The night I did not bring my camera with me when I went into the village of Cadaqués center for dinner, I took a side street on my way back to my hotel and found myself at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. I was here working on a story for The New York Times Travel about the painter Salvador Dali, who spend most of his life on this rock-crusted community and who depicted it in various works of art. Dali had his paintbrush, his sculptor’s’ hands. And I have little doubt the magnificent scene before me would have inspired him to create something. Without… Read More…

My dear friend and former neighbor, Marion Mapstone once told me the most important thing to know about gardening is not to be afraid to pull up, clip back and move things around. Her simple guidance didn’t turn me into a master gardener but I am no longer someone who keeps dead plants in the house because they are easier to care for. (Though once upon a time, I did.) While I now tend to a sizeable flower patch, Marion did more than show me how to handle plants, she taught me to appreciate them as a multi-sensory experience.   This came to me on… Read More…

The beach was warm and the sea inviting. So I was less than enthusiastic when Jeanroger Dorsainvil and Sala Landemaine, guides with the tour company Touris Lakay, arrived after lunch to take me for a previously scheduled walk to the market. I was staying at Moulin Sur Mer, an 18th Century former sugar plantation turned into a family-friendly resort on Haiti’s Cote des Arcadin about 90 minutes north of north of Port au Prince. “Listen, gents,” I told them, “Earlier, I thought I would be interested in seeing the market, but really the idea of going pales next to the possibility of staying right here.” But Sala was… Read More…

One does not decide to spend four days on a trip that can be accomplished in 5 hours by air without some weighing of the pros and cons. On the upside, taking the VIA Rail train from Vancouver to Toronto would give me the chance to actually see a part of the country with which I am not familiar. It would give me expanses of uninterrupted time to finish working on a writing project and also a plus, I’ve always, always enjoyed sleeping in a moving vehicle, train, boat, car it makes no difference.  The VIA Rail trip promised 4 nights of glorious slumber. On… Read More…

The only other time my husband, Jim and I saw a whale in the wild, it was an orca that came up to our boat flashing its shiny black tail so close I gasped out loud. We were in, or I should say off the coast of Victoria, British Columbia. It was thrilling, but full disclosure, it was one whale and we’d traveled 90 minutes in very choppy waters to see it. So my expectation when boarding the Dolphin Fleet whale watching boat in Provincetown on Cape Cod last month was for a similarly look-hard-and-don’t blink experience. Wrong. Thirty-five Humpbacks, 9 North Atlantic Right Whales,… Read More…

Sometime during my walk in Sedona’s Slide Rock State Park, an elderly man who had been walking on the path nearby looked at me and sighed, “Everywhere is beautiful”. He had dropped a few words from the sentence, but I knew what he meant. Everywhere you looked, there was something beautiful to see and his comment has become the caption to my memories of Sedona. We visited Slide Rock because of my husband’s sentimental attachment to a drive he made in his youth. Shortly after getting out of the Navy, with a new convertible sports car and a beautiful girl in the right seat, he’d… Read More…

If you are looking for an inspiring place to spend Earth Day, where better than the Grand Canyon where the reasons to protect the environment fill the eye in every direction? Four and a half million people from all over the world travel to see where history, geology, biology and botany come together in Nature’s most glorious classroom. So I felt very good indeed when I visited the canyon earlier this week on the earth-friendly Grand Canyon Railway, because this April 22nd, its historic steam locomotive will be chugging from Williams, Arizona to the Grand Canyon Railway Depot powered entirely by reused vegetable oil.  It… Read More…

The womph, womph, womph made me stop in my tracks and look up. It was the sound of wings, big wings, wings big enough to make the use of the verb “flapping” seem inappropriately diminutive.  Above me I saw a large white bird  pummeling the sky on its descent to the pond in the middle of the golf course where I was  walking my dog. I thought to myself, “It could be a goose,” because there are plenty of those here,  and as it flew it had its long neck thrust forward like a goose. But if that’s what it was, it was not like… Read More…

That Colombia as a tourist destination has an image problem is fact. Mention the country whose two large cities, Cali and Medellin are too often followed by the term “-drug cartel” and most people decide to visit Peru. Or Brazil. Or Chile. This is a mistake and the folks in the Colombian department of tourism are making their case with a series of beautifully filmed videos in which residents explain how they came to Colombia to visit and decide to stay. I was captivated by the videos which show Colombia as a country with a wealth of natural beauty and opportunities for outdoor activity. But… Read More…

I’ve never quite understood recumbent bikes. I mean, what is the point of laying back on a bike? So before I went for a ride on the 46 mile Withlacoochee Trail in Citrus County, Florida with Regis Hampton and Cindy Messer, of Hampton’s Edge Trailside Bikes, I asked, what does the recumbent have over conventional upright bikes? Riding feet-forward, low to the ground on a big seat with back and headrest is not only more comfortable it provides a viewer-friendly way to take in the surroundings, Regis explained. On a paved path the bike is stable enough to take one’s hands off the handlebars and… Read More…