Thanks for joining me on the journey.
I’m an American travel writer dividing my time between Seville, Spain and California. I travel the world seeking intriguing curiosities and outrageously delicious comfort food so I can have the fun of writing about them here. — Karen McCann
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Rich’s Memory Course and … Wait, What Was I Saying?
“So he says, ‘Try to remember these twenty words, in order, with their numbers.” Rich was describing Jim Kwik’s online course Improve Your Memory Now from the Omega Institute . “He said he could teach us to recall them so well that if he said ‘eleven’ we’d immediately respond ‘skis.’” “How’d you do?” I asked.…
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It’s Tricky Making Predictions, Especially About the Future
”Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.” — Peter Drucker Lately I’ve been having disturbing dreams about doing dangerous, forbidden things like shaking someone’s hand or entering rooms crowded with people whose identity and vaccination history are…
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Is It Time to Start Thinking About Travel Again?
“We are getting crazy travel bug,” my friend Lonnie wrote me this week. “Don’t know when but we are talking. Would love to pick your brain.” My emails and Zoom calls are humming with fresh possibilities now that the vaccines are making many Americans feel, as my pal Pete puts it, “completely bullet proof.” Or…
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What I Learned Thanks to Rich’s Happiness Course
“In my default mode, I’m mildly to severely aggravated more than 50 percent of my waking hours,” writes A. J. Jacobs in Thanks a Thousand . “That’s a ridiculous way to go through life. I don’t want to get to heaven (if such a thing exists) and spend my time complaining about the volume of…
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The Happiness Course: Rich Tells All
“Imagine that scientists have created a happiness machine. A machine that could make you as happy as you like with the push of a button. Would you use it? Would you push the button?” asks Dacher Keltner, director of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. “I’ve asked that question of my students for years, and…
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How (and Why) to Have Great Date Nights at Home
It’s been one of those weeks — the kind that makes you think your head’s going to explode. For a start, Rich and I were enmeshed in a ghastly tangle with our Spanish bank involving a new pin number they’d sent out of the blue, texting it to our Seville phone number — which isn’t…
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Europe’s Creative Ways of Adapting to the New Abnormal
I was both charmed and staggered to learn, when Spain first went into lockdown last year, that hairdressers were deemed essential workers. “Otherwise, how are old ladies supposed to manage if they can no longer wash their own hair?” said officials, no doubt breaking into an icy sweat at the idea of having to justify…
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Is Roaring 20s-style Debauchery Just Around the Corner?
“Debauchery!” said my sister-in-law Deb in our last Zoom call. “I just read that things won’t get back to normal until 2024 and then we’ll have a wild period of debauchery!” These days everybody’s got a theory about how things will look “when all this is over.” Some financial types say this decade will mark…
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Three Ways Travel Prepares Us for Pandemic Survival
“The best thing I learned from our travels,” Rich remarked over Sunday lunch, “was how to live with uncertainty.” Even the most carefully planned journey holds some suspense, if only about the weather and the sheer happenstance of daily living. One January in our corporate days, Rich and I took the chairman of the board…
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Working Remotely? Why Not Do It Overseas with One of the New “Digital Nomad Visas”?
After the earthquake last Saturday night, as soon as the couch stopped shaking, I turned to Rich and said, “So it’s true. Mother Earth really is trying to kill us.” It wasn’t Her best effort; a mere 4.2 on the Richter scale, just enough to startle. By the time I realized it might be wise…
TRAVEL with CURIOSITY
These days I’m cultivating curiosity, which science says will keeps my brain agile. I figure spending more time on the road and indulging my natural nosiness about the world will be good therapy and a cheerful counterpoint to today’s headlines. And I will never run out of quirky stuff to write about.
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