Author: Karen McCann

“Reading old travel books or novels set in faraway places,” writes Phil Cousineau in The Art of Pilgrimage , “spinning globes, unfolding maps, playing world music, eating in ethnic restaurants, meeting friends in cafés . . . all these things are part of never-ending travel practice, not unlike doing scales on a piano, shooting free-throws,…

OK, I’ll admit that those of us who have passed our 50th birthdays (and then some) can rarely stay up all night partying with rowdy strangers, crash on the floor for a few hours, then bounce up feeling fit, fabulous, and raring to go. But unless that sort of evening is essential to your itinerary,…

The Spanish siesta is, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest inventions of human civilization and justifiably famous around the world. What most people don’t know is that it’s usually followed by a small, delightful meal known as merienda , usually a coffee and pastry, often eaten in the company of family and friends…

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to buy a guidebook for Albania?” I asked a friend recently. “I could almost hear the Amazon computers thinking, ‘Seriously? Why would you want to go there ?’” A response I’d been getting a lot lately from various humans of my acquaintance. “Albania I can understand,”…

I knew something was wrong when our cab driver, a twitchy guy with glassy eyes, popped the clutch, stalled out, then tore off into traffic as if we were being pursued by the undead . Careening along Madrid’s freeways, he kept squirming, fidgeting, mumbling, and spitting out the window. When he wasn’t doing that… “Yikes!”…

Not everyone likes being invisible, but I often find it refreshing — and convenient, especially when I’m on the road. As “a woman of a certain age” — too old to require construction workers to launch into catcalls, too young to inspire Boy Scouts to assist me across the street — I can choose to…

“Do you have any ideas for travel experiments?” Jeff wrote to Clara, a woman he’d never met, in a message on the OkCupid dating site. “I have a few things I dabble in, and I’m going to push one of these experiments to the nth limit in June.” Turned out he meant weeks of unstructured…

Visiting Seville’s butcher stalls can be a real eye-opener. When I first moved to Seville, I was taken aback to see whole rabbits, fur intact, hanging by their heels in the butcher’s stall. “Are you supposed to skin them yourself?” I asked incredulously of an American friend married to a Spaniard. “No, they do it…

With kids in college and slender savings from their careers (she was a web designer, he was a musician), Veronica and David couldn’t afford globetrotting in grand style. “When we first set out,” David recalled, “we were in a 1983 Chevy motor home that we found on eBay for $3,200. Obviously we were doing things…

There is a wonderful moment at the start of every train journey when you arrive at the station to discover what the next short chapter of your life is going to look like. Will it be this? Or this? Or this? As regular readers of this blog know, in 2013 I traveled 6000 miles, mostly…