The sign went up about two weeks ago. It was probably a good thing I wasn’t in Los Angeles to witness the event. I might have started to cry. But a few days later, one of the realtors sent me a photo of it. There it was, firmly planted in the ivy by the stairs leading up to the house: the sign proclaiming that my house was up for sale.
I fell in love with Spain. First it was a week in Barcelona, then, a year later, a week in Madrid. By year three, following a week’s tour in the Midi-Pyreees, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to return to Spain and travel its length from Bilbao in the north, through its geographic center of Madrid and on to the former Moorish capital of Granada in the south. But first, I was told, I must visit – and eat in – San Sebastian.
by SwansonRut via flickr (common license)Located on the eastern end of Spain’s Atlantic coast, known as la Golfo de Vizcaya (Bay of Biscay), San Sebastian is considered one of the culinary capitals of the world, a distinction largely lost on this non-foodie. But, as much as gourmandizing does not excite me, the idea of bars competing to outdo each other with exotic and cheap finger food called “pintxos” (pronounced “pinchos,” and essentially tapas) was an adequate inducement, along with San Sebastian’s picturesque setting in a horseshoe-shaped bay with golden sand beaches.
I arrived by train from Toulouse, France, with the rugged Pyrenees providing a continual and stunning southern vista. At the border city of Irun, Spain, the civility and cleanliness of the French train, with the melodious lilt of that language spoken in hushed tones, was markedly replaced by a grimy and worn Spanish train, boarded by shoving one’s way in, and the shouts and grunts in Spanish and Euskara, a baffling pre-Indo European language spoken by the Basque people in northeastern Spain. I was back.
San Sebastian’s seaside does not disappoint. Its broad promenade skirts the entire bay where locals and tourists of all ages, most smartly dressed, stroll arm-in-arm or glide by on bicycles or skateboards. White walled restaurants with royal blue awnings and outdoor seating offer exceptional people-watching opportunities on the promenade or beachside, while upscale apartments and commercial buildings line the boulevard, looking over a green-hilled island and bobbing sailboats to sea.
by Judith Fein
I wish I could climb into a time machine and be catapulted back to the Viking period between 793 and 1066 A.D. I don’t care for the raiding and pillaging but I have been to L’Anse Aux Meadows in Newfoundland twice (the only authenticated Viking site in North America), I have held my breath as I read the Iceland sagas, and I know these hunting and planting people were resilient, artistic and resourceful; the women had power and prestige, and their governance was of the democratic variety. They wrote on rune stones, were brilliant ship builders and goldsmiths. They drank mead from horns, braved the cold and produced mighty sorcerers.
Photo Slide Show by Paul Ross
Last month, I went to Norway on the trail of the Vikings; actually, I felt as though I were in Viking school. At the archeological museum in Stavanger, I learned that the Vikings probably practiced a form of yoga and that diverse elements in nature like swimming birds and halibut were thought to help the sun on its daily journey. They believed in night ships that went into the water and the dark earth at night, and day ships that came up again in daytime.
words + photos by John Lamkin
Cora Amalia, the president of the municipality, affirmed the stories I’d heard for a while. There was a “lost” Maya city in the nearby jungle that rivals Tikal in Guatemala and has a pyramid larger than the one at Palenque in the state of Campeche.
“When can I go there?" I asked the government tourism officials. “Only when you get permission from INAH (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia),” was the answer, “And you can’t go now because the jungle roads are too muddy. You must wait for the dry season.”
Well, the dry season came. We applied for and got the INAH permit and set off on the adventure – seven of us in Luis’ Suburban.
Our crew consisted of Luis Tellez, professional guide and photographer and his wife Leti, myself and my significant other Susy, two expats that lived locally and had done some research on the city, and don Millon a 90-year-old farmer who had worked in the area as a chiclero, one of the men that harvested the chicle for making chewing gum, and who had visited the ruins in his youth.
We located the turn-off from the paved road that led to a small Maya community of a few traditional thatched huts. We presented our permit to a Maya woman who was the designated caretaker. She read the permit and then herded her family out to be photographed by us.
In addition to nearsightedness and a deep sense of curiosity, my Dad and I shared a love of good stories. After his death two years ago, I had the opportunity to travel in his tire tracks. My road trip became a lesson in discovery, geographically and emotionally, showing me aspects of my father I had never seen and beautiful places I’d never visited. Ghosts have a creepy reputation, but my father’s made the perfect traveling companion.
Let’s start at the beginning. My Dad was Tony Hillerman. During his 35 years of writing best-selling mysteries, millions of fans treasured his stories of Navajo detectives solving crimes on the panoramic Navajo Nation. He also inspired me to start The Tony Hillerman Writers’ Conference, where he served as our most popular faculty member for several years.
Before Dad died in late October of 2008, my photographer husband Don Strel and I had launched our own book project, “Tony Hillerman’s Landscape: On the Road with Chee and Leaphorn” to show readers who had never been to Indian Country the settings in which the fictional Tribal Officers solved crimes. I gathered quotes from Dad’s books that described places where his detectives pause to comment on the scenery in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado. Then we hit the road for Baby Rocks, Teec Nos Pos, Toadlena, Church Rock, Kayenta, Tsaile, Tuba City and other breathtaking places Dad loved.
Don and I finished the book with both relief and regret a few months after Dad died. We decided to promote it and honor my father’s memory with talks and slideshows to support public libraries. Little did I know that I would be getting most of the benefit, priceless stories from people in the audience whom my Dad had touched: loyal readers, distant relatives, Indian consultants, long-lost friends, and former co-workers and students from his days at the University of New Mexico.
At the small Placitas, N.M. library, a woman came up to me after my talk. “I have to tell you how I stalked your father,” she said. I was all ears.
The Alignments in Carnac, Brittany, France
words + photos by Elyn Aviva
We drove around a corner and encountered an astounding sight: row after row of standing stones, stretching to the horizon. “Pull over!” I demanded. Barely waiting for Gary, my husband, to stop the car, I opened the door, jumped out, and ran over to the green metal fence that separated the stones from me. I shook my head in disbelief, in awe. So many stones, lined up and going—where? Why? They fit no category I knew: they were an enormous puzzle of countless granite megaliths pointing to the sky, rooted in the earth. Hundreds, thousands of stones lined up in slightly wavering rows that went on for kilometers, as if the stones were frozen in the act of marching—somewhere. What was the point? What did they mean? What were they for? The stones made no response. 
Nowhere in the world has as many megalithic sites as Brittany, and Carnac is in the center of them. The amazing profusion of ancient remains includes isolated standing stones, rows of alignments, earth-covered tumuli, quadrilateral and oval enclosures, and table-like dolmens, each with its own energy and story.
The dolmens with their elaborately engraved interior walls are intriguing, but the 6000-year-old alignments fascinate me. Many of the original stones have been hauled off for re-use in nearby farmhouses and fences, but nearly 3000 menhirs (Breton for standing stones) remain. They are lined up in three sets of slightly undulating rows facing approximately northeast/southwest and extending for kilometers. Starting in the northeast are the Kerlescan alignments, followed by the Kermario alignments, and ending in the southwest with the Le Ménec alignments. The different sets contain from eleven to thirteen rows, and include from approximately 600 to nearly 1200 standing stones. Each set ends in the southwest with an ovoid or quadrilateral stone enclosure (or what remains of one). The cumulative effect of so many stones, so many alignments, extending for such a distance, is awesome.
words + photos by Don Mankin
The sun was shining as I passed by the town of Sequim (pronounced “Squim” like some kind of squishy, low tide cephalopod) on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula (OP). I was on my way to Olympic National Park, one of “America’s Ultimate Parks,” according to National Geographic.
Times are tough and money is short; that is why I vacationed last summer in the OP, home to one of the most diverse and accessible wilderness areas in the United States. The Peninsula is just an hour or so drive and a 30 minute ferry ride from Seattle, and its varied attractions -- a rugged coastline, empty beaches, glacier-capped mountains, alpine meadows, pristine lakes, and thick rain forests – are a relatively short drive from each another.
There was another reason for this trip, to see if I, at the advanced age of 67, could still haul a fully loaded backpack into the wilderness and survive a few days on my own. From my 30s to my 50s, I used to do a solo backpacking trip almost every year, several of them on the OP. It was always a deeply satisfying experience – a meditative, reflective, man-alone-with-nature, listening-to-your-inner-voice, getting-in-touch-with-your-primal-self, city-boy-alone-in-the-wild kind of thing. I loved it.
by Eric Lucas
Oh, how I love new places, new tastes and smells and sights and sounds. Just this year, I have discovered hot, amber sabia chiles in Tucson, peaceful historic beguinages (cloisters) in Bruges, the warm chartreuse water of Kanaka Bay in British Columbia, the mind-bending apocalyptic canvases of John Martin in London.
Love, love, love. But.
While we’re admiring the snazzy glamour of new discoveries, let me bring on stage the simple wonder of happy returns.
It was while visiting Tucson last week, dipping into the pool at dawn with my wife Leslie, that I had second thoughts about the siren song of newness. Not second, exactly; call them revisionist or retrospective. I was enjoying something I have often done before, in the exact place I had been many times. Hundreds of times, in fact, have I slipped into this exact pool, which is framed by subtropical plantings and the stern, cactus-clad heights of the Santa Catalina foothills behind, burnished by the fierce, loving sun of the Sonoran Desert.
A morning breeze feathered the mesquite fronds of the desert woods just yards away. A hummingbird buzzed by. Spent bougainvillea blossoms laid their vermilion origami on the surface of the water. A Gila woodpecker whacked a roof tile. The summer-warmed water was 85 degrees, both cleansing and comforting. Tendrils of overnight thundershowers curled by nearby escarpments, and the monsoon humidity lent the air a silken touch.
“Doesn’t this feel like Tobago?” asked my wife.
There are times, and there are people, that we desire to erase even while we don't recognize why we want to erase them; so it is with a trip I embarked on some years ago, to the California coast.
by kevincole via Flickr (common license)The trip was supposed to be the sealing deal in a relationship that had quivered on the lip of "commitment"—that ethereal concept—for two years, embroidered with camping trips, lots of laughter, a stringent lack of money, and the absence of those family members or friends who might have demurred at the sight of a nice middle-aged East coast women of liberal persuasion and a carrot-haired, Boston speaking, child of old-ward Democratic politics who was making a living, such as it was, selling orange juice to restaurants out of his beat-up car. But so it was. And the trip, which he had proposed and which I had accepted with the lurking sense that something was to be decided, did decide something: that we couldn't go on. And so we didn't. Not, it seems to me now, out of a fundamental problem, but because I couldn't really see the coastline we were passing because of my preoccupation with the failures, as I saw them, of the relationship.Now, fifteen years have passed in the breezy way that great swaths of time pass at this time in my life, and I'm returning, with one of my sons, his wife, and their four year old boy to the same coastline, the itinerary, designed by my beloved daughter-in-law, covering the same ground, stopping at the same places:
History repeated itself today. Two sisters came to pick blackberries on the farm. They told stories of picking as little girls and headed to the patches, basket in hand, containers at the ready, arms and legs bare. “Thorns are gonna eat’em alive,” I thought.
As stories go, berries have been picked on this farm since the 20’s. My grandfather bought this acreage just after the war and even though at that time it was a cow farm, and there was no undergrowth in the fields, there must have been berries in the hedgerows. Now that the fields have islands of undergrowth which surround mature trees, (looks like a park now,) the berries are everywhere. Out the back door, off the back porch and within 100 feet I am having breakfast any time of the day-by the handful. This lasts through August and into September. We eat all we can, and put quart bags full in the big freezer. In January, pulling them out is a delightful treat, especially on vanilla ice cream with hot fudge.
words + photos by Don Mankin
My two Teva-clad feet poked above the water, framing the view of the mouth of the cove spilling into the broad channel before us. The silhouettes of several tree-covered islands and mountains overlapped in different shades of pastel and receded in the distance. I was floating on my back in the waters of coastal British Columbia. Not exactly the Caribbean – no palm trees, no rum drinks with paper umbrellas, and the water temperature was more than a tad or two colder. But the water was warm enough for a late afternoon swim, the scenery was more dramatic, and there was no one else to be seen other than my four sea kayaking companions relaxing after a long day of paddling in the warm bright sunshine of the aptly named Sunshine Coast. 
photo by Tracy Mallory
The Sunshine Coast is just a relatively short drive and an even shorter flight northwest of Vancouver. It’s easily accessible but still feels somewhat remote -- most of the coast above Powell River, the “urban” center of the region, can only be reached by boat or float plane. Like almost all of the BC coast, it is strikingly beautiful -- islands of all sizes covered in Douglas fir, hemlock, and cedar; narrow inlets and fjords indenting the rugged coastline; and jagged snow capped mountains in the distance framing long views across wide sounds
by Judith Fein
I have just figured out how to save a lot of money: I will never again knowingly drive, fly, train, boat, bicycle or walk to a conference or talk where the speaker uses Powerpoint.
illustration by Austin Kleon via Flickr (commons license)I don’t know the origin of Powerpoint, and I could goggle it if I wished to, but I don’t care. This is how I think it began: some decades ago, teachers used transparency gels with factoids and bullet points. They were projected onto a screen and the teacher read the words aloud to students who promptly became comatose. One of my friends blames those gels for his dropping out of college. Years later, someone read a lot of studies, or maybe one key, antiquated study, that dealt with how people learn. The bottom line, according to said study, was that people learn, absorb and retain information through repetition. Furthermore, I imagine, the process is enhanced if the same information is imparted to the learner simultaneously through different delivery systems.
That was when Powerpoint emerged from the womb of ideas, gave its first mewl, and started to develop and grow. It may have been cute as a baby and seductive as a teen, but it is boring and enervating as an adult. Now I metaphorically puke when I hear the word “Powerpoint.”
Steven Slater , “What Color is Your Parachute, dude?” Enquiring minds want to know. Exit, stage left………or was that Emergency Exit, stage left?
Hand me that other cold one , will you?
It was another one of those days, wasn’t it?
Your high speed, French, aluminum-tubed cattle car was just yards away….no, feet away, no, no, just inches away for home plate and…and …… game over.
Brakes set, seat belt light off and you’re out of this pig pen……YES !
Your last syllable of “Home again, Home again, and I’m out of here” had not made it past your whispering lips.
THEN, it happened……… like clockwork. Those important people get out of their rented seats to retrieve their overhead luggage. This is before the aircraft is stopped and the seat belt light is extinguished.
OMG, here we go AGAIN…..for the millionth time.
For months now I’ve been seeing rocks stacked three or four high on my way to the gym, which is located in a suburban mall. The first time I saw the rocks I was with my daughter and I brought the car to a screeching halt and said, “Would you look at that!” There were about five or six little rock towers on the rocky verge of the road where the mall had dumped tons of rounded and semi-angular rocks about the size of my head.
Kenya: Rules of the Wild
words + photos by Ellen Barone
It was a few days into my first African safari when I learned the Fourth Rule of Safari Travel: When you think you’ve spotted a lion, casually ask the guide “What’s that?” rather than blurt out “There's a lion!” because 9 times out of 10 the ‘lion’ will be a termite mound.
Later on, I’d learn other rules: No. 7, If you’re squeamish about eating flesh avoid restaurants with the word Carnivore in their title; No. 13, Never run out of the safari tent, half naked, screaming “there’s a creature in my bed” before you’ve determined it isn’t a hot water bottle put there by the room steward to take the chill off a high-altitude night; and No. 17, Avoid standing up suddenly in an open-top Land Rover with a metal roll-bar above your head.
New Life in the Yucatan
words + photos by Suzanne Marriott
When my husband, Michael, died on January 1st, 2006, I felt as if I had died, too. The light went out of my life. It was as if I were a candle and he were the flame, and his last breath had blown out that flame and left me alone in the dark. 
Yet, for some reason unfathomable to me, my life went on, though I saw no reason why it should. No longer able to make sense of my world, I began to rely more and more on my intuition.
A little over a year after his death, in March of 2007, I was sitting on my living room couch, reading my copy of Spirituality&Health magazine. Suddenly, an announcement for a workshop on travel writing jumped off the page. I’d always loved to write and to travel, and here was a way I could do both. The workshop was to be held in the beautiful but “undiscovered” southern Yucatan peninsula in Mexico near Belize. There was no reason in the world why I shouldn’t go, I thought to myself. Did I dare? Did I have the energy? Probably not, I decided. This was crazy.
Cambodia Off the Beaten Track
words + photos by Don Mankin
Our narrow wooden boat churns upstream powered by what looks like a motor from a small lawnmower. The wide, almost empty river is straight out of “Apocalypse Now.” I feel vaguely like Martin Sheen looking for Colonel Kurtz as I scan the sparsely populated river banks. The small boat has barely enough room for the four of us -- my wife Katherine, our guide, the operator and me.
We are heading to a small, isolated village buried in the jungle about 45 minutes up a tributary of the Mekong River, deep in the heart of Ratanakiri province, a mountainous region in the far northeastern corner of Cambodia. This is as far away from our home in Los Angeles as you can get in this world -- geographically, culturally, and in pretty much any other way you can imagine.
Healing at Saint Onenn’s Holy Well, Brittany
words + photos by Elyn Aviva
It was a place you couldn’t find unless you’d already been there—or unless you found someone to take you there, someone with permission to cross from here to there….
While my husband, Gary, and I spent the day in Paimpont, our traveling companions visited a holy well in the nearby village of Tréhorenteuc. By chance, they had met someone in a bookstore who told them about it and led them to it. They had dangled their feet in the water and meditated, one by one. It was a lovely place.