by Christina Ammon
Sometimes a simple walk down the block feels like the journey of a lifetime
Nine months have now passed since my grandmother moved into Milder Manor Nursing Home. One morning last September she was getting dressed, took a fall, and in that instant was transformed from a commanding, bridge-playing, globe-trotting golden girl into [...]
by Nancy Middleton
We arrived at the St. Petersburg airport a couple of hours before takeoff. In plenty of time—or at least we thought. My mother and I dragged our suitcases to the end of an ominously long line just inside the terminal and waited with the rest of our tour group. The bus that had [...]
by Shelley Seale
Lurching along the dirt road, I gazed out the window at rural Orissa in northeastern India as the car bounced over potholes, sending plumes of red dust billowing behind it. The small villages we passed were as familiar to me as if I had been there only last week. The shacks that lined [...]
by Michelle McAlister
I have a photograph taken 30 years ago engrained in my head: My twin sister and I are posing behind one of those propped-up cardboard scenes where tourists are encouraged to snuggle up to the painted display and center their own, smiling faces in the holes. A proclamation of ‘Cheeeeeese!’ usually follows. In [...]
by Bill Zarchy
“Pinch me,” says Susan as we cross the Seine from the Left Bank to face the sun-drenched Gothic towers of Notre Dame. “I can’t believe we’re back here.”
We peel off jackets and join the throngs of tourists and worshippers outside the Cathedral. Despite the lyrics of the Cole Porter song – “I love [...]
by Erin Byrne
I shivered inside the car. Fuzzy static on the radio buzzed in my ears. A whirling, weightless fog of snowflakes obscured my vision. I felt desolate and lonely as I waited for the floating flakes to slow. After the flurry cleared I saw my landmark, Pikes Peak, and my inner compass adjusted. [...]
By Ayun Halliday
Twenty years of global travel have made me pretty choosy about souvenirs, but Milo, at six, is too green to resist the siren song of the colorful wares festooning the tourist trails. Not that his acquisition lust is confined to the kitsch cranked out for foreign visitors. It started in a Budapest subway [...]
By Tracy Barnett
Family ties and a mysterious force call writer back to rural Veracruz
04/22/2007 SUNDAY Travel 01L
Veracruz has been calling to me for a number of years, ever since that moonlit night a decade ago when I disembarked from a humanitarian aid caravan en route to Chiapas to soak my sweaty self in the [...]
By Anna Brones
Theater and film are almost as essential to the romantic Parisian image as Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. Acting has always played a revered role in French culture, and from grandiose theater productions to cinema classics, the rest of the world has had the chance to taste the artistic delicacies that the [...]
by Janet Riehl
A girlhood in rural Illinois wasn’t bad preparation for life in upcountry African nations. “Up country” meant the northern regions innermost from newly built capitol cities. My training as a future African driver began on my family’s farm at four years old⎯old enough to sit on my father’s lap⎯his left leg, to be [...]
