• 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 […]

  • There’s no substitute for time

    Harry Middleton, who wrote books and essays mostly about fly fishing before dying too young, gave me an important lens through which I view travel. On the Spine of Time chronicled his numerous trips to western North Carolina rivers. He lost more trout than he caught, ruminated on the history of his surrounding, was forced into […]

  • 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 […]

  • Filmed by Bike official selection

    This was a bit of serendipity. I shot video at a local cyclocross event, edited it into a brief video, and posted it on Vimeo where it was discovered by a rep from Filmed by Bike, a Portland, Oregon film festival. A few months later I was there watching it on the big screen at […]