Love your GPS? Love how easy it makes getting from Point A to Point B? If you’re like me, your GPS saves travel time, keeps you from getting lost, and provides an Australian or British voice so you can get directions from Ned Kelly or James Bond, depending on your...
The art of travel is being able to create memories. But how can we relive the experiences and relationships of an exciting or romantic or never-again adventure? Think outside the camera--the right postcard can be more of a memory-maker than all those digital photos...
Arriving in Fiji alone at 1:00 am after a 12-hour flight was unnerving but that’s the way the flights went so there I was, in the middle of the Pacific, with a heavy suitcase, an even heavier bag of scuba gear, and reservations for a hotel that was 20 miles away. I’d...
NaNoWriMo can be described as a cult phenomenon, a virtual writers gathering, a very strange hobby or God's gift to global coffee sales. As I've mentioned elsewhere in this blog, the goal is to write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. It’s a tough thing...
In my quest to find connections across cultures I've been thinking about how different cultures influence what we eat (salsa, anyone?) But if we turn that around to look at how a food influenced different cultures we come to one inescapable word: McDonald's. Yep. The...
Right now it is storming outside and my dog is going nuts. Trying to wriggle under the desk when thunder booms, scurrying into the bathroom shower stall when lightning flashes, running between me and the door as if to blame me for the rain. She’s gotten eccentric as...
A year ago I was Lost. No-cell-phone-service Lost. The-road-is-a-gravel-track-through-cane-fields Lost. Set Sail One Day Five girlfriends had set out from Panama City to go to El Valle, about two hours away. We’d go to the Sunday crafts market there and have lunch at...
I was sitting in a small auditorium at the Colegio Americano in Mexico City waiting for the meeting to start. The room was full of women and the occasion was the annual meeting of Mexico’s Secretariat of Education with the school’s parents. I knew I wouldn’t...
Once upon a time, when we lived in Panama, I was walking the dog and passed a construction site where the workers were engaged in a furious argument. The Spanish flew too fast for me to catch every word but anger came through in every red-faced yell and hostile...
Whatever remains to man unknown, in this world of ours, is by so much a burden on the spirits of all men . . . every mystery made plain, every unknown land explored, exalts the spirit of the whole human race--strengthens its courage and exalts its spirit permanently....
When my daughter was little I wanted to give her a sense of her place in the world. We got a globe and calculated the exact opposite spot if one drew a straight line through the center of the earth from where we were. We hit China.We started to tell each other...
The Hidden Light of Mexico City contains a number of references from my own experiences in Mexico City. I've already written about the class struggle of simply standing in a line but also wanted to share a sadder, more compelling event that helped shape the book's...
Oslo in June is a wonderful place. Clouds scud across a cobalt sky and the harbor is thronged with boats, tourists, and the smell of lilacs. After months of Arctic winter grey, the city is stretching itself awake in the midnight sun. You stay up long after sunset at...
Once upon a time, I took a trip with a similarly adventurous-minded girlfriend to Papua New Guinea, which bills itself as "The Land of the Unexpected." I doubt it has changed much since then; it is a wild, mountainous place where the wheel was never invented....
Let's set the scene Luz filled out a form to cash the check at a mahogany counter then went to the end of the line. It moved very slowly and grew very long. Luz had ample time to look around. The bank was an elegant place of glass and darkly veined marble...