By Ted Beatie It was midnight in a nearly deserted bus station on the outskirts of Marrakesh, and my fiancee and I had one-way tickets to the edge of nowhere. We knew we wanted to see the great Sahara–after all, that was why we had come to Morocco–but plans? Provisions? We hoped the Universe would […]
By Margaret Wagner On the morning of my sixth birthday, before I stepped off the airplane in Mumbai, India, then known as Bombay, my mother gave me a present, a Tammy doll. Tammy, more wholesome and sweet than a Barbie doll, had blonde hair, a comb and several outfits. Even more exciting was the carrying […]
By Michelle McAlister NINE-YEAR OLD Misha thinks no one is watching. His unusually large, round blue eyes scan the kitchen. His papery, quasi-translucent hand reaches out to steal fruit from atop a plastic table. The muscles of his tiny hand tremble as he jerks a banana from its bunch. He sticks it down his pants, […]
By Sarah Enelow Kermit, my devoted partner and laptop, was sick. His screen was cracked, he wouldn’t charge, and he’d cannibalized most of his battery life. We were in Beijing for a month and actually I hadn’t been so healthy myself. My first week was marked by a nasty cold, a migraine, and constipation—who knows, […]
By Catherine Watson From the mountaintop road above Kvivik, green slopes fell steeply away to the sea, and the sea swept my eyes outward, over the village, to the soft shapes of other islands drifting in the pale blue distance. More than a thousand years of Faroe Islands history lay in that view. It was […]
By Amanda Mander “Stay away from my son,” his father said as we stood alone on the balcony. Tears were threatening to burst through my barely-calm exterior when I noticed Kirin, my fiance, listening from inside the Bombay apartment. His warm, brown eyes pleaded with me to hold strong against the force of his father’s […]
By Mary Jo McConahay In later years…President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice Longworth, congratulated me every time we saw each other: “You got out. So wise.” —“Reflections on Glory Reflected,” in United States: Essays 1952-1992 The day Gore Vidal died rain fell hard on the roof of his old house alongside the ruins of Our Lady […]
By Chris Epting In my mind, travelers are hunters. What do you hunt for when you travel? Experiences, people, souvenirs? We all hunt for something. I hunt for places. We were in Oslo, Norway, my teenaged son and I, spending a few days before hopping a ship with Quark Expeditions to explore around the Arctic […]
By Peggy Jaffe At first I ignore the mail piled in the foyer, take my shoes off, and absorb the warmth of the terra cotta floor. Outside the living room window, a carpet of dandelions welcomes me like a light parade. How I love being in Tuscany in May—the lavender-laced air, hills stretching skyward, birds […]
By Lola Akinmade Akerstrom Eight of us – six Swedes, one Finn, and me – are gathered in a modest city-center studio apartment in Stockholm’s eclectic Sodermalm district. Next to our dinner table is a small window with a gorgeous view of Stockholm’s history-rich old town, Gamla stan, with its narrow fingerlike red clay, melon, […]
