Daytona Beach in Florida

30 September 2013 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  6 minutes

Welcome to Daytona Beach! © Dan Petreikis/cc-by-sa-3.0

Welcome to Daytona Beach! © Dan Petreikis/cc-by-sa-3.0

Daytona Beach is a city in Volusia County, Florida. The city is located approximately 51 miles (82.1 km) northeast of Orlando, 86 miles (138.4 km) southeast of Jacksonville, and 242 miles (389.5 km) northwest of Miami. The city has a population of 61,000. It is a principal city of the Deltona–Daytona Beach–Ormond Beach, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area, which was home to 495,000 people in 2010. Daytona Beach is also a principal city of the Surf Coast/Fun Coast region of Florida.   read more…

Built as Fast Breeder nuclear reactor, operated as an amusement park: The Wunderland Kalkar

28 September 2013 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  3 minutes

Cooling tower used as climbing wall © Koetjuh

Cooling tower used as climbing wall © Koetjuh

Wunderland Kalkar is an amusement park in North Rhine-Westphalia, just north of Düsseldorf. It is built on the former site of SNR-300, a nuclear power plant that never went online because of construction problems and protests. The park was constructed by Dutch entrepreneuer Hennie van der Most, who purchased the site. Wunderland Kalkar receives around 600,000 visitors each year.   read more…

Altes Land, the largest contiguous fruit-producing region in Central Europe

28 September 2013 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, Hamburg Reading Time:  6 minutes

Steinkirchen © Christoph Matthias Siebenborn/cc-by-sa-3.0

Steinkirchen © Christoph Matthias Siebenborn/cc-by-sa-3.0

Altes Land is an area of reclaimed marshland straddling parts of Lower Saxony and Hamburg. The region is situated downstream from Hamburg on the southwestern riverside of the Elbe around the towns of Stade, Buxtehude, Jork and Lühe. In Hamburg it includes the quarters of Neuenfelde, Cranz, Francop and Finkenwerder.   read more…

Cheddar in southwest England

26 September 2013 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  6 minutes

Aerial view of Cheddar Gorge © Adrian Pingstone

Aerial view of Cheddar Gorge © Adrian Pingstone

Cheddar is a large village and civil parish in the Sedgemoor district of the English county of Somerset. It is situated on the southern edge of the Mendip Hills, 9 miles (14 km) north-west of Wells. The civil parish includes the hamlets of Nyland and Bradley Cross. The village, which has its own parish council, has a population of 5,093 and the parish has an acreage of 8,592 acres (3,477.1 ha)   read more…

Tehran, economical, scientific and cultural center of Iran

25 September 2013 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  17 minutes

Tehran Towers and buildings in the northern part of Tehran with the Alborz mountains © Shervan Karim/cc-by-sa-3.0

Tehran Towers and buildings in the northern part of Tehran with the Alborz mountains © Shervan Karim/cc-by-sa-3.0

Tehran is the capital of Iran and Tehran Province. With a population of about 8,800,000 and about 15 million metropolitan area, it is Iran’s largest city and urban area, and one of the largest cities in Western Asia.   read more…

Büsingen on the Upper Rhine

24 September 2013 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  6 minutes

Büsingen am Hochrhein © Prekario

Büsingen am Hochrhein © Prekario

Büsingen am Hochrhein, commonly known as Büsingen, is a German town (7.62 km2 or 2.94 sq mi) entirely surrounded by the Swiss canton of Schaffhausen and, south across the Rhine, by the Swiss cantons of Zürich and Thurgau. It has a population of about 1,450 inhabitants. Since the early 19th century, the town has been separated from the rest of Germany by a narrow strip of land (at its narrowest, about 700 m wide) containing the Swiss village of Dörflingen.   read more…

The Imperial War Museum

21 September 2013 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, London, Museums, Exhibitions Reading Time:  6 minutes

Imperial War Museum, London - Atrium © IxK85/cc-by-sa-3.0

Imperial War Museum, London – Atrium © IxK85/cc-by-sa-3.0

Imperial War Museums (IWM) is a British national museum organisation with branches at five locations in England, three of which are in London. Founded as the Imperial War Museum in 1917, the museum was intended to record the civil and military war effort and sacrifice of Britain and its Empire during the First World War. The museum’s remit has since expanded to include all conflicts in which British or Commonwealth forces have been involved since 1914. As of 2012, the museum aims ‘to provide for, and to encourage, the study and understanding of the history of modern war and “wartime experience”.   read more…

Pauillac en Médoc

21 September 2013 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, Bon appétit Reading Time:  6 minutes

Château Batailley © CGC 1855

Château Batailley © CGC 1855

Pauillac is a commune in the Gironde department, Aquitaine, Médoc region in southwestern France close to Bordeaux. The town of Pauillac is the largest in the Médoc, with a population of over 5000. Pauillac is somewhat more elevated than the surrounding area, rising to a peak of nearly 30 metres above sea-level in the region of Château Pontet-Canet. The soil is gravelly, as with most of the Haut-Médoc. The forest to the west shelters the vines from the Atlantic winds.   read more…

Cape Trafalgar in Spain

19 September 2013 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  5 minutes

Cape Trafalgar © JMSE

Cape Trafalgar © JMSE

Cape Trafalgar (Spanish: Cabo Trafalgar) is a headland in the Province of Cádiz in the south-west of Spain, approximately 40 km southeast of the provincial capital Cádiz. It lies on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, northwest of the Strait of Gibraltar. The International Hydrographic Organization defines the Western limit of the strait as a line that joins Cape Trafalgar to the North to Cape Spartel to the South. The name is of Arabic origin, with the modern pronunciation being a modification of “Tarf al-Gharb” meaning “Western Cape” or “Cape of the West”.   read more…

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