By Erin Byrne
Imagine being placed at the top of the main staircase inside the most visited museum in the world. Daylight streams from above, bathing the arched walls in golden light, illuminating and exposing you. You’re there for thousands to see, but have neither head nor arms.
Winged Victory stands boldly atop the sweeping Daru staircase [...]
by Nancy Middleton
As we boarded the bus outside our hotel in Athens, I took a look at my five students and wondered if we should skip the day trip to Delphi. We had been touring for seven days straight—every morning an early one—and the boys (yes, they were all boys) were visibly exhausted. Much of [...]
by Kathy Comstock
Years ago across France one could set a watch according to the ‘vieille fille’. Dressed in black and with laced shoes supporting a stocky or painfully thin frame, she would secure her front door lock, look right then left, and head off. One withering fist hugging her shawl and the other gripping a [...]
by Deborah Fryer
Like many kids, I went to summer camp to learn to sail and ride a horse and tie a bowline. I whittled green boughs into perfect marshmallow-roasting sticks and stayed up way past bedtime reading by flashlight on my top bunk. I sang raunchy songs and played capture the flag, got poison ivy [...]
by Tom Bentley
Long ago, when I was still in high school, I took a road trip from Southern California with three of my best friends to Las Vegas. Naturally, we were too callow to gamble, drink or cavort like the stylish rogues that we fancied ourselves to be, but that was less the point than [...]
by Catherine Watson
In the physical and mental calm that follows whitewater, a friend and I, still dripping from the icy river, were relaxing on the front tubes of the raft, letting Nepal’s hot sunshine dry us off as the noise of the day’s first rapids faded behind.
”I never thought I would hear that sound again,” [...]
By Mary Patrice Erdmans
Ulrich, a robust 52-year-old pilgrim dressed in a red flannel shirt, told me, “I want to walk through the world without leaving footprints. It’s hard work to be silent.”
Sitting alone inside the walls of the convent of Santa Clara in Carrion de los Condes, Spain, I stretch out my legs under the [...]
By Tom Cheche
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Shade kept us from seeing the sign. The narrow country lane, devoid of traffic, meandered through farmland of the Cotinten bathed in glorious autumn sun, highlighting roadside fields of squat, manicured apple trees but intensifying darkness in the occasional stretch through a palisade of looming shade trees. It was a rough board nailed [...]
By Ginny Horton
I have been Maria Von Trapp on many a mountainside. Isak Denisen eating on fine china
in Kenya by day. Ernest Hemingway smoking cigars and drinking warm scotch around the campfire by night. I have yet to be diagnosed as schizophrenic but have undergone distinct personality changes while traveling. It begins with the accent, [...]
By Elizabeth Galewski
My alarm went off and I shot out of the hard bed in my dingy Delhi hotel room, every cell in my body charged and eager. I was going to fly to London that day. I was going to pack up my bags, go to the airport, and fly to London. I was [...]
