Hello Reader,

🧭 Where in the World?

Greetings from Valencia. We’ve spent much of the last couple weeks with family, celebrating a birthday, catching up with three grandkids, and simply enjoying the time together. For kids and adults, Valencia’s parks, playgrounds, botanic gardens, and City of Arts and Sciences are all inviting places for walks. For adults, Valencia is a real foodie town, and we’re now in the midst of its annual Cuina Oberta food festival, sort of a Restaurant Week concept promoting dozens of food experiences (learning about tiger nut cultivation and horchata production, for example) and special fixed-menu offerings at over 80 restaurants.

The two of us detoured on a one-day tour of Cabanyal, the seaside district that began as a separate fishing village, became a beach-and-spa getaway, and is now one of Valencia’s coolest neighborhoods. (It survived a plan to bulldoze a road through it to the sea only because residents fought back for years.) The place and its luminous atmosphere are captured in many of Joaquín Sorolla’s paintings. Our full story, with photos, is coming soon.

🛫 Get Going: A Webinar We Recommend For You

• Travel Past 50’s Free Webinar: Study Abroad for Adults

Please join us Thursday, November 12, for our webinar conversation about study abroad for adults.

Whether your interests are in language, literature, history, art, science, or cuisine – or all of the above – you can find wonderful courses to suit you. We’re here to answer your questions and chat about the opportunities that will inspire your next trip.

We will be joined by guests Carrie Angoff (Elective Study Abroad) and Cécile Balavoine (instructor for Elective’s “Women in Paris” and professor at Columbia University’s Reid Hall, Paris).

It’s free. Come with questions, and maybe leave with your next trip. Thursday, November 12, 1 p.m. ET (Noon CT, 10 a.m. PT). We'll be joining from Valencia, where it’ll be 7 p.m.

Register HERE.

• For info on traveling with us to Andalucía in March 2027, visit our Travel Past 50 Tour Page.​

✏️ Our Latest Post

Along with our visit to Palermo, we took a few days to continue exploring Sicily, one of which was spent touring the stunning Villa Romana del Casale. The Villa was probably the country estate of a Roman emperor, and is filled with hundreds of colorful floor mosaics that definitely deserve an extended visit. Combine that visit with a stop in Morgantina to see 2200-year-old Greek ruins, and also the nearby Aidone Archaeological Museum for artifacts from the area and you get a one-day primer on the rich history of ancient Sicily. The Aidone Museum is particularly notable because it houses many artifacts that were once looted from Italy and ended up in American museums such as the Getty in Los Angeles and the Met in New York. Those artifacts have been returned to their rightful home. Read about our visit to the Villa here.

🗞️ Travel News From Around the Web

• While we use Booking.com a lot for our hotel bookings, we always make sure by checking every way we can that the booking is legitimate. If there's any doubt at all, we make sure by communicating directly with the hotel. (We almost never use Airbnb anymore for this very reason – too many sketchy listings.) The EU is currently investigating Booking.com because, the EU regulators say, Booking is not doing a good enough job of vetting their listings. Turns out no platform gets a free pass. As always, we recommend doing your own research.
• And speaking of hotel bookings, especially in Europe which has much better consumer protection than the US, you should definitely book direct if you're looking for the best rate. Expedia, which controls an obscene percentage of online hotel bookings, has a "parity clause" in its contract with hotels in the US that keeps the hotels from lowering rates to direct bookers. Book direct in the countries where Expedia's parity clause is prohibited, and the hotel will save 15-25 percent commission, and they'll pass along a portion of that to you. Again, only in Europe and a few other countries, so far. But, could it be coming to the US? Who knows.
• This should be a no-brainer. Don't ever post a photo of a boarding pass or other travel documents on social media. If you do, you're opening yourself up to having your travel arrangements trashed, or worse, having your entire identity stolen. We prefer to celebrate our travels after we get home. It's safer.
• We always love a good photo contest, and this one's unique: Nikon Small World 2026 Photomicrography Competition. Some fascinating looks at stuff you'll never see with the naked eye.

Sponsors, like this one below, help keep our newsletter and blog free to read. And we don't accept sponsorships from brands we don't use ourselves. Check out 1440's daily news summary. We subscribe for that morning news brief that saves us a lot of clicking and scrolling.

✈️ Points and Miles News

• If you're like us, and are sometimes too confused or don't have enough time to figure out how to use your points and miles, Daily Drop Pro Limited lets you search for flights using points or cash, so you can compare your options and find opportunities to put your rewards to work. It's one of the places we usually start our airfare search, so we can recommend it as one of the tools you can use to start planning your next adventure – and it's FREE to get started. Check it out here.

📖 What We're Reading

Kris just finished reading Wild Things: A Trans-Glam-Punk-Rock Love Story, by Lynette Reini-Grandell. She especially enjoyed observing all the ways in which Lynette’s past decades have intersected with our own – media, music, and Minnesota being constant companions.

Tom has almost finished Madame Bovary and is marvelling at the writing of Gustave Flaubert and appreciative of the artful translation by Lydia Davis. He's also wondering what took him so long to finally get around to reading it. Next on his list, for his book club, is The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, by Brady Udall.

Find most of our recommendations at our Amazon book shop — or, if you prefer supporting independent booksellers, Bookshop.org is excellent. Art book lovers: Taschen's catalog is a rabbit hole worth falling into.

If you buy a book through our links, we make a small commission at no additional cost to you.

❝Travel Quote of the Week❞

Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac? – George Carlin

See our list of amusing, insightful, and pithy travel quotes here.

Read past editions of our newsletter here.

If you're enjoying what you're reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here.

Have any feedback? Ideas for future posts or email topics? We'd love to hear from you. Email us at feedback@travelpast50.com.

Happy travels,

Kris and Tom

Tom Bartel and Kristin Henning ​Travel Past 50​ Connect with us on Facebook and Instagram. Join our Facebook community.

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