Kalbarri National Park, Houtman Abrolhos Islands, and hunting wildflowers During a stay in Western Australia’s capital Perth, I decided to visit Kalbarri National Park and the Houtman Abrolhos Islands, farther up the coast than other places on my list. Turns out both are close to the small city of Geraldton. Why not stay there for a […]

Getting to know you – on foot I was in Western Australia’s capital Perth for a couple of weeks and wanted to see what I could of the west. It wasn’t easy picking out-of-town excursions. Western Australia is huge, and east, south, north, each direction is so different from the others. One place I wanted […]

Luscious, phantasmagoric, street art extravaganza in France’s countryside Lurcy-Lévis is a smallish town in Auvergne, toward the top end of Allier, where the hills are gentle, cows graze, most every town offers a medieval church or local chateau, and pretty rivers are swimmable. Even so, foreign tourists are relatively few (so enjoy while you ...

The Botswana-Zambia border at Kazungula is probably the best known border crossing in southern Africa. There’s no bridge over the Zambezi River. A Zambia Daily Mail article described the only link between the two countries as “two pontoon ferries wobbling across the river on hourly intervals . . . .” Add to this that the […]

When the Zambezi River is in full flow, Mosi-oa-Tunya, Victoria Falls, is the largest curtain of falling water on earth. This was the season; I’d see the Smoke that Thunders – the awesome power of cataracts a mile wide surging over a cliff into a 300-foot-deep chasm so narrow you could almost throw a stone […]

The Dubai stopover is becoming a travel essential, and I was feeling left out. But then it happened. I went to Dubai to meet my friend Kathy and the others I was going with to Africa. My stopover would be three days, a day alone while I waited, and then day tours of both Dubai […]

About a year before Africa, I took a road trip with my friend Kathy, a writer and editor from Minnesota. We wanted to see Savannah, which we did between downpours.  One day when we were holed up at the hotel during another storm, Kathy got an email about a possible trip to Africa. Would I […]

If you are planning an outdoor adventure, you’ll know how to prepare, or you should. But a nice holiday that you envision to be sun-filled can turn out very gray. We’ve all had rainy travel days, but now and then it’s a rainy season. I’ve had some exceptionally rainy trips. How do you make it […]

Kindred Spirit Mailbox is a legendary place with its own Facebook page. But I’d never heard of it until one beautiful, February weekend on the North Carolina coast. The mailbox is a place where you can communicate with other chance passersby, people you’ll probably never know. It’s the kind of place you’d expect to find at […]

We got to be Ice Road Truckers fans at my house, driving the Dalton with every episode. But I never thought, “Wow! I want to do that!” Sometimes, we’d joke about going to Coldfoot, just to cross the Arctic Circle, not that I had any idea what Coldfoot was like, or why you’d want to get […]