All Feature Articles
A Mongolian Bus Ride To Remember
I started my journey from Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, the only real connection point for most of the country’s transport network — much like the center of a spider’s web. Except unlike a spider’s web, which is normally extraordinarily neat at its center point, the bus station there was anything but. It consisted not of a […]
Lessons Learned Having Lunch With The World’s Most Famous Butcher
As I parked my car, my belly began to rumble. I hadn’t eaten anything since Friday afternoon, almost 24 hours before. No need to waste stomach space when you’re going to visit the world’s most famous butcher, after all. I was in the small, hilltop village of Panzano in Chianti, in the scenic countryside between […]
Naked On The Loveliest Beach In The World
Steep, narrow and lacking guardrails, the crumbling cement road to Myrtiotissa Beach, Greece, appears to be headed over a cliff, and my husband, two young daughters and I along with it. Leaving the car parked slantwise along the shoulder, we continue on foot, the trill of cicadas rising and falling in the dusty summer heat. […]
The Bus to Mwanza
The summer before we were married my husband introduced me to Tanzania. Within two weeks we crossed the country from east to west, smelling our way through a spice tour on Zanzibar, sipping Tusker lager at the Mweka gate of Mount Kilimanjaro and following an elephant family through the dried up Tarangire riverbed while on […]
I Took A River Cruise Through The South Of France. Yes, Really.
As I sat in the lounge of our longship nursing a freshly poured glass of wine, I looked around the room. Of the roughly 150 or so people attentively listening to the Entertainment Director’s welcome introduction (one of eight such all-hands-on-deck speeches we would hear over the next eight days), I found I could group […]
The Top 50 Travel Blogs (4th Quarter: 2016)
Below is a list of the top 50 travel blogs for the 4th quarter (October — December) of 2016 ranked by visitor traffic. There are a few other sites that have put together their own lists of the “top” travel blogs. However, each has their own subjective means of ranking sites, using everything from Alexa […]
Conquering Devil’s Tower
I was taught how to trad climb by a guy who said it was like learning how to drive stick: once you start, you’ll never go back to automatic. He taught me in Red River Gorge, a climber-famous area in Kentucky, on a 5.7 grade climb called Octopus Tag. All of it — the friction […]
Spreading Joy At Mardi Gras
When my friend Kendra asked me to ride krewe with her on a Mardi Gras float I was unsure. We sat at the dining room table of my Seattle apartment one chilly fall night, cradling our wine glasses, polishing off a second bottle of red. “What about the crowds?” I asked. I hated crowds and […]
An Afternoon At One Of Mexico’s Crazy Wrestling Matches
Inside Mexico City’s Arena Mexico, everything was noise and mayhem. The crashing sound of bodies hitting the floor. The loud crack when one wrestler’s ankle impacted another wrestler’s neck. Ear-piercing, guttural shouts from spectators around the room. Bikini girls dancing. The announcer booming. Vendors chanting. Lights flashing. Music blaring. During the Lucha Libre, there was […]
Learning To Befriend Winter In Quebec
On the narrowest stretch of the trail, hemmed in by forest, Fripouille locked his icy-blue eyes onto me. “Hey, why aren’t we moving?” he seemed to be asking. Not that he could ask me as much. Fripouille (Scoundrel in English) was one of six Alaskan huskies standing in front of me, howling in cacophonic impatience. […]