In mid-April, we said farewell to New Zealand after three outstanding months. You can read about our Kiwi experiences in our three blogs about visiting the islands.
On our way home, we arranged to make a three-week stop in Hawai’i to visit our friends Katherine and Dwight and learn a …
Two and a half weeks. Not enough time to see a country but a decent amount of time to see one small region of one island of this magical place. Wanaka, Glenorchy, Manapouri, Te Anau and Fiordland National Park. We knew nothing about them except that Glenorchy is aka Top of the Lake for all you BBC fans and that any place with “fiord” in the name has …
It snowed almost a foot in Bethesda the day before we were scheduled to fly to New Zealand on January 14. The plow didn’t make it to our neighborhood, but fortunately our son Dylan was able to drive us to the airport in his pickup truck. After four connecting flights …
From the initial days of planning our travels, Sicily was on our list. I’m not sure why it exerted such a strong magnetic pull on us, but we were determined to go. In retrospect, it’s clear that we had very little idea of what we would find there. The happy …
Last week we arrived in Sicily, and yesterday we climbed Mt Etna. It was such an amazing experience that we wanted to share it with you right away.
I have wanted to come to Sicily for a long time. Probably more accurately, I wanted to visit the Sicily of my …
Wherever we go, national parks seem to exert a magnetic attraction for us. We seek out opportunities to explore wild places, and national park status seems like a reasonable launch point for trying to find them.
While we spent eight months last year visiting 29 national parks in the western …
We just spent a month in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, a small market town (population 1,598 in 2011) on the border with England. The locals were surprised: “What! Did you say a month? You must mean a week!” (Nope.) Or “What! How did you even hear about Hay? Did you just close …
As we considered how to spend our time this year, we decided to include some work-stay experiences. Having now done three in the last four months, we’d like to share some reflections on this particular mode of travel.
A work-stay is an exchange between a volunteer who works 4-6 hours …
I’ve been thinking a lot about remembrance lately. It’s partly about my dad, who died in January, and who I’ll be remembering with family and close friends next weekend. But I’ve also been thinking about public remembrance of traumatic events. These reflections are primarily prompted by how the people of …
Last Sunday we set off for a trek to Choquequirao, a large but only partially excavated Inca site. Having just completed the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu the week before (see our last blog), we inevitably found ourselves comparing the two journeys. In short, our trek to Choquequirao was as …