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Lesley Peterson is a Toronto-based blogger tripping on travel, art, culture, museums, cities and legendary landscapes. Catch her on Twitter as @culturetripper or contact her at lesley@culturetripper.com. All content by Lesley Peterson copyright © 2009 - Until the Present. All photos by Lesley Peterson except where other credit noted.
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Life lessons from the Papas: Hemingway Days, Key West
It’s a sea of red berets outside Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West, Florida, headquarters of the Ernest Hemingway Look-Alike Society and their annual running of the bulls. A bwip-wip from a motorcycle escort parts the crowd and, to the tune of Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy), the fist-pumping Papas roll out. Earlier that day, […]
Exploring culture, food, and Route 66 fun in Albuquerque, New Mexico
The drum is a heartbeat, faster than mine. Apache Crown dancers pace the circle, bodies painted, pine boughs bobbing at their hips, bells the size of tangerines adding an edgy jangle. With cotton sacking disguising their human features, feathers dangling from where their eyes should be, the dancers are eerie, otherworldly. My heartrate rises to […]
14.07.2012 · Filled under: Architecture, Destination Guides, Food, Legendary Landscapes, New Mexico · Tags: CITIES, HISTORY, road trip!
Taking the 506 streetcar to little India
Toronto’s 506 Carlton streetcar is one of the best sightseeing bargains in the city, rambling past many of Toronto’s most colourful neighborhoods – Cabbagetown, Kensington Market, the original Little Italy and two separate ‘Chinatowns’ – on its way to and from its western terminus at High Park. A few days ago I hopped on the […]
Santa Fe for culture trippers
There’s a kind of hush over Santa Fe, New Mexico, a hush quite remarkable for a UNESCO Creative City and the third-largest art market in the U.S. (after New York and Los Angeles). Located at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains at an elevation of 7,000 feet, the color and beauty of New Mexico’s […]
29.06.2012 · Filled under: Architecture, Art, Destination Guides, New Mexico · Tags: CITIES, museums
Inn on the Alameda, Santa Fe, New Mexico
The scent of spring lilacs drifts in from the patio. The puff of breeze ruffles the maps and brochures beside me on the bed. Warm evening sun slants into our room at Inn on the Alameda, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Two hours earlier, Pat and I had driven the speed limit to get to Santa […]
Postcards from New Mexico
Once upon a time I spun a globe and declared to my sisters that I would go wherever my finger landed. It landed on Albuquerque which, at the age of ten, I couldn’t even pronounce. Though I did pass through New Mexico on a solo trip around the U.S. in my early twenties, I wasn’t […]
16.05.2012 · Filled under: Architecture, Legendary Landscapes, New Mexico, Spirituality · Tags: Artists, road trip!
The colour of the goddess
The motorcycle cop waves us down, swings his leg off his bike. My heart kicks a beat. In all the times Pat and I have visited Cuba, we’ve never been stopped at any of the seemingly random highway checkpoints. Heat shimmers off the road as the officer approaches our car. The road can’t be flooded […]
Cherry blossoms in Toronto
Of all the beautiful things that grow better with age, the magnificent Somei-Yoshino cherry trees in Toronto’s High Park are some of the best. The donation of blossoming cherry trees, or sakura, has been a project of the Japanese Consulate in Toronto for years. With the support of private donors, the consulate’s Sakura Project has planted […]
Canucks, inukshuks and Cuba
Waves crash, palms blow, vultures wheel, clouds unspool. Here on the Costa Morena, the rugged coast west of Santiago de Cuba, all nature salsas in the wind. Flopped under a seagrape, sunburnt, pants torn, I suddenly get Van Gogh. Vincent never made it to Cuba but he would have known how to paint it: all […]
Are you a right-brained traveler?
I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about being lefthanded while growing up. Raised in a house full of righthanders, I simply adapted to unfriendly can openers and blister-causing scissors and got on with life. Life as a lefty, though, meant drawing a certain amount of flack. And flack is fuel for stubborn individualism. For […]