A Guide To A Good Life, Places

The Flagler Museum – Part 2

This is an article continued from Part 1, containing photos from the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum in West Palm Beach, Florida. Part 1 featured photos from the exterior, the Grand Hall, the Drawing Room, the West Room, the Courtyard and the hallways. Now let’s go inside the rooms, to see how the New York firm of Pottier & Stymus did things in there.

Here’s the Dining Room, with its richly ornamented walls and ceiling. It’s a place that looks as if you won’t get up hungry from the table. Indeed, it looks as if you’ll be getting several courses every time you sit down.

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A Guide To A Good Life, Places

The Flagler Museum – Part 1

On a sliver of land across Lake Worth, between Florida and the Atlantic Ocean, sits one of America’s most famous historic homes and Florida’s first museum: Whitehall — Henry M. Flagler’s Florida home, and a gift to his wife, Mary Lily Kenan Flagler.

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Places

A night in Frankfurt

Back in September of 2008, we were stranded in Frankfurt because of negligence on the part of United Airlines, who did not properly coordinate the transfer of passengers from a connecting Lufthansa flight. The whole ordeal is a nasty mess I’d rather forget. One bright spot in that whole filthy experience is that we got to spend a beautiful evening in Frankfurt, and I took the photos you see below.

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It was a case of making lemonade out of the lemons we’d been dealt. We had to find a hotel, which we did, by ourselves, and it was a really nice one too, a Holiday Inn about 7 minutes from the airport. After a nice, hot shower to wash off the nastiness we’d just experienced, we headed downtown, where we were treated to some very beautiful architecture and gorgeous river vistas.

We had dinner and walked for a few hours on the shore of the Main River, cris-crossing from one side to the other via the many bridges that span it. I took photos with my 50mm f/1.4 lens, which works great at night due to its large aperture.

Sometime between 11 pm and midnight, we got back to the hotel and had a wonderful night’s rest. Those beds were the most comfortable beds we’ve ever slept in. I don’t know what brand they were, and what they used in the mattresses and the comforters, but we’d have loved to sleep a few more nights on them. My wife still raves about them.

In the morning, breakfast awaited, after which we prepared ourselves mentally for some more nastiness from United (we weren’t let down) and the long flight back to the US.

There are more photos from Frankfurt in my photo catalog. And you’ll also see some photos from Munich in there.

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Events

Organ concert at Biserica Sf. Margareta

All summer long, the city of Medias sponsored weekly organ concerts at the oldest church in town, Biserica Sf. Margareta (Margarethenkirche). Medias is a medieval city in the province of Transilvania, Romania.

The concerts were held every Monday night at 7 pm. We attended one of them on September 7, 2009. A wide selection of music was played for 1 ½ hours, from medieval pieces to Bach, and all the way to a modern piece written in the 1940s. I lost the program note, so I can’t go into the details, but overall, the concert was good, and some pieces were great. I’m definitely looking forward to attending more of these recitals next summer.

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