My blog has migrated to a new host and is being painstakingly reconstructed here. Please bear with me as I iron out wrinkles, hammer out the dents, and apply enough spit and duct tape to hold it all together.— Karen
“Welcome to Arizona,” say the locals, “where summer spends the winter — and hell spends the summer.” It’s true! I had a business trip to Phoenix one August and felt like I’d died and gone to Hades in the 110-degree heat. I developed a keen appreciation of Mark Twain’s story about an Arizona sinner who…
When your boat breaks down at sunset on crocodile-infested waters in a trackless jungle, there’s ample time to ponder whether or not you’ve made the right travel choices. For instance, Rich and I felt our honeymoon definitely called for independent travel, yet when both our hungover young boatman and his ancient outboard motor conked out…
In just the short time since I posted this, some regulations affecting Americans have changed. Here’s an update on US-Cuba travel. Thinking of going to Cuba this year? You’re not alone. That small island nation is attracting huge attention as newly relaxed regulations make travel easier, especially for Americans. This is thrilling news for people…
If you’ve been in the Havana airport lately, you’ve no doubt heard the legend of the stranded tour group whose travel arrangements were messed up so badly, over and over again, that they were forced to bed down for the night in a bus in the airport parking lot. Yep, that was us. Funny thing…
The thing I love about the Balkans is they’re not for everybody. If you’re looking for cookie-cutter experiences in predictably charming places where every waiter speaks English and all the food is familiar, you’ll have better luck elsewhere. The Balkans are consistently unpredictable. No one can even agree precisely which parts of roughly 13 countries in…
“And so when the plane started to break apart,” my friend told me, “I said to my husband, ‘Unbuckle your seat belt.’ Because we don’t know how to swim, and I knew we had to jump out before the plane was over water.” This happened back in the nineties, and I’m still gobsmacked by the…
Skimming an infographic about selecting a vacation spot, I did a double take when I saw Step 1: “First assign priorities to your interests and based on how the destinations add up to your interests, score them.” To me, that was like saying, “Want to become a real estate mogul? First, make a million dollars.…
Rich spent 20 years bringing up the loony idea of luggage-free travel , but it was Clara Bensen who finally convinced me to try it. She and her not-yet-officially-a-boyfriend Jeff explored the parameters of their unconventional relationship during three weeks of Couchsurfing around Europe with nothing but the clothes on their backs and, in Clara’s…
“Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve,” wrote columnist Bill Vaughan . “Middle age is when you’re forced to!” It’s easy to get blasé about ringing in yet another January. By now we’ve all learned that few, if any, New Year’s celebrations live up to our Hollywood-fed expectations for…
When I was a little girl, I used to save up my allowance for family excursions to San Francisco’s Chinatown, where I proceeded to purchase such dazzling exotica as hand-painted fans, little plaster statues of animals, and shiny bits of jewelry. Little did I know that all these years later, my skill for finding gimcrack…
CELEBRATING GOOD NEIGHBORS These days I’m writing about Good Neighbors, exploring how the people around me are working to help each other get through these challenging times. My weekly posts appear on Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on my travel and research schedule.
THIS BLOG IS A PROMOTION-FREE ZONE. As my regular readers know, I never get free or discounted goods or services for mentioning anything on this blog (or anywhere else). I only write about things I find interesting and/or useful.
