(oh, btw… I was nominated for Blogger’s Choice Awards, go sign up and vote if you feel so inclined! Thanks!)

While I was in New York last week, the strangest happenstance meeting occurred.

I was on the way home from eating a good Italian dinner by myself one night (eating alone is common…I just take a good book and zone out) and I stopped at a rice pudding dessert place. It was recommended by my buddy Wade at Large Animal Games, even though I told him that I hated rice pudding because it seemed like a dessert that you are forced to make when you can’t find the normal ingredients for a proper dessert. He told me to shut up and just go to this “Rice to Riches” place. Anyway, this is not a post about rice pudding at all…

And while I was there trying to pick out one of 20 rice pudding flavors, my brain was on overload so I asked the gal beside me what was good. She ended up telling me very little about what to choose, but a lot about her background in public relations. I told her that was interesting because we are looking at a few PR firms for the game company. And then..blah blah blah… I could write a long entry about a witty conversation but I will skip it… but eventually she told me that one of her specialties is in travel… and more blah blah blah (it was good blah blah… just moving on here)… and then she told me that her dad was Rudy Maxa.

“Rudy Maxa!” I exclaimed. “You mean the ultimate savvy traveler?”

And it was him. That refined gentleman with dulcet, calming tones that works for public television and does all the nice travel shows. I started watching him when I got HDTV at home and needed something to record other than Christopher Lowell flitting about in an HD pastel wonderland. He’s sort of like Rick Steves (Maxa, not Lowell), but he spends less time telling you how to save money by living in the forest outside of Dusseldorf and surviving by slicing open the belly of a caribou to stay warm at night. Rick Steves is also famous for his PBS series called “Europe Through the Back Door”, which, to me, sounds like a hair-raising tour-de-force around the gay club scene in Germany.

So the next night after the conference I met Rudy for some espresso and dessert. We had a good time talking and I got all kinds of cool inside Maxa scoop. Today he dropped me a note and said he mentioned me on his blog, so I wanted to link back so my readers could check out his site as well. He chose a few pics of mine to feature, and one of them was this Icelandic horse and some place with this windy things that spin (I always forget the name) in Holland that I have re-posted below.