Category: Travel & Adventure

  • Places: Death Valley Junction

    The Amargosa Opera House stands at the corner of State Line Road and California Route 127, in a place now called Death Valley Junction. In the early 1920s it was Amargosa, a company town that supported borax mining interests. A U-shaped building contained a hotel, dining room, dormitories, company offices and a community center. The […]

  • Fare wars

    After a relatively slow summer for airfare sales, the last few weeks have seen competition heat up. Beth and I had a list of places we were interested in visiting this winter–Vienna, Amsterdam and Portugal were top of the list, along with Paris (no, we can’t quit that place). I kept an eye on fares, […]

  • Practical matters: passports

    Last week I started the passport renewal process. The good news: If you’re a US citizen you only have to do this every ten years. The bad: 2018 is the year of delays and higher fees. First, the delays. If you’ve been putting off renewing or applying for a passport, get on it now. For […]

  • Travel’s missing ingredient

    Yelp, TripAdvisor, Instagram, Google Street view and countless other always-available web sites and services have drained travel of a critical ingredient: Mystery. How often do most of us land in a new location already knowing what we want to see, do, eat and drink? Moreover, we have strong expectations of what those experiences should be, […]

  • Food Matters: Paris

    One of the pleasures of travel is finding good, local food. And one of my favorite cities for eating is Paris, thanks to an exploding culture of creative cooking that offers more than the sauce-heavy dishes that have long characterized French cuisine. You can spend a fortune dining there, but you don’t have to mortgage your […]

  • Turin, Eataly, and catching a ride with a stranger

    I had only a vague idea where we were, which wasn’t comforting since we were sitting in the backseat of a stranger’s car. After getting in the car 30 minutes earlier we had gone in what seemed like the right direction, but with all the u-turns and backtracking I was a bit nervous. Not to […]

  • Go when you want, see what you like

    Whenever I run across the question, “What should I see when I visit [blank]?” I can guess most of the answers. Helpful folks will respond with a list of the usual landmarks, often with tips about avoiding crowds. There are a lot of people who want nothing more than to shoot a selfie in front […]