Master mounted binoculars you put a quarter in and look through like a periscope, not for U-boats but for the elusive Montauk light at the end of the South Fork. (Everybody thinks they can see it. You can’t; it’s too far away. Nevertheless, I swear I did see it one crystal-clear day when the light was right, and I was in a Loch Ness mood.) And it has the 510 Lounge.

All my friends agree that a crossing of the Sound can be conjured as a mini cruise, akin to a few hours at a day spa that stops short of a full week at Canyon Ranch. I tell them over and over that all Cross Sound ferries are not the same. I can, and do, preach nonstop about the lounge. Yet all they care about in the end are the departure and arrival times. I understand. I have genuine sympathy and a certain amount of respect for their practical approach to booking a ferry. I hope that, someday, I can also forgive them.

Let’s Kick the Bucket List again next week.

What is left to say about Prince Felix Felixovich Yusupov that hasn’t already been said? Born into one of the wealthiest families of imperial Russia, in St. Petersburg in 1887, Felix had it made. He could have been just another rich playboy creep like Porfirio Rubirosa or Kash Patel. But that would not have been our Felix. While stopping short of full-tilt Mother Teresa, he chose instead a life devoted to serving his fellow man.

We had never heard of Felix Yusupov either, but his face kept splashing across our social feeds in relentless meme waves every few hours, all with the same pic and bizarre, not to mention complicated, story. (Blame it on the Algorithm, too much searching for “Aeroflot” and “Kirov” for my last post, A Tale of Three Cities.)

A cross-dresser from an early age who later performed at cabarets wearing his mother’s jewels, Felix later turned up in England, smoking hash, studying at Oxford, and doing the tango with ballerina Anna Pavlova. Before you could say “Liza with a Z,” he was back in St. Pete, poisoning Rasputin and outrunning the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution. (The Smithsonian disputes much of his account on the assassination. But what do they know? They’re probably shut down by now anyway.)

Next thing you know, he and his wife, Princess Irina Alexandrovna of Russia, move to Paris. He’s as angry as can be about all the movies—Russian, German, and especially American, about a dozen in all—that depict his thinly disguised part in the plot to kill the Mad Monk. The film that galls him the most, though, is “Rasputin and the Empress,” a 1932 production with the great John Barrymore playing his nibs. Nothing left to do but sue MGM, which Irina does, successfully—seems it wasn’t about him anymore but his wife’s honor—causing Hollywood studios to adopt the odious disclaimer, “Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”

I forgot. He wrote a book, “Lost Splendor and the Death of Rasputiun.”

Why he is getting this award

Not to be outdone by Hollywood degenerates, Felix went on to coin his very own phrase, one that now resonates with travelers everywhere: “fasten your seatbelts,” a classic line as important in the world of travel as “employees must wash their hands” is to the food industry.

The year was 1964 during a choppy landing at Juan-les-Pins, when he suddenly flew out of Seat 1A, bumping his noggin so hard that his five-pound, diamond-encrusted tiara punctured the overhead bin with such force it spiked right through his brand-new Louis Vuitton Rollaboard. A few years later, just before his timely death at 80, Felix was said to have been putting the finishing touches on ”items may have shifted” and “federal regulations require,” each posthumously absorbed into standard aviation lingo.

Felix is buried in his fur hat and Mom’s jewels in the Russian section of the cemetery in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois—along with Nureyev and Andrei Tarkovsky—about 15 miles southwest of Paris on the RER suburban rail network (open to visitors from 8-6 daily; 8:30-6, Saturday; 9-6, Sunday). Les Fleurs et Sens, a shop conveniently located near the Russian end—look for the gate with the giant eagle clutching a golden tureen of beef Stroganoff —has a fine array or flowers and memorial adornments. Ask for the Troika Special, with something for all three—prancer, dancer, and anti-Stalinist film maker.

Let’s Kick the Bucket List again next week.

First Stop: LENINGRAD

Groggy and jet-lagged. Not happy in high-rise hotel on Gulf of Finland, icy and overcast, a place for skaters to disappear into the fog and emerge in Helsinki. Out-skate the bastards. Water in faucet is puce, maybe as yet undiscovered color between yellow and brown.

Day two, all wedding-cake pretty. Winter Palace and Hermitage Museum. Can’t get close to paintings, guard finger-wagging from chair. Need closer look at Rembrandt’s “Return of the Prodigal Son.” Can’t get there. “Nyet.” Lunging at me. Sit down, you old bag. Get a real job.

Sobering afternoon at Museum of the Defense and the Siege of Leningrad. Hard to imagine city cut off from food for three years. No wonder World War II all about them, the Great Patriotic War against Fascism. Impossible to say exact number of everyone in USSR killed, maybe 25-30 million, civilian and military. When was American city isolated for that long without contact to outside world? [Note: The U.S. lost around 800,000, a very small percentage of whom were non-combatants.]

Evening at Kirov Ballet, La Bayadère. Mariinsky Theater, a palace in green and gold, want to stay seated forever. Love spelling of Mariinsky. Pedantic argument with copyeditor some fine day. Nureyev started here. No wonder they’re proud.

On to KIEV

Terrified on way to airport, first flight on Aeroflot. Good reason. Standing-room only, long time to Kiev, holding pole like D Train at rush hour. Old people making sign of the cross. Landing a spontaneous dance party; everybody doing the Twist.

Love Kiev. Just love it. Old Europe, lodging at Grand Hotel Ukrania, right on main square. Fascinated to be in Ukraine. Absorbed by dreadful history of World War II. They make sure we see it all.

Best Leaping Worker statue ever, high above Dnieper River, going for the gold of communal farming and industrial production. Almost convinces me to switch to the Other Side. Forgot to mention the famine during reign of Stalin. 86 that idea.

Passport control to get back into hotel. Guard looks like same woman from Hermitage. Maybe her sister. Dark disco beckons with strobe lights from across lobby. Band playing “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polkadot Bikini.” Try to enter, to explain what it means to hear world’s most idiotic song at hotel in Kiev, decades after making teenagers across America ill. [Written in 1961, the song hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 list, selling a million copies in the US, and was a worldwide phenomenon as well. It was hilariously lampooned in Billy Wilder’s comedy, One, Two, Three, in which East German agents torture a suspected West Berlin spy (who is actually an East German Communist) by endlessly playing the ditty, over and over until he breaks down and confesses.]

No go for disco. Nyet. Entire lobby now off-limits. Gee, can’t a guy get a little drinkie-poo at the bar before hitting the hay? Without every alarm in the hotel going off? I’m not going to assassinate anyone. Maybe the singer in the lounge, but that’s it.

Immediately escorted upstairs for another passport control before allowed to proceed down hall to room. Woman at desk on my floor looks like same woman from downstairs. Maybe she’s moonlighting. Think it’s the uniforms, so achtung, bitte in their own distinct Soviet way.

Third City: MOSCOW

So happy to have seat on plane. Make sign of cross to celebrate. Thrilled to be headed for the Big Town. Moscow does not disappoint. Red Square, amazing, Disney World for Western degenerates, types who get stoned before seeing Nutcracker.

Onion domes and long line for Lenin’s tomb. Sobering, but not much different from childhood in St. Louis, back to old neighborhood every few months to see Great Aunt Annie on display at Bohemian funeral parlor. Every time somebody croaked, it was Great Aunt Annie. Never knew any of them. Same thing with Lenin; everybody thinking how natural he looks, what a good job they did. Can’t say it out loud, though. No talking, not even in Russian or Ukrainian.

Seven Sisters. Maybe five, I end up spotting only four on the skyline. Stark, dark, perfectly symmetrical paperweight buildings, square boxes, spire-topped, soaring above the rest. Maybe guide said Five Sisters, and I heard seven. Maybe Alexei meant Smith and Vassar, but doubt if he knows any young women at any of them. Fascist architecture so comforting, if you’re a fascist. Curves and waves, funny angles verboten, or maybe I mean nyetified. Eero Saarinen turning over in grave. [Zaha Hadid on eternal rotisserie spin in sympathy with him.]

No restaurants. Nevsky Prospekt looks like ghost town at night. A few eateries—they deserve that name for being so detestable. You can barely see inside. No neon, no signs at all, no signs of life at all, just big bruisers at the door whose faces say “get lost or we will sit on you.” I’d dive into a McDonald’s right now and call it Cheers. [Note: First McDonald’s opened in Moscow in 1990, a year before USSR went out of business. Thousands stood in line for hours to get in.]

Another dinner, another night of caviar—tons of it—with bottomless vodka and endless toasts to Soviet-American friendship with officials who are nice but duller than leftover borscht. In banquet room at Hotel National. Lots of faded memories and sad sofas keeping each other company. [Today, it’s a five-star luxury hotel with views of the Kremlin and the onion domes of Red Square.]

Love my hotel, the Sputnik. Motel 6-ish high-rise with revolving starburst satellite-sign. Finally, some neon. [It’s still there! Much bigger than I remember. Upteen floors.] Miles from Red Square but near subway stop. Subway deepest in world, deeper than London’s. Glorious chandeliers everywhere, all the way up escalators to heavenly workers’ paradise outside. Maybe I’m being followed. No idea and don’t care. Tail me, idiots. Go ahead and turn me in for spying on light fixtures and re-riding escalators a dozen times. See where it gets you.

Alexei gives off know-it’s-all-bullshit vibes. We bond. He knows I knew he knows there’s bullshit on our side, too. Tell him he has health care; tells me I have color TV that works. Wonderful morning at GUM Department Store, a mammoth, late-19th-century trapezoidal building so big it could eat Harrods and Macy’s with room left for Bloomingdale’s. Faded arcade with balconies around glassed-topped atrium, grander than any passage in 19th-century Paris. Want to stay all day. Alexei can’t understand my fascination with a tin-can thin aluminum kettle, very Ma & Pa Kettle. I know it will be kitschy wonderful joke back home. Not nice. I know he knows I know I’m being an asshole, behaving like Long Island Valley Boy

More caviar and vodka but thrilled to be going to performance at Bolshoi afterwards. Ask Alexei what they’d be doing tonight. “Dancing.” Hard to explain why that’s funny, but he finally gets it when I can’t stop laughing. Turned out to be dumb dancing. Bolshoi theater all red-and gold to Mariinsky’s green-and-gold. Emeralds and rubies. So disappointed not to see classic program from one of best ballet companies in the world. Where is Tchaikovsky when you need him? They’ll never do that Euro-trash number again. Alvin Ailey would barf. Rockettes, too, one-by-one down the line after each kick, all over their boots.

Day to leave Moscow. Last-minute change. Flying back Aeroflot instead of Pan Am. Goodbye 747, hello Ilyushin 76, with twin AAA batteries on tail instead of four giant GE motors grinding away on the wings. Grand Ilyushin, indeed (747 - 76 = 671). No wonder they crash all the time. Same uniforms for stewardesses as hotel guards but powder-blue Pucci instead of army tank green. Hope Rosie the Riveter is on board. Do not want to hear the announcement, “Is there a riveter on board? With rivets?” Happier if I know she is already seated, maybe next to the “is there a doctor” doctor.

Of course you can smoke. That’s the second act for the nut dish after you eat all the nuts. My nut dish goes missing; I suspect it might reappear in Pan Am flight bag, stashed under my seat, once I get back to New York and unpack.

Let’s Kick the Bucket List again next week.

That’s it? That’s what spying has come down to? Aeroflot has been a cover for spies since the Soviet era. For decades, the carrier, founded in 1923, wasn’t just the national passenger airline but the USSR’s entire aviation authority, hauling freight, petroleum, medical supplies, and military cargo. If the Cold War is going to make a comeback—many bored Americans dearly miss ”The Americans”—we must do better than Mother Russia asleep in a rocking chair next to a once-chattering dot-matrix boarding-pass printer.

President Trump didn’t help matters either by popping into an airplane catering container after a NATO conference in Turkey. If the episode is ever made into a movie—“The Spy Who Came in from the Cold Tray of Appetizers “—it would help. But it will not earn him a seat under the legendary Cone of Silence, the game-changing piece of spy equipment now on display at the National Air and Spy Museum on the Mall. So crucial was it to Cold War strategy that the factory manufacturing it closed the day after its last model rolled off the assembly line. Then the Smithsonian announced it might close.

In the late 80’s, I signed up for a one-week Soviet Sampler during the era of Glasnost, when Reagan told Gorbachev to “tear down that wall,” and the Soviet chief said “okay.” For some reason, both sides decided I needed to monitor how things were going. To be completely honest, the trip was being run by Pan Am and the Soviet carrier, Aeroflot. Pan Am would fly us transatlantic, while scary-in-the-airy Aeroflot would handle the domestic legs from Leningrad—yes Leningrad—to Kiev and on to Moscow. Both airlines did it to promote tourism during this thaw in Soviet-American relations. In other words, to sell tickets. (But I can dream.)

By 1991, the USSR was gone. Pan Am was out of business, and Leningrad took back its maiden name, St. Petersburg—a defining moment causing one State Department official, Francis Fukuyama, to famously ponder The End of History?—all jotted down in my journal. The Smithsonian expressed interest in reviewing it. CBS thought it might work for “60 Minutes” but for some reason changed their mind. PBS said, “Let’s see how the midterms go.”

Now I’m offering my diary to the highest bidder. (China, if you’re listening …) but will also post it for you to look over next week in Part II, A Tale of Three Cities, When the Cold War Was Hot.

You’ll see what I saw looking out my window at the Hotel Ukraina in Kiev—nothing less than a grand and peaceful city square that Paris would be proud to claim. The Maidan was the center of protests during the Orange Revolution. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Independence Square remains the city’s main gathering spot, but the mood is somber. Seeing the damaged facade of the hotel on TV after missile strikes made me weep.

In Moscow, the lavish, 19th-century Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, its gold onion domes towering above the river about a mile from the Kremlin, wasn’t there. Stalin tore it down in 1931. What I saw was not a vacant lot but an open-air swimming pool, the largest outdoor heated pool in the world at the time, opened by Khrushchev in 1960. Decades later, the Moskva Pool got ripped out, and a new Orthodox cathedral, a carbon copy of the original, was reconsecrated in 2000. Pussy Riot, the umbrella name for the young “feminist punk-rock collective,” invaded 12 years later. The band caused a real riot that day, landing two of the five protesters in jail.

And I’ll spill the beans—nuts, actually—about a last-minute switch to fly home from Moscow on Aeroflot instead of Pan Am, which scared the bejesus out of me. All went well on the transatlantic flight—of course it did; I’m not dead—and I was able to filch a snack dish with a hammer and sickle logo that has become my most prized possession.

Now chipped and addicted to Krazy Glue, that little dish outranks my eight-piece place setting of Royal Crown Derby bone china by a mile. Despite a life devoted to petty pilfery—stealing soap dishes and ashtrays from luxury hotels around the globe—I did not steal these dishes. They were a gift from the British Tourist Authority, a reward for judging a travel-writing contest to find the best story about the U.K. in an American publication, each entry worse than the other.

The two warring sisters in “The Gilded Age” would flip for the elegant pattern of gold filigree and seaglass-green tracery on the china; they’d text Mrs. Astor immediately to see if she was up for dinner that evening. I like the china, but not enough to glue anything back together if a guest accidentally poked a butter plate off the table. I would simply laugh and assure them “don’t worry about it” while enjoying the Schadenfreude of it all. If they broke my Aeroflot peanut dish, I would sic Agnes van Rhijn on them and personally hand her a butcher knife on the way up to 5B for the hit.

Signing off now. Got some strategic calls to make, and I have to activate my own personal Cone of Silence, which I put together from a DIY kit ages ago. BTW, there really is such a thing as a cone-of-silence transmitter and antenna, involving space above broadcasting areas that naturally distorts airwave frequencies. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has documents on display to prove it (open daily, 10-5:30, except December 25.) Admission is free, but do hurry.

Let’s Kick the Bucket List again next week.

In the post “Ask Your Travel Agent if Stonehenge is Right for You” (July 16), we reported the extraordinary story of how the ancient monument‘s six-ton Altar Stone floated lazily down from Scotland to England’s Salisbury plain, some 400 miles away. We were wrong and regret any inconvenience for travelers who might have been headed to Wiltshire to look at Stonehenge, even though we advised you in the first place not to do that.

Technically, the error was not our fault but a bum tip from the BBC, the network of “Wolf Hall” and “Masterpiece Theatre” that erudite Americans place so much trust in even as they tire of being constantly reminded that America does not have a royal family and thus no royal family members to wave from balconies. However, we do have a pretender, Meghan of Montecito.

Some clarification here: Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is married to Prince Harry, whose aunt is Sarah, the former Duchess of York, who spent many years living as Old Fergie of New York after her divorce from Prince Andrew, now Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly of Old York but currently of Wood Cottage-upon-Peat Bog on the royal Sandringham estate in Norfolk, the one where he and his family spent every Christmas.

Nobody’s sending the Daimler for Andrew on the 25th this year, though, even if they’re serving cooked goose in the big house. Ex-wife Fergie’s off the list, too. The couple could drive up together on a neighbor’s tractor waving St. George’s white flag and singing ‘God Save the King,” but it would make no difference. Charles and Camilla would stop them in their muddy tracks with a rousing chorus of “no no no,” louder than Amy Winehouse refusing to go to rehab, before politely asking a butler to slam the door in their faces. For the record, Harry and Meghan aren’t invited either. Neither is the first footman delivering leftovers on Boxing Day.

This holiday season, Andrew will be lucky if he can rustle up a shepherd’s pie at the Rose & Crown not far from his self-catering cottage, in Snettisham, if they’re even open. As for Fergie, should she happen to be in New York for the holidays—hard to resist the windows at Bergdorf’s—I’d be happy to take her down to the Village for a Christmas pudding at Tea & Sympathy, the sweet little lunchroom in the cluster of British culinary outposts along Greenwich Avenue. Doubt if they‘re open either.

Fergie is on the record as loving yellow taxis, hot dogs, and the Empire State Building, which reminds her of a favorite movie, “An Affair to Remember.” She once joked about being so Americanized she says “elevator” instead of “lift.” Pretty wild stuff. (Full disclosure, when in the U.K., I refer to myself as a holidaymaker; once back in New York, I make a point of running out of bog roll, never toilet paper.)

Let’s get back to the correction, though: Yes, the Stonehenge story sounded like nonsense from the get-go, but there it was on the BBC website. It came as a shock, then, to confront a headline roaring across the pages of the June 4 issue of New Scientist that proclaimed, “Stonehenge’s altar stone probably wasn’t transported by a glacier.” Should have trusted our gut. Back to the original theory of aliens from the planet Arcturus.

The 70-year-old British publication is as reliable as Big Ben, which is unfortunate since the same issue ran the story, “Becoming a parent may make you love your partner less,” all about the bygone bliss of Netflix and popcorn on the settee with your loved one beside you. Kiss that goodbye. The magazine leaves open the possibility that your partner is merely faking it to get out of watching “An Affair to Remember” again. Either way, kids are tough on romance, which is perhaps why Charles and Camilla decided not to have any more, although she, according to Tracey Ullman, spends most of her spare time babysitting.

To avoid future Altarcations, sweeping changes have been made on our end. For starters, the entire fact-checking team is now Full English Breakfast toast. Furthermore, we plan to sue the BBC, as soon as Todd Blanche is available. And we no longer hire people with children, married or single. Simply can’t run the risk they might show up en masse on “Take Our Sons and Daughters to Work Day.”

Let’s Kick the Bucket List again next week.

Of the new breed of airship, the U.K. company Hybrid Air Vehicles’ Airlander 10 is the most impressive among a dozen being tested around the world. (A French all-cargo version is manufactured by the company Flying Whales.) Partly motorized for speed, it still relies on lighter-than-air gas to keep it aloft, which is good for the environment when not exploding. Thankfully, the 138-passenger Airlander 10—nicknamed the Flying Bum—is filled with non-flammable helium rather than much cheaper hydrogen, like the ill-fated Hindenburg. (Oops, just found out helium—like petroleum, jet fuel, fertilizer, aluminum, etc.—is log-jammed in the Strait of Hormuz. Stay tuned.)

Today, there is nothing to be afraid of should you decide a transatlantic crossing on a glorified blimp is right for you. Nevertheless, make it your mission NOT to watch Masters of the Air before you go. Apple TV’s sweeping production of Allied aces in WWII sucks you into the aerial combat so realistically you’ll retch right alongside the B-17’s navigator on the sortie over Regensberg. (Interesting fact, that UNESCO World Heritage city on the Danube is where the Sertl family hails from, but let’s dive-bomb into that some other day.)

Instead, check the inflight entertainment for the 1954 film “The High and the Mighty,” with action safely over the Pacific between Honolulu and Frisco. Only the dialogue will have you tossing your popcorn, with lines like —”There oughta be a home for dames like me. … I could call it the May Holst Home for Broken-Down Broads.”

The prototype for Airlander 10 was tested in clear-if-fake skies above San Francisco on a flight simulator at the company’s facility in England. Simulators are big boxes mounted on hydraulic poles, with a cockpit surrounded by 360-degree images from projected screens. Landings, the most difficult operation, will make or break an aspiring pilot. Using footage from airports around the world, students don’t know beforehand at which one they’re assigned to land. They do understand immediately if the screen explodes. Crashing the simulator is like failing the bar if you’re a post-grad lawyer but without the option of retaking the exam.

Inside the airship, the allure is all White Lotus chic, with leather banquettes in the lounge and private cabins plush enough to revive the do-not-disturb industry. Remember doorknob placards—hangtags in hospitality parlance? Some got very fancy, like the braided ones from the opulent Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in Hamburg, far sexier than today’s electronic scram-indicators controlled by phone or TV screens. A revival of hangtags could spell branding opportunities galore for the savvy entrepreneur: Shh! Miuccia Prada would like you to go away.

In the early 1980s, as a travel editor, I was privileged to witness the drama inside a simulator for Lufthansa’s fleet of Boeing aircraft at its Frankfurt training base. To add a soupçon of terror to the experience, the big box pitched and rolled like, well, a plane pitching and rolling at 30,000 feet. And then just months later, I got to have another Mr. Toad ride, this time at Alitalia’s maintenance base in Rome. I was on the edge of my seat as the instructor navigated our plane toward a virtual airstrip in Palermo while slowly descending through a Mediterranean pastiche of sun, sea, and, unfortunately, mountains.

Right before touchdown, the pilot yanked the wheel violently to the left, crashing the plane into a light-show of video explosions with accompanying surround-sound. I was shocked. I looked at him, mouth agape. He looked at me. We cracked up. I knew instantly I preferred this jocular teaching moment to the ruler-slap rigor of Frankfurt. It was amusing too, if you weren’t a student hoping for certification.

Looking back, I realize how much I miss “Alitalia.” What kind of name is ITA? Looks like the new company simply ran out of paint.

Terminial cases

The failed landing in Palermo was frighteningly realistic. Unfortunately, all airports are frighteningly realistic right now. An article in the Atlantic calls out the most-hated airports in America, starting with Reagan in D.C. but also skewers Atlanta, DFW, Charlotte, and Newark. The writer labels all U.S. airports “depressing and scary,” noting that at least seven are named for people who died in plane crashes.

Back in Italy, Rome’s airport can be scary too if you hit it on a busy travel day. It is always called Fiumicino (little river) for the nearby village at the mouth of the Tiber. I’ve never heard anyone call it by its official name, Leonardo da Vinci.

Northeast of Rome, on the Adriatic coast of Emilia Romagna, the beachside city of Rimini renamed its airport Federico Fellini in honor of the city’s favorite son, who died in 1993. Some decades later, it was re-christened Aeroporto Internazionale di Rimini e San Marino “Federico Fellini.” It’s about time an airport acknowledged the heavy traffic in and out of the tiny Republic of San Marino, where I’m not sure any traveler has ever been. I am certain no one will ever say “I’m flying out of Fellini.”

Meanwhile, before traveling these days, be sure to check if your airport is actually operating. Find out if it still provides baggage carousels, boarding gates and, of course, runways. Phoning is better than going online; a quick call might snap an overworked traffic controller to attention, if any of them are still there. Or simply call 800-USA-RAIL (or visit amtrak.com). Again, make sure before setting off that they still have funding.

Let’s kick the Bucket List again next week.

The Coronation Stone is ancient, like Stonehenge, but far more authentic. And you can possibly sit on it, maybe even have a bite if you promise not to litter, one of those things the Brits love to do but was banned by Brussels prior to Brexit. Fair warning, though, you might not be able to have the traditional pub lunch because chips, what we call French fries, are too expensive to import from Europe now.

How old is the Coronation Stone? Really old, going back a millennium to 925, which sounds like the time a train leaves Grand Central for Greenwich but is really the year Athelstan, regarded as the first king of England, was crowned.

How authentic is it? Very, according to the BBC, which points out that, although “no written record existed until the late 1790s, it’s thought … Athelstan sat of the Coronation Stone while receiving his crown.” Uh-huh.

Was the attraction sullied when moved in 1936 from its original location in the woods outside of town to the middle of the High Street without the city fathers understanding that the wafting aroma of fish ‘n’ chips, prior to being banned by Brussels, would eventually be replaced by the stench of McDonald’s?

Was the Coronation Stone even that special? Might it have been designed for Athelstan and future Saxon kings, like Aethelred the Unready of 979 fame, simply to sit on for a spell and catch their breath, taking time to smell the roses while staring lovingly at a host of golden daffodils long before Wordsworth’s heart danced with them?

If a toadstool stone was a bit small for a royal rear end, remember that bums, like kings themselves, were also smaller back then. It certainly would have been more comfortable than the Iron Throne, forged from swords, in “House of the Dragon.” No wonder Viserys I Targaryen wasted most of his reign at King’s Landing Urgent Care waiting for cauterization.

What about influencers, who would go on to not be able to spell Athelstan, Aethelred, or maybe even “unready.”

Decades ago, I set out from London to find answers, armed with information from the British Tourist Authority, the name of which was later changed to Visit Britain, probably in anticipation of a future directive from Brussels to lighten up and sound friendlier.

That was a shame, since most travelers don’t know what they want, something the BTA so intuitively understood. They were always there to help; one quick call to an 800 number yielded tons of concise directives about what to see, when to see it, and how to turn yourself in for offenses like littering in Trafalgar Square. They even had a toll-free number to call after returning home so that they could let you know how much fun you had or if you even had any at all.

And Visit Britain? “Hey man. Yeah, don’t know if feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square is littering or not. Try asking a friendly, unarmed Bobby or look for a guy with a big fur hat selling sightseeing tours.”

Do not confuse the Coronation Stone in Kingston upon Thames with the Coronation Stone neatly tucked under the Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey-not-far-from-Thames, what King Charles actually sat on during the ceremony three years ago. It can get confusing, so keep reading for a clearer understanding of what really went down.

Counting down to the Wackiest Things about Charles’ Coronation Stone

10 The 336-pound hunk of sandstone was placed underneath the gilded oak chair for the crowning, three years ago in Westminster Abbey, because Charles surely didn’t want to look all tilty while perched on a lumpy rock the size of a small microwave. The chair is also prettier, to say the least (see below), especially after recent efforts to restore it from damage in a 1914 bombing by Suffragettes and centuries-old graffiti in the form of initials carves by school boys, many from Eton.

9 Another problem was that the stone, also know as the Stone of Scone and the Stone of Destiny, wasn’t there anymore and had to be brought down from Edinburgh Castle, which must have figured into the estimated $72 million spent on the ceremony itself along with place cards and “Hi, My Name Is” badges.

8 The reason the stone wasn’t there is that it was returned to the Scots in 1996 after 700 years at Westminster Abbey. Good party planners, like the parents of the Princess of Wales, would have foreseen that and said, “Leave it in London where we could certainly use it for future coronations.”

7 The reason the stone had been in London for 700 years is that English King Edward I, Hammer of the Scots (bam! ouch!), stole it in 1296 and took it to Westminster Abbey where he had it built into a coronation chair, the same one Charles, his Mum, and previous monarchs sat on but sans even the slightest hint of sarcen for poor Charles.

6 The reason the stone itself was extracted from the chair and returned to the Scots in 1996 is that it had been the ancient ceremonial stone for the crowning of their kings from the fourth century until stolen by Edward.

5 After eight centuries, the Scots were still plenty pissed off, despite Whitehall saying, “Sorry, we won’t do it again.” Nice try, but it did nothing to keep the ungrateful Scots from clamoring for greater independence.

4 When the stone went back to Scotland after the coronation, though, it was returned not to Edinburgh Castle but to its original medieval home, an hour’s drive north of Edinburgh, in the village of Scone.

3 No, you cannot joke about ordering a scone when you’re home alone stoned. Scone rhymes with “skoon.” Scottish name, their choice how to pronounce it.

2 In 1950, students from the University of Glasgow broke into Westminster Abbey on December 25, removed the stone, dropped it on the floor, and managed to get the two cracked halves back across the border to Scotland before Boxing Day. Hardly a hazing prank—no upper-class twits from Eton this time—the caper’s final destination was Arbroath Abbey, near Dundee, from where Robert the Bruce declared independence from England in 1320.

1 The stone was returned, the four collegians never prosecuted, and Christopher Nolan is apparently interested in a follow-up to The Odessey—The Heist—also to be shot in IMAX-70 but on location in Georgia and Louisiana to cut costs.

Let’s Kick the Bucket List again next week.

Blame it on the Wimbledon Men’s Final. No excuse, though, so let’s jump right in.

On June 21, the summer solstice, light from the setting sun passes perfectly through gaps between the boulders of England’s Stonehenge—150+ boulders, most weighing about 25 tons each and arranged in a circular pattern by Druids for religious observation.

That’s what we thought, anyway, until the Sixties when Stonehenge Decoded came out. Author Gerald S. Hawkins boldly proclaimed Stonehenge to have been an astronomical observatory rather than a ceremonial site, restoring the idea that worship-in-the-round originated at a drive-in church somewhere near Tulsa.

His second busted-myth was even more shocking: It wasn’t the Druids who lugged those ancient rocks onto the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire but an ancient people who pre-dated the Druids by at least a millennium.

They would have been an ancient people indeed. The Druids showed up around 3,000 B.C.E. and stuck it out for another 1,500 years, straddling the late Stone and Bronze ages. After such an extraordinary discovery, you wonder why Edwards didn’t break into the Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour instead of writing a book that far fewer people would see.

Okay, but where did the boulders come from? A few of the bigger sarsen stones weigh 50 to 60 tons each. Like almost all the others, they are sourced from the sandstone in the immediate vicinity. The smaller stones, weighing a mere two-to-five tons each, are made of bluestone, which is not found in the area. (Spoiler: There’s a quarry in Wales, 150 miles away, so it’s not like they had to come all the way from Carrara.)

Wait a minute. Even that spoiler alert is suddenly out-of-date. Only last month, the BBC reported that a glacier might have floated the heavy Altar Stone down all the way from Scotland. In hindsight, that seems obvious, but what if the report is simply a diversionary tactic to deflect attention from Donald Trump’s $14-million defamation lawsuit against the BEEB for allegedly leaking information about him?

Okay, let’s say the Big Boy—the stone, not the President—did get handed to the ancient people on a terminal-moraine platter. Surely they would have expected more 60-ton stones to rain down; Ancient people were nothing if not superstitious.

It doesn’t really matter, because everyone who visits Stonehenge comes back with the same impression: It’s tiny. You expect a Colosseum-size monument but end up with another Little Mermaid, the under-performing subject of last week’s post. To answer my own question, Stonehenge is more about nuanced detail, like Hawkins’ observation that the 56 circles surrounding the stones might well have enabled these ancient people to predict eclipses.

That does it, those ancient people were aliens.

Ph.D. astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of the podcast, StarTalk, disagress, saying, “Just because you can’t figure out how ancient people did it, doesn’t mean aliens helped them do it.”

But do we trust him? True, he graduated Harvard and went on to oversee the multi-million-dollar renovation of New York’s prestigious Hayden Planetarium, where he is now director. He also claims to have come up with the very name Manhattanhenge, in a 1997 article in Natural History magazine. So let’s give him a pass.

Let’s give him a pass but also acknowledge that he has no more idea than Hawkins what he’s talking about. Stonehenge was built by aliens, as confirmed in the 1984 Rob Reiner movie Spinal Tap. The boulders came from another planet, probably Arcturus, so popular with male super-models in the 1980s. And that is that.

Let’s Kick the Bucket List again next week.

On my first trip to Europe, the one where you have to see everything everywhere all at once, my friend and I spent a half day trying to track down the Little Mermaid, one of Copenhagen’s most iconic landmarks, based on the character made famous in a story by Hans Christian Andersen. Boy, did it stink.

We were driving a Volkswagen Beetle, navigating with a year-old 1975 copy of Autropa Atlas Europa. A full tank of gas cost $8, scandalously high and double the price in the U.S. at the time. We learned that most of the money from that painful pumpage went for taxes—our first brush with socialism—to maintain things like parks, provide health care, and pave the streets we were driving on. The bean counters skimped on signage, though, for while there were graphics of airplanes on stanchions at every crucial intersection to get drivers safely to the lufthavn, we did not see a single icon of a fan-tailed woman to help grease the ways along our route. We got quite lost.

Finally, there she was, in all her souvenir-size glory, only four feet tall, a gracefully carved hunk of slimy green bronze looking mournfully out to sea, as if she couldn’t decide whether to pop back in the water or stay put for a few more rays.

The statue was lovely, I’ll give it that, which is why it shows up in all the Danish brochures and on postage stamps, luring tourists with the brash confidence of an Eiffel Tower or Statue of Liberty but with no more gravitas than an oversized paperweight. Bait and switch, to be sure, but you can’t really blame Denmark. After all, there have been at least three big movies, a hit Broadway musical, and countless ballets based on the 1837 Andersen story. Maybe stardom just went to everybody’s head.

She’s got competition now, too, from Han, a male sculpture created in stainless steel by two British artists in 2012 at the impish request of the city of Elsinore, Hamlet’s home town, a half hour’s drive from the capital—take that, Copenhagen. Han, imagined from the start to be the Merm’s brother, wags two legs instead of a tail but looks equally wimpy. At least a man has finally broken into the mermaid racket, so long dominated by females.

If you must see the Little Mermaid, you should consider staying in Nyhavn, with its “rows of brightly painted 17th- and 18th-century row houses and old wooden ships moored along the canal,” according to ChatGPT, which also thinks the stroll along the waterfront to the Mermaid would “end up being one of your favorite 20-30-minute walks in Europe.” Sounds like it. A 20-30 minute walk along the Seine, my previous favorite, now strikes me as passé; it’s way too hot in France these days anyway.

***

The other day, I called food-and-travel writer Lisa Abend, who now lives in Copenhagen, to see what she thought of the Little Mermaid, but she hung up on me. Later, she apologized, saying she gets calls all the time from scammers trying to sell her the Little Mermaid, like the Brooklyn Bridge.

Lisa also admitted she doesn’t actually spend that much time in Denmark now that she’s so peripatetically busy with The Unplugged Traveler, her wonderful Substack in which she reports on places after spontaneously showing up with no prior information about the destination.

So clearly, we can’t trust anything she says about Copenhagen, although she did do a decent job of making it sound appealing in Afar magazine, giving the Mermaid the shortest amount of shrift possible. Off the record, though, she confessed her favorite place in the entire city was NK department store in Stockholm where “you can pick up all kinds of cool knick-knacks for friends back home.”

Neither could she confirm the rumor that 86-year-old Queen Margrethe, who abdicated two years ago in favor of her son but usually shows up with the family on the balcony of Amalienborg Palace for Official State Waving occasions, was trying to remove the iconic mermaid statue and have a much larger one of herself erected instead.

I hope so; Margrethe is a hoot, as passionate about soccer as she is about hanging onto Greenland. That would also mean no more endless waiting under the balcony at the palace—which BTW sits along the harbor walk to the Little Mermaid—simply to see the Queen pop out. I love the way she waves, but camping out on cobblestones in a chilly Copenhagen during the winter or on a crisp spring evening is no picnic, although the politi tend not to beat you up as much for getting frostbite inside a sleeping bag, a novel touch much appreciated by Americans.

In the end, I can’t help thinking there’s something sinister about Den Lille Havfrue, admittedly charming but a bit too similar to the notorious Lorelei, just a few rocks over on the Rhine, who lured passing sailors to their doom while singing like a siren. I guess the big difference is that the Little Mermaid falls in love with a prince who dumps her for a human, then stabs him and ends up going back to the sea to die but is redeemed by doing good deeds for eternity to gain an immortal soul. Something like that and a pretty big difference, come to think of it.

But I’d still prefer to see one of those Mermaid shows—the Disney ones have happy endings for Bambified Americans who cry in movies—than go to all the trouble of trying to find her again in Copenhagen. Fool me once, shame on you …

Let’s Kick the Bucket List next week with more “Must-See Sights Not to See.”

I bet I’m not the only one who’d rather be at a quinceañera with prized-filled piñatas than a semiquincentennial with phony Stigmatas like Trump, Vance, Johnson & Graham. (Do call them, though, if you’ve been injured in an accident. Ask for Paula White-Cain; find out how she got that wacko name.)

Right now, let’s fast-forward backwards to 1861, another polarized period in U.S. history when Union forces fired on Fort Sumter. Then, we’ll quickly move on to similar global conflicts around the globe during that period.

The year 1861 wasn’t a great for the Austro-Hungarian Empire either, which lost its Italian-speaking provinces from Milan to Venice. Italy, though, did quite well, unifying as a nation von Kopf bis Fuß—from head to toe. Italians didn’t have a language yet—calm down, read on—but they were already thinking “from the head of the Alps to the toe of the boot.”

Talk about a zero-sum game. Italy got a new flag, statues of Giuseppe Garibaldi everywhere, and some long overdue r-e-s-p-e-c-t. Even a new language. Linguist and New York Times columnist John McWhorter notes, “In 19th-century Italy ... Piedmontese to the north and Sicilian to the south had so little in common with Tuscan in the middle that they qualified as different languages altogether.” Tuscan, one of many dialetti coming directly from Latin, got anointed as “Italian.”

Austria pretty much got bupkis.

I watched both pageants unfold while simultaneously streaming “The Empress” and “The Leopard” on Netflix, toggling back and forth between episodes of each. The effect was like watching two re-enactments of America’s Civil War battles at the same time in different fields. Look left for Natchez; glance across the cornstalks for Gettysburg.

In the German-language production of “The Empress” (“Die Kaiserin,” returning for its final season this fall), Elisabeth, affectionately known as Sisi, and her emperor-husband, Franz Josef, can’t come up with a single good idea to save the alpine provinces. In “The Leopard” (“Il Gottopardo”), forces of the Italian Risorgimento surge and re-surge from Milan to Sicily, fiercely fighting while shouting orders that sound more like opera than war.

Meanwhile, a privileged Sicilian prince, the Leopard himself, stews in his Palermo palace, just as unhappy as the Habsburgs back in Vienna. I wondered if he’d considered popping in on Elisabeth and Franz, crashing with them at the Hofburg for a while until things calmed down back home.

In truth, Austria did end up with a door prize in 1864, taking a chunk out of Denmark after the obscure but I’m sure equally bloody Second Schleswig War. (Sorry, Denmark, but you’ll always have Greenland—for now.)

A year later, America took a break from its civil war, starting up hostilities again around 2016. For exactly 15 decades (give or take a year), a blanket of peace lay gently over the land, marred only by the Teapot Dome scandal during the presidency of Warren Harding and, some 30 years later, Joe McCarthy and Pat Boone.

By 1865, I’m guessing Italians were still celebrating their four years of independence. Austrians, I suspect, simply soldiered on with fewer soldiers while in sein bier heulen.🇦🇹 😢 🍺

Let’s Kick the Bucket List again next week.

Can another No Kings protest be upon us so soon? OMG tomorrow! Saturday, June 27, to be exact. Time flies when confronting a lunkhead dictator-wannabe, but we’re really not having that much fun. Maybe Trump will take the hint, retire to Florida, and pick up a hobby, like George H. W. Bush. Skydiving, anyone? Now that sounds like fun.

Speaking of royalty, while remaining neutral on their benefits to society, I sure have met a lot of them over the course of my magazine career. King Charles was my favorite.

Let’s drop in on Charles at Powis Castle, the Prince of Wales’ official residence in—you guessed it—Wales on a sunny spring day in the early 90s when he was still a prince. There I stood in the courtyard with a bunch of feature writers from around the world—at least 200 or more, as I recall—invited to meet HRH, then the brand ambassador for Wales. For a few hours, we stood in neatly organized clumps circling the great lawn below the castle. We were grouped by country, as if at the Olympics, but it was good that we were not at the Olympics. My fellow nerds and I would have surely killed ourselves had we gotten anywhere near a ski slope or might even have been accidentally shot by the recently deceased Claudine Longet.

Charles took forever to slow-walk the circle, spending so much quality time chatting with each imported “journalist.” He was a mensch who clearly loved his job. (I like him even more right now; I just read this morning that he paid $41 million in taxes this year. Mensch and stalwart citizen.)

But I didn’t love his job. The arcane protocol that goes with addressing one’s betters terrifies me. In America, we don’t bow or curtsey to our royals. We just say things like, “Loved you in ‘Ozark;’ now totally hooked on ‘DTF St. Louis’ or “devastated that you and Keith are officially split” and always in a restaurant or airplane where they foolishly feel safe. I began to quake as HRH approached our group.

Unfortunately, my Garden Design name tag was a Charles-magnet bigger than any jewel in his great-great-great grandmother’s crown.

“Aren’t gardens the most marvelous things on earth?” he said.

“Yes, Sir, they truly are, Sir.” [Please move on to the guy next to me from Royal Toil & Boil in Trenton, or whatever his name tag says.]

“Have you been to Heligan? Such marvelous gardens, with a micro-climate from the Gulf Stream. There are palm trees there, you know.”

No Sir, but it has been a lifelong dream to get there.” [Florida has Palm trees; I’ve been to Florida.]

“Well, then. You must go.”

“Indeed, Sir. I am headed to Cornwall next.” [Heading straight to London to party with friends.]

Finally, he moved on, and I could breathe, until later when I was handed the souvenir photo of us shaking hands. My transition lenses had transitioned to full-tilt shades in the outdoor setting—good, that’s what’s there are supposed to do, but I forgot—making me look like the latest shipping magnate to buy Harrods, now with my hand extended begging for an invitation to the royal box at Wimbledon.

A few years later, after Charles and Diana officially separated, I flew on a plane with the Princess from Heathrow to London’s secondary airport, Gatwick, a promo for the rollout of a new Virgin aircraft—a spanking new A340—christened Lady in Red. As we flew by Windsor, smart-ass Virgin owner Richard Branson played pilot, announcing, “Those on the right side of the plane you can see Granny’s castle.” Masters of the Universe were always cheeky, and maybe a bit sexist, but nothing like today’s Masters of Mayhem dicks.

The flight was a huge deal; at the end of 1993, Diana had more or less retired from public appearances, part of the agreement after the separation. The fact that Branson coaxed her back for this splashy inaugural set off a media explosion in Britain. Every paper covered the event. The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Bible of the upper classes, praised her appearance to the high heavens. The left-leaning Guardian wasn’t so impressed—waste of money, cheap gimmick, grumble, mumble, grumble and all that. Some tabloids labeled Branson brazen for putting his arm around Diana and demanded a public flogging.

Let’s move on to Queen Elizabeth. She graciously invited me to the 2004 launching of the Queen Mary 2 in Southampton, headquarters of Cunard, and it was a dazzling event, followed by a black-tie dinner. Guests assembled on the pier inside a bespoke theater in which the 150,000-ton liner filled the entire wall behind the see-through stage. The women were all under hats, just like at Ascot, and this time I left the sunglasses behind.

Soon after taking our seat, we were asked to be “upstanding for Her Majesty, the Queen.” She in turn asked God to bless the ship and everyone who sailed within her. A bottle of Champagne boinked the ship, and a bagpiper, dramatically elevated on the prow behind the Queen, closed the ceremony with a melancholy dirge that sounded like an anthem for all those brave souls asleep in the deep. Many in the audience teared up, but my mind went straight to a friend’s definition of a gentleman: Someone who knows how to play the bagpipes but doesn’t. Hard to cry after that.

I even had the pleasure of hanging—if not with, then next to and slightly below—Kaiser Wilhelm II at the villa of his personal legal adviser in the pastorally posh Berlin neighborhood of Grunewald, finished just before WWI. Soon after the Schlosshotel Ritz-Carlton began squatting there in 1999, I booked a room, marveling at the interior design by Karl Lagerfeld that, according to one rave review, created a distinctive look that mixed “imperial German grandeur with his trademark gray palettes and French-inflected luxury.”

Alas, all that gray grandeur apparently wasn’t enough. After a few years, the Ritz-Carlton got evicted from the Italian-Renaissance pile and the Schlosshotel Berlin by Patrick Hellmann moved in. (His name was removed from the stationery only this year.) In the end, did fashion designer Hellmann pull a Trump before Trump got the idea, slapping his own name on the weekend redoubt of Kaiser Bill’s favorite lawyer? Might Hoffmann be guilty of Majestätsbeleidigung, what the French and English refer to as lèse-majesté?

More importantly, could the protesters at “All of U.S. 250” tomorrow be setting themselves up for charges of lèse-majesté simply by expressing a desire for less majesty? You know the demonstration is gonna piss off our home-grown Kaiserliche Orangene Majestät.

Nevermind. Let’s hie to Washington anyway and scream real loud in Pee Wee’s honor. (BTW the secret word is RAUS!)

Let’s Kick the Bucket List again next week.

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God knows, I wasn’t the reason for the policy change. Ruth Reichl was, right after being named editor-in-chief. Ruth came straight from the New York Times, where she’d been the dining critic for six years. Before that, she was the critic and had been food editor at the Los Angeles Times and earlier a food writer for New West magazine. To me, she embodied the soul of an old-fashioned newspaper back when newspapers still existed.

Simply put, she believed a journalist was compromised the minute they jumped on a junket or accepted a free meal. To a former freebie-taker, that concept was music to my ears. With my Gourmet job, I could now expense my room and comfortably write “… beautiful hotel but so much dust on my coffee table; future guests should bring their own N95 masks.”

A convert’s devotion to their new religion, Mahatma Gandhi said, “is greater than that of a person who is born to it.” You bet.

Ruth had something else I admired: fierce determination but never a sense of unbridled entitlement like so many other chieftains at Condé Nast. I didn’t know that on the day I sat next to her at a luncheon at the Waldorf. I was nervous, and she should have been too with so many Condé Nast bigwigs around the table. There are a lot of emperors and devils at Condé Nast, but not all of them are wearing clothes, much less Prada.

Soon after sitting down, I offered to fill Ruth’s water glass. I was trembling, all new-employee polite. As I poured from a big heavy pitcher, tons of tiny ice cubes jammed around the spout, cascading water over her like Niagara Falls. I was mortified and gasped at the thought of how angry she would be, how humiliated she must be in front of the suits. Instead, she laughed and, along with a bevy of waiters, grabbed a bunch of napkins, frantically trying to speed up the drying process while power-chatting across an annoying centerpiece of expensive-but-showy-flowers.

Not long before the magazine got axed, Ruth asked me to join her on a field trip for our annual issue devoted to a single great food city. This year, it would be Paris—take that Meryl, Anne, and Emily! Once there, we split the lodging beat, with each of us at a different hotel every night for a week, rigorously testing the stay-worthiness while diligently not checking for dust. But most of all we ate, reuniting each day for lunch and dinner, sometimes eating three or four, once five, meals a day. Breakfast not included.

Food editors from Gourmet’s test kitchen, the beloved “cooks” to everyone on staff, joined us a week later for more eating, food-styling and photo-shooting. As a Puritan-American, I am now duty-bound to swear that we worked our tails off. (“Great trip, yes, but damn anyone who might suggest we had an ounce of fun.”) Since Paris cries merde to all that crap, and out of respect for the French in general, I’ll simply say “maybe we did and maybe we didn’t.” To be sure, changing rooms each day was grueling, eating together every night much more pleasant.

Picks from our Excellent Paris Adventure

After 17 years, these restaurants are still among my favorites in Paris. I’ve dined at each again and again over the intervening years, but I’m not the food expert. For more up-to-date recommendations, check Ruth’s Substack La Briffe and Alexander Lobrano’s Hungry for Paris & France website.

As for the hotels, are they all still finds? Nope, but they’re still great places to stay.

Hotels

Hôtel des Grandes Écoles Not just a terrific three-star hotel (from about $300 per night) but maybe my favorite in the whole city. Most rooms open onto the cobblestone courtyard.

Hôtel des Saints-Pères A reasonably priced find no longer—rooms now start at $500. The top floor Suite (with coronation-worthy bathtub (in photo below) is now up to $950—always a splurge but now even splurgier.

Hôtel de l’Abbaye Impossible not to like this hotel ($360–$900, which feels plucked from the pages of a coffee-table book about Provence. The only thing not to like is that stage-set French can sometimes feel not French at all. Being asked “How’s the burger?” by a guest from New Jersey at the next table does nothing to sustain the Gallic illusion.

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Restaurants

L’Ami Jean Dead-serious modern bistro fare with a delightful mix of 7th Arrondissement weirdos—lawyers, journalists, the occasional celebrity—all there for the food. Because of the tight quarters, a bobo at the next table might inquire about the burger, but in French.

Robert et Louise Open-hearth cooking in a farmhouse setting but so true to rustic French cuisine you won’t care this time that you’ve been photo-shopped in.

People’s Park

Parc des Buttes-Chaumont

The grand parks of Paris are regal and royal in the case of the Tuileries and the Luxembourg Gardens, the latter encircled by statues of the queens of France. But stray into the once working-class 19th arrondissement and you’re in Edith Piaf territory. Instead of monarchs, Buttes-Chaumont proposes faux temples to climb on and lawns for sprawling. And terrific views of Paris from a La Vie en Rose perspective.

Let’s kick the bucket list again next week.

It worked like this: Fly to France, eat, drink, be merry, go home and write something merry about France. Repeat with any tourist board, airline, or hotel willing to host you, aka foot the bill.

I soon realized the potential for addiction while traveling like a CEO on a college student’s budget. I also quickly found my tribe, a gaggle of like-minded editors who, like me, wanted out of our Faustian bargain. We knew we couldn’t quit jobs like ours without withdrawal symptoms. Far worse, we still had to spend a ridiculous amount of time in the office, and that just sucked for vagrant vagabonds like us.

To alleviate the boredom, we composed a spirit-building anthem to our people. We were the Gratis Gang. And proud of it. If some deemed our ditty sophomoric, we dismissed them as killjoys who should move to Russia where it was probably illegal to be sophomoric. Our tuneful paean (to the tune of Ta Rah Rah Boom De Ay) went like this:

The Gratis Gang are we, we only go for free

If we don’t fly first-class, then you can kiss our ass

If you won’t comp our room, they’ll be no tourist boom

If we don’t eat three-star, we don’t know who you are

If you can’t give us booze, we will not print your news

If you need photos too, a simple gift will do.

But even Faust knew when a good thing was going south. About 10 years later, I made the leap to big-time consumer magazines—Travel Leisure, Saveur and Gourmet—where the publisher, not the tourist board, picked up the tab. That nifty shift made the foie gras at La Cirque cheaper for me than the bottomless shrimp platter had been at $11.99.

If fraternizing with colleagues was now more post-grad than sophomore, an unbridled sense of entitlement among so many editors and writers failed to impress—at least on the trades we knew we hadn’t simply arrived to the manner born. Early on, that lofty attitude surfaced one evening at dinner with a well-known food writer whom I had always admired to the point of envy. If ever he felt slighted—by the maître d’ or server on down to the humble kid who sweeps crumbs off the table—there would be hell to pay, and he felt slighted that night. Soon I heard the phrase that would come back to haunt me as he turned to a clumsy sommelier and asked, “Do you know who I am?”

In my mind, he was suddenly just a hack who phoned in his stories to the Springfield Bugle & French Horn. “Do you know who I am?” still echoes, though, in the souls of modern if pee-brained influencers. But you don’t have to be famous to resurrect that refrain. There are far too few publications now, way too many writers, and a lot of tourist boards desperate for coverage with no place to place anything. Any aspiring young writer looking for a boondoggle job can pay back with lightning speed on Instagram by simply posting, “Loved Kazakhstan. Stunningly beautiful. Feels SO safe. And the 🥘 🍲🍝 Yum!”

The Gratis Gang rides again, but this rodeo is all peel-and-eat shrimp to me if not out-and-out chopped liver.

Let’s kick the bucket list again next week.

Soon after popping, I fell in love with Nashville. Throughout my travel career, on such magazines as Gourmet, Saveur, and Travel + Leisure, I have tended to fall in with cities I visit for the first time and usually threaten to move there. “This time I mean it” is always the refrain in my head as I wait to board the plane back to New York. Tucson International was the last scene of a heartfelt goodbye. Now it was Nashville International. I was convinced I really did mean it this time as I began to wonder what ever happened to strictly domestic airports. Do they still exist?

The state of being smitten had nothing to do with country music, which I don’t think about much. Nashville has all those other things I love in a city—grand buildings, grand opera, an ornate old train station saved from demolition by being turned into a hotel. With ornate old stations, the choice is always hotel or parking lot. And great restaurants, which you can get into by booking a few weeks in advance as opposed to never in New York a year in advance.

We got into Druise & Darr, one of 60 worldwide restaurants from Jean-Georges Vongerichten, in the Hermitage Hotel, built in 1910 and now beautifully restored. “Why eat there if it’s not a local spot?” you might ask. The two best reasons are: his food, usually good no matter where you eat it; and to see the men’s room, with its vintage acid-green shoeshine stands that recall a dressier time, for White people at least. A third reason might be to bask in the Beaux Arts splendor of the hotel’s lobby, with chandeliers so high you wish you’d brought binoculars to catch the stained glass and gold leaf on the ceiling from which they hang. The hotel is not far for the Tennessee state capitol, on a hill looking down on history and a sea of construction cranes.

Like Athens, Nashville has a Parthenon, and it’s in much better shape than the one in Greece. That doesn’t mean it’s better than the original—who doesn’t prefer marble to concrete?—but it’s no Disney World fake either. After seeing the seminal 1975 movie, Nashville, in which the Parthenon plays a key role, I was surprised how beautiful it was up close and exhilarated after first spotting it on the long drive through the golf-course greenery of Millennial Park. The monument glowed in soft morning sunlight, its friezes and Ionic columns perfectly in tact. I had imagined some sort of of folly, like the wonderful fake temples that litter Parc de Buttes-Chaumont in Paris. Pas de tout as it turned out.

You can thank New Yorker Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the worst of the late 19th-century robber-barons, for much of this. Totally immersed in give-back mode for breaking St. Pauls’s dictum about money being the root of all evil, he unloaded some of his ill-gotten gains to establish Vanderbilt University in 1873. It would turn Nashville into the Athens of the South. Could a Parthenon be far behind?

Vandy—as it’s called in the same way Philadelphia is always Philly—is on the march these days, racing to become a national institution with outposts from coast to coast. Soon, Vandy will be not just the Harvard of the South but also of the West (San Francisco), the East (New York) and the Way Too Far South (West Palm Beach). With the Florida branch, you should consider a couple of things, including if you’re okay flying in and out of Trump International, the recently rechristened airport there, and how hard it will be to study with all that humidity.

People add a certain je n’ais c’est pais to any metropolis, and Nashville has lots of them. They speak in soft tones that soothe like bath water but without the deep drawl that scare Northerners into thinking they’re being hypnotized, soon to be baptized or sent off to a chain gang.

My friend Ann Patchett also lives in Nashville, where she writes and runs the celebrated bookstore Parnassus. Her friends in New York are always surprised that it’s so big—those high ceilings again but nothing like the Hermitage and mercifully without the surgical lighting that comes with gonzo chandeliers. Neither does it tuck neatly into a kumbaya corner on Bleecker Street with a statue of Joan Baez but in a shopping mall. Parnassus is definitely not the Greenwich Village coffee house a lot of us imagined. You will not find a folk singer strumming a guitar behind the counter at Parnassus. However, If one showed up I doubt if anybody would ask them to leave unless they sang Puff the Magic Dragon.

Once you pass through the doors, Parnassus is a mellow place, with the muted tones of a proper British drawing room where harsh colors are tolerated but not encouraged. Books with bright yellow or pink jackets do their best to blend in. (God knows what’s in them, anyway.) You’d like it to be raining on the day you visit so you could plop down and read for hours without being disturbed. (Remember to buy the book before leaving, though.)

I was surprised to learn after a recent visit that Parnassus Books has 50 employees. You don’t need that many to keep the store going—even with bouncers to kick out the occasional folk singer. Ann also runs a major shipping operation—for books—which she never mentioned when I was her editor at Gourmet. The key to all this functioning is Sarah Arnold, the Marketing and Communications Director. Before I met her, I thought her job was simply to ❤️ my comments on Instagram. Much, much bigger than that, we now know.

Cynthia and Ann both have dogs. Ann once told me I could say anything I wanted to about her but I dare not criticize Nemo. Not ever. Cynthia also has a dog, a new puppy, Cara Mia, who stole my heart, which is back in Nashville like Tony Bennett’s is riding a cable car in San Francisco. Ann would surely take umbrage if anyone said anything bad about Nemo, possibly going so far as to bop them on the head with a frozen leg of lamb. Cynthia is a good cook and might get by with it. Ann is not, but I imagine anyone could shove a leg of lamb into the oven pronto to keep from going to jail.

Cynthia lives in an area called 12 South, a hip neighborhood where young women wear short skirts with cowboy boots and young men wear cowboy boots with shorts but never skirts.

Ann was honored last month in New York at the PEN America Literary Gala. I wish the Nashville city council had sponsored a table at the event for Kick the Bucket List. In exchange, I would have provided some help with tourist promotion. I already have the slogan for a new campaign: “It’s opera, not opry, and we got both.”

Nashville calls itself a blue-dot city in a red state. On my next visit, I would like to meet State Representative Justin Jones, who along with Representative Justin J. Pearson from Memphis, got kicked out of the a house for using megaphones inside the chamber to protest the state’s lax gun laws. Another representative, Gloria Johnson from Knoxville, got reprimanded, too, but narrowly missed being evicted. I would invite the Tennessee Three, as they’re known, to lunch at the Yellow Table Café where we could chat about politics over buckwheat galettes at this dollhouse of a charming boîte—Pee Wee’s Playhouse but with better taste and silent furniture.

Anna Watson Carl learned to craft crêpes from a master tutor in Paris. She spend some time with food magazines in New York before returning to her native Nashville to open Yellow Table in East—not East This or East That, just East—a large swath of soft hills across the Cumberland River that feels like the sleepy neighborhood every kid dreams of growing up in. Except it isn’t sleepy anymore, although gentrification has left most of the put-your-feet-up porches in tact on the original Craftman-like bungalows.

Nashville might be my Goldilocks city, not too big like New York and Los Angeles but not so small that it doesn’t have a very glamorous industry to complain about. The city is heading for new heights now, with 60,000-seat new Nissan Stadium opening next year inside a humongous box with luxury boxes inside and terraces outside that drip down the facade. You bet it could host the Super Bowl. It replaces old Nissan Stadium, an open-air arena next door on the river with the old-fashioned appeal of homecoming weekend. The international airport, a jewel of maneuverable un-bigness, will double in size over the next few years.

The best way to prepare for a trip to Nashville is to watch Nashville. it’s no spoiler to say the Parthenon plays a major role in the Robert Altman film, which was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture but ended up with only one, for Best Original Song, which seems appropriate. It’s a bit of a spoiler to say there will be blood by the end of the film and a great big one to mention that some of it gets on the Parthenon. Watch the film anyway, just to see what Nashville looked like in the mid-1970s, starting with footage of tantalizingly domestic Metro Airport.

Restaurants I wish were on my block back home

I couldn’t make it to all the good places, but here are the ones I’d go back to each visit.

City House Lively, fun, and best pizza ever. If the crust were any thinner you’d be eating just a plate full of toppings. Open-kitchen main room lively-to-loud, but restaurant has cozy outposts for best of both worlds.

Iggy’s Hip crowd, and I think it’s Italian, so says a dish of Goat Cheese Gnocchi alla Vodka Sauce Liuzzi with burrata, basil, and breadcrumbs. But what to make of Maine peekytoe crab, sea urchin butter, Japanese red chiles, yuzu, and roasted seaweed?

Lockeland Table In my fantasy, I live upstairs of this early trend-setter, popping down at mealtime for Nicoletto's pappardelle or red Thai curry steamed PEI mussels. Everybody knows my name at this clubby spot, and I never go to the airport again.

Let’s kick the bucket list again next week.

But do I even have to do that?

Big crowds reportedly make it hard to get close to the Mask of Tutankhamun, 25 pounds of gold and one of the museum’s most prized possessions. Big crowds blocking the Mona Lisa on my first trip to Europe, right after college, are what turned me off to bucket-list mentality in the first place, leading to general animosity later about the whole idea of must-see sights. Didn’t the gawkers understand that there were 7,581 (more or less) other paintings in the Louvre? In Cairo, the good news is that skipping the line shouldn’t be hard if you’re can envisage a sparkly mask weighing as much as two medium-size bowling balls.

The Pyramids happen to be right next door to the museum if you wanted to grab a sneak peek, but that’s not the point, which is that bucket-list culture can be not just annoying but downright evil in its ability to employ the “do” verb so flippantly. “We did the south of France,“ you say. Now you might do the Amalfi Coast, hoping it will remind you of the south of France while not actually being it. Perhaps you’re flirting with a new adventure. To do or not to do Fiji? We could all learn from the upper-crust Victorians after their Grand Tour. They understood buckets have a bottom and that the list is not infinite. “See Naples and die” meant just that: Go back to England and stay there—nothing left to see or do—and, yes, die if you can’t stop talking about your trip

For most of my career as a travel editor on magazines like Gourmet, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, I had a potential bucket deeper than the Atlantic at high tide. It started at my first job on a travel-trade magazine, in 1977, when my editor asked after only three days on the job, “Can you go to Puerto Rico to cover a tourism conference?” I knew the new job would soon send me packing—at previous jobs “travel” meant to the men’s room and back—but when the time came I was blown away. Imagine the giddy delight when, a few weeks later, I was offered a seat on a flight to Paris, an expense-paid bacchanal followed by intense jet lag and a killer hangover. I have only thrown up in two airports, one of them Orly. (All about LAX some other time.)

After a while, I got picky. Didn’t like press trips anymore nor did I care to see Paris again like a D-Lister at an Oscar party. I was going for bigger things: Angkor Wat or bust. After 20+ years, I got myself to Cambodia on a paid ticket from the late great Gourmet magazine.

Cambodia also came with a midnight ride through Phnom Penh on the back of an American ex-pat’s motorcycle headed way out of town to go clubbing in an open-air jungle pavilion where joints were freely passed. I kept thinking, “Next stop: Killing Fields.” but the next morning brought instead a tour of a Vietnam-era prison for decadent intellectuals, like teachers and journalists, and possibly me had I known at the time what my profession was. I also bought some pretty pillows at the silk market like a good tourist.

After my banquet in Cambodia, other places began to taste like eat-at-seat airline food. I was now a Method traveler looking for Motivation. If these days it’s fashionable to base trips on a quest for chefs, gurus, and ancestors, why shouldn’t I zero in on Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen, since architecture, politics, and TV are a few of my favorite things. I first learned about the complex of government buildings from a Danish foreign-exchange student in high school; the blanks were filled in much later by the Netflix hit Borgen, about a mild-mannered backbencher who ends up Denmark’s first female prime minister. Throw in still-reigning 85-year-old Queen Margrethe II—half elegant monarch, half feisty soccer thug— and you’ve put together quite a travel package to Denmark.

A fascination with headquarters of all kinds was borne early from a grammar-school field trip to the Anheuser-Busch brewery, not far from the brick levee on the Mississippi where my hometown St. Louis was founded. While most friends I acquired after moving to New York followed Michelin stars, I kept counting bottle caps, eventually ending up at Campari outside Milan, a bottling plant that looks more like a country estate waiting for a Dwell photographer than a plant of any kind. That’s because it was an estate, the home of father and son Davide and Guido Campari, who once lived in a villa and built the Art Nouveau factory in 1904 on the same manicured grounds.

In between came Heineken in Amsterdam; Harp in Dublin; Anchor Steam in San Francisco, a lovely craft brewery that closed only three years ago; and non-alcoholic Evian in the eponymous (plus “-les-Bains”) town on the French side of Lake Geneva, an enormous building, so clean and bright it could have been the setting for Hôpital Général.

Somewhere between the Mississippi River and Lake Geneva, I lost my thirst for bottling plants as inspiration. But I never buckled under the weight of bucket lists generated by peer pressure. To this day, I stand with Lesley Gore, who in her 1963 pop classic, You Don’t Own Me, sang “don’t tell me where to go and don’t tell me what to see …” or something like that.

Let’s kick the Bucket List again next week.

There’s nothing wrong with a travel wish-list. Far from it. That’s how you create memories to last a lifetime, longer than a box of Costco popcorn packs. So, don’t kick your bucket list. Rewrite it. I can help with Kick the Bucket List, a cornucopia of fresh ideas on where to go and what to see far from the clutches of stuffy guides and overstuffed influencers.

Get the ball rolling by calling up the everyday things you love. Dig deeper and turn those passions into travel. If you’re a film buff who’s seen Casablanca a dozen times, no need to run off to Paris to prove the Eiffel Tower’s still there. Instead, consider the Musée Lumière in Lyon, which celebrates the birth of French film in the middle of a glorious if under-appreciated European city.

I’ll take it from there. Kick the Bucket List will not only spell out why the museum is worth the trip but also share a list of the city’s best bouchons, those mom-and-pop bistros adored by toute La France. Nobody knows them better than Alexander Lobrano, the ultimate authority on that city and everything French whom I worked with throughout my career on magazines such as Gourmet, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure. (Check out his Hungry for Paris and France website.)

I’ve been to many charming places and seen most of the world’s legendary sights but am no longer interested in Alpine villages where people yodel from morning to night just to get through the day. Don’t need to stay in another overwater bungalow catering to honeymooners who’ll soon divorce. The Taj Mahal? Nice, but just because Princess Diana sat on it doesn‘t mean we have to. Agra? Let’s skip it.

What should be at the top of your list? I nominate the American Embassy in London, a compound that kindles a Ken Burnsian style patriotism with none of the ugly baggage of today’s macho man politics. You won‘t soon forget the Cube, as it’s called, a jewel-box confection with no hint of pomposity, no dead-before-you-make-it-up-the-steps-to-die-under-Corinthian-columns kind of place. You can’t forget it either, at least if you’re a fan of The Diplomat, Slow Horses, The Agent, Black Doves and a slew of other hit shows currently streaming and wrapping new seasons. The Cube is the star of them all. Can you take a tour? Of course not, but you can stare all day at the baubles, bangles, and bright shiny beads from an ogle-worthy path along the Thames that locals also love.

Luxe lodging for less: My favoritre boutique hotel is in the poshest part of town but half the price of others in the area. Rooms are tiny but for $40 more per night you get the penthouse, which comes with a terrace big enough to host a discreet tailgate party, maybe for Wimbledon weekend. You can even spot the Embassy if you squint.

Save for trivia night: America’s first embassy opened in 1785, two years after the British surrender at Yorktown. Although new buildings replaced it over the years, the U.S. diplomatic seat remained on London’s Grosvenor Square until 2010 when it moved to its current quarters south of the Thames.

Some headquarters might languish on my own Bucket List, if I had one, like Buffalo Central Terminal. A train station attached to an Art Deco skyscraper, it was once a stop for the legendary 20th Century Limited on its run between New York and Chicago. Buffalo’s station is in the midst of an overhaul, and I need to get there soon to take a look around, even if that means all-aboard Amtrak. The terminal needs money. I chipped in; you can too.

P.S. Fans of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest can thrill to Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint bustling along a red carpet—to Hell with the one in Hollywood—once laid down for Pullman passengers boarding at Grand Central in New York.

My posts won’t be all embassies and depots all the time. There’s lots of other stuff to see. I love gravesites, so I might track down the final resting places of some legendary figures—already tipped a caretaker at Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires to find the unmarked mausoleum of Eva Perón. Where might Ghengis and Attila be hiding? Won’t be all despots, either. Birthplaces, too. Maybe I’ll seek out the childhood home of my heroic Camry—120,000 miles and still kicking—apparently an automotive theme park called Toyota City stranded between Tokyo and Kyoto.

The blog won’t be all headquarters all the time either. I’ll also invade the Empire of the Elite, exposing what I know of the privileged world of travel writing and special access. There’s more going on behind the curtain than most people realize. Some of the tales are sordid, most are fun. I’ll tell them all.

Out with the old bucket list, then. In with the new. Let’s Kick the Bucket List for real next week.