When heading to a place like Cancun, Mexico, I’m not going on a jungle-trekking adventure or anticipating anything much more rugged than rough water during a snorkel. I’m going for a getaway from the daily stress of my workaday world,…
Ever since getting on a plane and flying to Rome 20 years ago with a backpack full of traveler’s checks (do those still exist?), I’ve never much worried about not having a place to stay when I arrived at my…
Everything I needed to know about traveling, I could have learned from Ed Stafford’s Walking the Amazon: 860 Days. One Step at a Time. He’s the first man to have walked the Amazon, a little journey that took him just…
I travel because I want to try out different lives. Could I remember the names of all the trees and remedies to become a shaman? Would throwing my slop into the streets of medieval Rouen be too much for me?…
For me, there’s no greater experiential learning than walking back through time via travel. The chariot tracks in the streets of Pompeii made life in the first century that much more real to me. Seeing row after row of crosses…
Word that computer anti-virus genius John McAfee, of that McAfee, is in hiding in Belize after being accused of running a meth lab there brings to mind the opening line of Bruce Barcott’s The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw:…
The Youthful Adventurer and I were snorkeling in the Galapagos Islands when we saw the shark. He kept swimming; we kept swimming. It was exciting to see one and good that he was a distance from us and that the…
I drove solo six or so hours to my high school reunion last summer and was surprised when I got there when one of my classmates said, “I would never have made that drive alone.” I remember thinking, Why not?…