I was scheduled to be in Newport for a week on business but the trip wound up being unexpectedly extended into a second week. I used the opportunity to do a little bit of sightseeing on the weekend. Besides walking about 10 miles, I took tours of two mansions (The Breakers & Marble House), toured the Breaker’s stables & carriage house, walked part of the Cliff Walk and did some shopping. If you have to unexpectedly get stuck somewhere, Newport is a good choice!

Check out the photos here.

I just added 3 new photo albums. They are all from my trip to Western Maryland and West Virginia. We visited the Spruce Forest Artisan Village & Penn Alps restaurant. The bulk of our trip was spent in Frostburg & Cumberland, where we took a ride on the Western maryland Scenic Railroad. On the way home we spent 2 days in Charles Town and Harper’s Ferry. It was a fun couple of days. It was nice to send time in some very old, very small towns for a change and Harper’s Ferry National Historical Park is one of the most interesting NPS sites I’ve been to.

I post hundreds of photos on the site and usually don’t know if they are getting noticed by anyone or not. However, lately, besides all of the dozens of contacts I get regarding my genealogy work, I’ve been seeing more comments on my photos. It makes me glad that I take the time to post them. A pro photographer in Virginia commented on my Hampton Roads photos, a model builder used one of my photos as reference for a model and last week I granted license for use of one of my photos by a company in a case study. You can check that out at Lencore.com.

If you are interested in acquiring or licensing any of my photos, please feel free to get in touch with me.

I finally posted my photos from my week in Jacksonville, Florida. As i say on the photo album page, I spent most of the week indoors at a conference, but did get outside to take a few quick photos.

Check them out here.

Over the past few days you probably have seen posts that consist of any “tweets” I’ve posted to twittered on a given day. Obviously, this means I’ve caught up with the bandwagon and joined Twitter. You can find me at twitter.com/megatti. I got the idea to have my tweets automatically cross posted to my blog from Leo Laporte. Like him, I don’t like the idea having anything I create hosted solely on a service that I don’t control. So, the result is that you can catch up with my tweets on twitter, but you can also check them out on my blog. That way they’re all saved for posterity. (Don’t take that to mean that you can expect anything profound from me! )

Happy New Year! Here’s to a happy, healthy and prosperous year! I’ll be spending today recovering from all the cooking and eating I did yesterday and watching the mummers parade. Hopefully, the parade will go on again next year despite the city’s budget problems.

I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas!

When I think of Christmas it conjures images of small towns with rows of little stores selling gifts in Germany. OK, so maybe not the Germany part. However, a really cool Christmas tradition does come from Germany. It’s the Chriskindlmarkt. Bethlehem, PA (a.k.a. Christmas City) puts on a huge one every year. I finally got a chance to go to it this year. It was a fun day of shopping and some sightseeing.

Then i heard Philadelphia was putting on one of their own at City Hall. It was called the Philadelphia Christmas Village. While not as big it will hopefully be an annual event because it has real potential.

Check out my photos from Bethlehem and then take a look at my photos of Philadelphia.

I finally found time to go on another covered bridge tour. If you haven’t seen my previous photos from the Lehigh Valley, you can check them out here. Then go check out my newest photos from the covered bridges of Berks County. I’m sure they aren’t the last ones you’ll see posted.

The photos also include some pictures of the Reading area including the William Penn Memorial Fire Tower and Pagoda.

You’ve heard and seen the months of annoying campaign ads. You’ve endured constant polling calls. Now it’s your turn to impact the election. Whether you’re voting for McCain or Obama, just make sure you vote!

I won’t tell you who I’m voting for in about 6 hours when the polls open, but if you look closely at this post, I think you’ll figure it out.

It doesn’t seem at all possible that more than 6 months have passed since the death of my father. I’ve created memorial pages on my genealogy site for other family members, but I felt like I should make something more substantial for my Dad. What started out as a page on my family tree site has slowly evolved into emilgatti.com.

Please feel free to visit and take a look at the photos, stories, biography, etc. Then if you have anything you’d like to add about my Dad, please submit it by using the links on the site. I know that there are more stories and details to be added, but I rely on the the people who know them to share them.

Go to www.emilgatti.com for info.

I just posted some photos taken on a weekend in New Haven Connecticut. We stayed in New Haven and made side trips to Mohegan Sun, Foxwoods and Olde Mistick Village. Our room at the Omni had a spectacular view of the Yale University campus.

On the Fourth of July, we stopped at Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria for lunch. They originated New Haven style pizza. That was fun. We also tried to go to Louis Lunch, but they were closed for the holiday, so we didn’t get to taste a burger from the place that allegedly invented the hamburger.

Enjoy the photos right here.

Last month I was lucky enough to get to spend some time in the Florida panhandle. We also took a side trip to Biloxi, Mississippi with a stop in Mobile, Alabama. I’ve finally gone throught the hundreds of photos I took and put some of them online.

Some of the highlights are the beaches of Fort Walton Beach, Destin and Panama City Beach, dolphins in Destin, my cousin’s house in Shalimar, the casinos of Biloxi and much more!

View the photos right here!

A few posts ago I promised a brief review of the restaurant that I went to in Lancaster last weekend. The restaurant was an Amish buffet called The Family Cupboard. You can also order meals, but we went for the buffet. Most buffets are basically a smorgasbord of mediocre food. We were leery that this would be the same. We had picked it out randomly from the Internet.

When we walked in and saw that there was a fair number of Amish/Mennonite folks eating there, we became more confident that the food would be good. As it turns out, it was really good. I went back for three plates plus dessert. There was a delicious meatloaf, buttered noodles that were clearly homemade and definately from a PA Dutch/German recipe. These sat alongside glazed ham, stuffing and seafood, pasta lima beans and on and on. The salad bar was your usual salad bar. I was glad to see it was all fresh and crispy, but what really made it special was a delicious house dressing.

For dessert, there was Turkey Hill ice cream as well as an assortment of desserts, but but what really caught my attention was the pies. I had a piece of pecan pie (my favorite) which wasn’t so great, but I went back for another piece and selected shoo-fly pie. It was delicious!

You can view their menu and get directions at FamilyCupboard.com.

In an attempt to slowly start trying to get caught up with life, I’ve started posting stuff on eBay again. Check out what I’m selling and feel free to bid on something at members.ebay.com/aboutme/michaelgatti.