Getting to Olympos, Turkey, our final destination, was turning out to be a real doozy. This sleeping spread-eagle business on the cold green floor of the Kharkiv, Ukraine, airport, catching a 3 a.m. flight with …
June 14, 2013
Travel Editor Picks
Olympos, Turkey
Sofia, Bulgaria: rakia with Boris
I hung out the other day with a 50-something-year-old Bulgarian bus driver named Boris. He'd taken one of my classes on a field trip, and I’d offered to buy him and the tour guide a …
June 10, 2013
Behind the redwood curtain: Humboldt County
Northern California doesn't begin with San Francisco, at least not to Humboldt County residents. It's not really a particular city that marks the split between north and south, but a vast stretch of forest – …
June 9, 2013
The Mad Greek
What am I doing out here in the middle of the desert? The lights of Las Vegas are a distant memory, faded away into the early morning, and now about a hundred miles into the …
Mali: my almost nomad wife
In my capacity as a travel writer, I journeyed through much of Mali's Sahara Desert with the fabled Blue Men in the years before it was desecrated by Al-Qaida. For two thousand years, Tuareg nomads …
May 16, 2013
Snoqualmie Falls
As a general rule, I am not interested in pampering weekends, over-indulgent spas or fancy hotels for the sake of fancy hotels. Accommodation choices are usually fixed around cost and convenience, and so far my …
April 30, 2013
Magic lives in Kanas
Magic lives in a remote corner of China. In the northwestern corner of the country, where a bony finger of land divides the land from Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia, the traveler will find myth, legend …
April 23, 2013
Serenity in the Channel Islands
Visiting Channel Islands National Park is like entering a time machine and being transported back a few hundred years to a wild and natural, pre-automobile, pre-industrial California. Located off the coast of Ventura, the Channel …
April 18, 2013
Darkness and Light in Rwanda
I was the only one in the vehicle awake, excluding the driver. There were four of us. Two were snoring loudly, and I was trying to read my book and failing. Perhaps because of the …
April 12, 2013
Vacation Evolutis
The majority of non-business travel is for one special thing, “Vacation.” The word within the word vacation is "vacate" ("4. an act or an instance of vacating," Merriam-Webster), so by extension looking at it as …
April 8, 2013
NYC: In Search of America's First Pizzeria
Red-and-white tablecloths with Dean Martin music in the background. It sounds like every other pizza joint in the United States – and it's got every possible cliché you can think of when it comes to …
April 4, 2013