Tag archives: traveling

Grab your cowboy hat and cowboy boots, throw your kids or grandkids (if it’s a weekend) in the car, or perhaps indulge in a midweek romantic getaway and head on up to historic Alisal Ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley for a tootin’ good time. I’ve visited the downhome 10,500-acre Alisal Ranch several times over […]

The weather window was tight. It was one day, and we took advantage of it, circumnavigating the 27 coastal miles of San Miguel Island, the most northwesterly isle in the Channel Islands National Park. After several solo circumnavigations of this wave-battered, teeming islet, I was gratefully joined by four kayak guides who I work with […]

It’s just one of so many countless hidden nooks and crannies carved out over time by volcanic upheaval, the surf, and weather along the craggy coastlines of the Channel Islands National Park. Most of these concealed, volcanic alcoves, corridors, and toothy grottos are only accessible by kayak. Going on foot or even by boat won’t […]

My fall trip to Northern California wine country was designed to spend a few nights during the tail end of harvest season in Sonoma. This included checking out the recently opened Montage Healdsburg resort, a stunning and tranquil retreat set on 258 acres of heritage oak forest, also dotted with manzanita and madrone trees. Vineyards […]

I rarely travel in the summer: too many tourists and, as the summer of 2022 proved, oodles of delayed flights, piles of lost luggage, and cases of COVID contracted. Plenty of friends can vouch for these annoyances, including Rachel Kaganoff Stern and her sister Tessa Kaganoff, who were separated from their luggage in London for […]

I’d seen them on Old Army Pass in the Eastern Sierra a few years ago, small in stature but hardy American pikas, keystone species and great indicators of a warming planet. Before I saw them, it was their grating chirps concealed in talus, gritty granite habitat required for their survival.   The hike to the […]

They could’ve been tiny patches of snow on a distant mountain face, winter clinging to an Arctic summer on the North Slope of the Brooks Range in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). However, scanning with my binoculars while on a braided, swift-moving raft, on the Kongakut River, 18 snowy white Dall sheep gradually grazed […]

My weekend trip to San Francisco began with a bang. I was bopping along in the fast lane of the 101, when just north of Gilroy and south of Morgan Hill, I heard a loud “clank” at the front left of my car. A few light, rain-filled moments later, I realized I had blown a […]

While the world was going to hell in a handbasket, I escaped to Rancho Santa Fe, a sort of Montecito for the horsey set, for a couple of glorious nights at lovely Rancho Valencia Resort & Spa, a Spanish-Colonial hacienda style resort set on 45 acres in north San Diego County that’s a three-and-a-half-hour drive […]

I can look at all the local weather reports, scour all the weather apps, but when I’m standing on the shoreline and gazing across the channel with my binoculars, I trust my judgement more than anything to complete a successful channel crossing across the unpredictable Santa Barbara Channel. On March 8, 2022, sea conditions looked […]

After backpacking out of the Sierra Madre Mountains in the Los Padres National Forest, myself and two others hiked out to Hwy 166 to walk and hitchhike to our next water cache 15 miles to the west. It would require brushing up alongside speeding semitrucks, sleepy cows, the arid Cuyama Valley, all the while knowing […]

Rome, Italy. Postponed.  Las Vegas, Nevada. Posponed.  Loreto, Baja, Mexico. Posponed. Spring 2020 — this was my dilemma (as a longtime travel writer with several assignments in place), when a nasty little virus called COVD-19 began wreaking havoc with the world. It was a year the world remembers well – and not particularly affectionately. Italy, […]

The northwest swell was heaving into the northern fringe of Prince Island, a half mile off San Miguel Island in the Northern Channel Islands chain. Eleven species of seabirds use Prince Island for breeding and nesting habitat. One of those species, the common murre, had returned to Prince Island after a 100-year absence, egg collecting […]

While kayaking and circumnavigating the Salton Sea’s 110 miles of coastline in California’s southeastern corner, the winter climes were a mild 75 degrees, and the salty waters were beyond silky smooth.  It was so clear I could see a massive flock of American white pelicans two miles off in the distance resting peacefully on the […]

Pucci, Gucci, Prada, and Armani. Valentino, Versace, what will you score?  Dolce & Gabbana? Shop the Via Condotti? Marni or Buccellati? More, more, more! Just two and a half days into my Rome explorations and I was beginning to know, understand, and fall in love with one of Europe’s most beautiful capitals spread over 500 […]

My first morning in Rome began with some much-appreciated exercise, as I was aching to hit the ground running. A person can run — or walk briskly as I did — with stops at historic sites on a special tour arranged by the dream team of concierges at my hotel Sofitel Villa Borghese. Along with […]

Rome, I barely know thee. I visited you briefly in the 1980s on a whirlwind trip through Italy on my first European travel writing assignment and carry a few impressions in my memory bank. Now, along with legions of visitors over the centuries, I too have fallen in love with Roma, la citta bella, one […]

I had to admit it. I was lost and feeling a little vulnerable, the grandeur of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), the largest refuge in North America, was swallowing me whole. Located in northeastern Alaska, the braiding Canning River was a maze of channels that separated me from the rest of my group. I had […]

We walked gingerly across a teeming mudflat on a minus tide within Elkhorn Slough, located in Moss Landing and within Monterey Bay. As we glopped along the muddy banks of the slough, legions of line shore crabs scrambled into the shadows dramatically baring their pinchers in self-defense. The eel grass was exposed and laid across […]

In mid-September, my husband Michael and I hit the road and traveled to Kellogg, Idaho, to ride the rails. Our locomotion, however, was pedal-powered and the iron rails had long been torn out, leaving behind two rail corridors: one of the Union Pacific Railroad and the other of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific […]