Author JD Lasica's website
Here are some of my favorite photos of my cruise with Janet aboard Wind Surf to St. Kitts, Guadeloupe, St. Barts, St. Maarten and St. Lucia in March 2017 and with Mary aboard Silver Spirit to Dominica, Grenada and Antigua in December 2016. Both visits took place well before the two hurricanes that tore through the region in September 2017.
Here’s a photo gallery of my trip to Kotor, Montenegro, aboard Viking Star in November 2015. The history and look of the place was absolutely mesmerizing!
Loved the medieval Old Town, sitting right on the Adriatic coast, with its Romanesque churches, public squares and narrow winding streets. But what was most memorable was our trek up a steep winding trail above Old Kotor, which leads you up 1,350 steps to the ruins of the Castle of San Giovanni, some 4,000 feet above the bay. Took some epic shots of the city and bay along the way.
We finished up with a late-afternoon dinner at Dalmatinska Konoba Cesarica, a family-owned restaurant where the waitress, a college graduate of Serbian descent, told of her difficulty in finding a job because of her nationality. Deeply moving.
Here are some of my photos of the exquisite medieval-era city of Old Dubrovnik taken during a voyage on Viking Star in November 2015. You might recognize some of these images as the setting for various scenes in HBO’s “Game of Thrones” — typically the ones where bloody battles take place.
But there’s so much more to Old Dubrovnik: The friendly townspeople who live beneath classic orange-clad clay rooftops. The Mediterranean cuisine. The elegant bell towers and timeless architecture, such as the medieval walls that were built and fortified between the 13th and 18th centuries. [Read more…] about Photos from a day in Old Dubrovnik
Here’s a photo gallery of my recent trip to Greece aboard Viking Star. We spent a full day in Athens — a 20-minute taxi ride from the port of Piraeus — and an afternoon on Santorini, traveling from the port of Fira to the picture-perfect village of Oia on the north of the island. [Read more…] about Photos of Athens & Santorini, Greece
If you can possibly get to Istanbul, go! While many of the locals we met on our Viking cruise in November 2015 had the hard gruffness that characterizes many Middle Eastern countries, others were delighted at meeting Americans and sharing stories about their magnificent culture. [Read more…] about Photos of Istanbul & Ephesus, Turkey
Here are some of my favorite Photos from my October 2014 trip to Machu Picchu and Cusco, Peru, in November 2014. I was flown in to speak to a conference of Latin American journalists and decided to spend two days at the end of the trip to Cusco — only a 70-minute flight from Lima. [Read more…] about Photos of Machu Picchu & Cusco
I‘m just back from Poland, where I gave a talk on The Social Startup to the Bitspiration startup conference in Krakow.
This was my first trip to Poland, so naturally I did some sightseeing in Krakow. And I spent a day traveling in the Polish countryside to Spie, where my grandfather came from. [Read more…] about Photos of Krakow & a startup conference
My side of the Lasica family — the American side — has had only fleeting contact with our cousins in Poland since my grandfather, Wojciech (George) Lasica, arrived on Ellis Island on Feb. 13, 1912. (For some perspective, that was a month before the Titanic sank.) My grandmother, Katarzyna Delenta Lasica, and my aunt Tory (Sophie) Lasica Stagg, sent items of clothing over in the 1950s, but since then, the connections have faded away.
So when I headed to Poland last week for the first time, as a speaker at the Bitspiration startup conference, I decided to mix business with family affairs by hiring a Krakow-based family researcher from Your Roots in Poland to accompany me to the former Lasica family homestead in Spie, about 2 1/2 hours northeast of Krakow.
Here are 34 photos of my trip to Spie and the surrounding countryside.
Kinga, Krzysztof and I spent June 27 tooling around Wilcza Wola, the district that encompasses Spie, with a local historian, Wojchiech Mroczka. We spent an hour going through records dating back to the early 1800s in the church parish’s offices with the help of Father Stanislaw. But the highlight came when we visited the now-abandoned house at 11 Spie and met the neighbors, Bronislaw and Zofia Sudol, who still maintain the land there for the property owner.
I won’t go into the backstory of how a determined family matriarch, Maria Lasica Bordon, cajoled family members to up and move to Toronto. But the Łasica family (pronounced wa-SHEET-sa) left an indelible mark.
Here’s a short video I took of Bronislaw when we arrived — he was quite excited to pass along his recollections of family members who once lived there, and it was quite touching to meet him and Zofia. For your hospitality, dziękuję bardzo!
