Tina Lassen, a travel writer from Oregon, doesn’t mince words. Frankly I think she found my behavior on board Don Chancey’s flat bottomed fishing boat too cold-blooded for her taste. This explains why she is now calling me the “salt water assassin.” We were spending a glorious Florida day fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, just a few miles off the coast of Homosassa in Citrus County where the gulf water is shallow. Don was the captain of our vessel, the Grouper Hunter and rounding out the group was the adorable and charming Peter Sacco, who writes for the travel website gonomad.com. The afternoon of… Read More…

Having spent days trying to figure out a way to keep the bears out of the garbage at my little log cabin in the mountains in Connecticut, I must admit I feel a little hypocritical traveling to Florida’s Nature Coast on a wildlife tour. But here I am, swimming with the manatees and cooing over the fish and birds in the accurately-named Crystal River and feeling my heart break over orphaned baby bears at the Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park – a rehabilitation center for injured or orphaned animals. I mean, what is cuter than this bear still too young to be foraging in garbage cans… Read More…

A partial list of the critters I have seen while kayaking would include, alligators,  dolphins, water snakes, ducks (duh!) eagles, hawks, ospreys, anhinga and snapping turtles. Just listing all the wildlife makes it sound as if kayaking was a chaotic experience. In fact, it’s just the opposite. There’s something so peaceful about moving slightly above the surface of the water; kinda in it and kinda not. The gentle slosh of the paddles is my only contribution to the sound track provided by nature. Wekiva River, Florida One of my favorite kayaking spots is the Wekiva River in Orlando, Florida not far from Walt Disney World… Read More…

Over dinner, when I asked my travel companion, the Belgian journalist, Raphael Meulders, what he enjoyed most about our day traveling in northwest Ethiopia, he hesitated about two seconds and answered, “the people”.  I know just what he means. We had a day full of moments that made me feel as if I’d just stepped into a National Geographic special. Our bus stopped to wait while cows and goats were shooed from the street and we gaped at the monkeys in the trees, pelicans on Lake Tana and the colorful centuries-old murals at the church of Ura Kidane Mihret. But it was the people we… Read More…

By far, my most exciting transport experience has been flying with acrobatic pilots, which I have been privileged to enjoy twice: Over the Arizona desert with Gil Monte, a flight instructor for Lufthansa and once off the coast of New York, with Air National Guard show performer John Klatt. But I don’t think I was ever in as much danger as I was on Thursday when I arrived in Zimbabwe and decided to ride in an open-air, game-viewing  vehicle through the streets of Harare. When seated two feet above the roof of the cab, tree branches or anything else you might otherwise blithely drive under,… Read More…

One of my all time favorite books is Earth From Above by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, which presents a pilot-eye view of the earth. It’s remarkable that even from great heights, Bertrand’s photographs reveal the subtle characteristics of land-dwelling humanity. Living in New England, this is the time of year when I most want Bertrand’s thousand-foot perspective because my little corner of the world is just the most remarkable place right-this-very-minute. Tomorrow, If the day is clear, I’ll go flying with my friend David Paqua in his Acro Sport, a biplane he built on the second floor of his glass shop in Stamford, and we’ll zoom around… Read More…

After six weeks of traveling on assignment – from the steamy heat of  Singapore to mid-winter in Christchurch, New Zealand, back to tropical Bangkok and then on to the Arabian desert –  I finally took two days off from work and plopped myself down on a beach blanket by the Indian Ocean in Dibba in the United Arab Emirates. I found the Holiday Beach Motel through bookings.com (which has a much better selection of hotels in out-of-the-way places than asiarooms.com, that’s for sure) and selected it for its great price and for the fact that it had a dive/snorkel shop right on the premises. Forget… Read More…

There’s a bright red cable car that runs up and down Victoria Mountain in Wellington New Zealand. Its so adorable, its easy to dismiss it as tourist kitsch. But this icon of the city has a history because this is the little train that could. It could create living space out of the sharp cliffs surrounding the narrow harbor front of New Zealand’s capital city by providing  easy and direct transport up the side of steep terrain.  It could feed the imagination of city planners who one hundred and fifty years ago set aside a large chunk of land for a botanical garden and footpath… Read More…

What Americans call hiking, the New Zealanders call tramping, which if you want to be silly and immature, (and I always do) it makes describing an afternoon of healthy activity giggle-inspiring because to be a “tramp” in the USA is kinda  naughty. Anyway, I had my first tramp yesterday when my daughter Marian‘s boyfriend, Sam James Jones-Parry and his cousin Ed Howard took me to the Te Henga Recreation Preserve northwest of Auckland. Sam actually has a connection to the Bethell of Bethell’s Beach above which we were tramping.  And listen, if I could claim it, I sure would, no matter how far up the… Read More…

Everything I preach about enjoying the journey as well as the destination should not be undone when I tell you that on a recent trip to Frankfurt, I flew Lufthansa business class. Yes indeed, that’s a significantly different experience than flying coach. “Sure,” you’re saying, “who doesn’t enjoy the journey when you’re traveling premium class?”  But that’s not what I’m going to write about here, not now and probably never. There are plenty of other travel websites that cover that experience, In fact, I did write a story about this for The New York Times a few weeks ago, which you can read here. Suffice… Read More…