Tag archives: traveling
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 […]
“Let’s motor down to MiamiLet’s climb the Grand Canyon WallLet’s catch a tunaWay out in LagunaLet’s get away from it all”– Lyrics from “Let’s Get Away From It All” (music by Matt Dennis and lyrics by Tom Adair, published 1941) commonly associated with Frank Sinatra One of my best female friends and I have traveled […]
Two years – and a century (it seems) – ago, I had the pleasure of taking my wife, Helen, our son, Tim, his wife, Jacqueline, and their two boys, Deacon and Kessler (then five and seven years old) on a glorious seven-day Christmas Market cruise on AmaWaterways’ 164-passenger river cruise ship, AmaCerto. We traveled down […]
As an experienced traveler (though not lately), I’ve always said that travel would be much more easy and pleasant, if only we didn’t have to eat and sleep. Others will, of course, argue that it is all the things relating to food and accommodation which make travel enjoyable. But to me, they are generally a […]
As schools around the country start to reopen and older students begin the migration back to college life, I worry about the safety of teachers and pupils alike. But a smaller, less socially conscious voice in the back of my head quietly cheers for the small freedom of leaving home. Some of us may have […]
To get to Half Moon Bay, we had driven up U.S. 101 through crawling traffic in San Jose, dodged the pushy Porsches and Tesla jockeys of Silicon Valley, and finally twisted and turned our way over a busy road through the Santa Cruz Mountains. At the end, though, waited a quiet little farm town called […]
It was ten at night, and two weary travelers stood at Track 17 at Toronto’s Union Station, waiting to board The Canadian. The brochure for this flagship of Canada’s VIA Rail system had promised “comfortable accommodations” in “superior sleeper cabins,” and we were filled with the anticipation of looking out our window as the train […]
The trip was called “Cruise the Face of Europe” and, in fact, it was a 15-day river trip from Amsterdam to Budapest that did just that. Not surprisingly, early outposts, ports, and villages at strategic locations along the Rhine, Main, and Danube rivers provided early opportunities of commerce and control for centuries, from Roman times […]
