The Start of Leg 2: Surreal Times in Sydney, Australia
What the earth looks like betweenAuckland and Sydney. I flew into Sydney, Australia from Auckland on my birthday, June 14. When I got off the plane and came out of customs there was a camera crew waiting with my friend Kate standing behind them. When Kate told me she was going to try to get […]
First Pie Class of the World Piece Journey: New Zealand
My first pie class of the World Piece tour was in Napier, New Zealand. Brett Zimmerman (aka Mr. Z), a friend of Louise Watts (my host Grace’s daughter), is a cooking teacher at a local college. (College in NZ is high school in US terms.) Mr. Z offered use of his classroom — 6 large […]
Mad Apples at The Yummy Fruit Company
Here’s a lesson in trust. For most of my stops on the World Piece tour I have quite a few things planned, scheduled and confirmed on the calendar. For New Zealand, however, my first stop of my three-month journey, I left things a bit, shall we say, loose. I knew I wanted to teach a […]
A Few New Zealand Pie Recipes
New Zealand gas stations don’t just sell fuel for cars. The pie display the BP gas station — or petrol station as they say in NZ. If there is one thing I’ve learned on my World Piece journey so far, it’s that New Zealand loves pie. Kiwis (as New Zealanders are affectionately called) love pie […]
World Piece: Day One, Arriving in New Zealand
In all my years of traveling internationally, I have never had such a hard time saying goodbye to my parents. They have been driving me to the airport since my first trip overseas 30 years ago. I have always traveled solo and regardless of where I was traveling to — Europe, Thailand, Kenya — I […]
World Piece Planning: Answers to Your FAQs
It’s 6AM and I am sitting in the guest bed at my parents’ apartment in Redondo Beach, California. They are still asleep but I am wide awake. I still have a lot to do before I leave U.S. soil tomorrow. One of the things I wanted to do before jetting off (for my first stop […]
Planning, Packing and Paring Down: Does It Spark Joy?
I leave on my round-the-world trip one month from today (though it really begins in just 2-½ weeks with my drive to Iowa to drop off my dog Jack at “summer camp.”) I am excited, yes, but I am also bogged down in planning and packing. And neither of those things are the most enjoyable […]
WORLD PIECE: Announcing my global pie-making mission!
The Concept On June 2nd, I will be embarking on a round-the-world journey I’m calling “World Piece.” I came up with this idea after writing my memoir, “Making Piece: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Pie,” as a way to extend the theme of making and sharing pie with others to make the world a […]
Finding Solace in Solitaire
I’ve never been a fan of card games. It’s just not my thing to sit at a table and dole out little rectangular pieces of coated paper with numbers and symbols and faces of royalty printed on them. It seems pointless, a waste of precious time that could be—should be—spent doing something productive, like exercising […]