the sea and, as long as I can remember, showed no visible signs of wanderlust. My mother's travel adventures were bounded by New York City to the east and a cruise to Baltimore with my father on his ship.

 

During my formative years, I expanded my horizons by reading.My foreign language education began during 8th grade: the only alternative to Home Economics, was German, which I began then and took for seven long years through high school and college. Despite invitations by an aunt and uncle to travel with them to Germany, and from cousins in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to visit them, I never went. The one place I did go was to the D.C. suburbs to visit a pal who’d moved away: those trips, flying on the Eastern Airlines shuttle ($28 round trip!) were bliss, but aside from the experience of flying and being in a different place, I wouldn’t really call them traveling.

 

After college I headed to Washington, D.C.  My first job took me to San Antonio, Chicago, New Orleans, Baltimore, Chicago, Oklahoma City, Nashville, and Portland (Oregon). For the first time, other than high school field trips to New York, I visited art museums, attended dance performances and concerts, and sat in on annual meetings of folklorists, who talked about people with lives, ways, material culture, and artistic expressions vastly different from the ones I knew. I wasn’t yet really traveling, but those things drew me like a magnet. There’s nothing like a warm beignet as you look out over the Great Muddy at 3:00AM to help you feel the magic of a new and different place.

 

After D.C., I moved to New York, where I met my now ex-husband, a journalist whose dream it was to be a foreign correspondent. I didn’t think much about that idea or what it meant, but we took our honeymoon in Southeast Asia after he completed an assignment there. Six weeks altogether in Bali, which in 1982 was not the highly developed and highly trafficked tourist destination it is now, Bangkok and northern Thailand, Burma (not yet renamed Myanmar), and finally Rajasthan, India, by which time I was completely worn out, but in love with these places and the people we met along the way.

 

Four years later, we put our things in storage and boarded a plane for Manila, Philippines. It was 1986, the year Ferdinand Marcos was deposed and Corey Aquino was elected, an exciting time to live there. I traveled within the country, and wound up co-authoring a National Book Award winning book about photographer Eduardo Masferre, who documented the tribal people of the Philippine Cordillera, and I helped develop a book donation and exhibition project for Mobil Philippines—an amazing, incredibly rewarding experience and example of being in the right place with the right skill set at the right time.

 

Four years after that, my spouse and I headed to Tokyo for another tour of duty. This time, he was covering Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. When he traveled, I often went along, writing articles for regional travel magazines, about, for instance, hill tribe textiles in Thailand, the T’Boli tribal festival in the Philippines, Korean ceramics, dining in Seoul, and Hanoi, Vietnam, as it balanced on the cusp of change in 1990. I loved it. But being perhaps too conventional in my thinking, could not imagine raising our infant daughter, born in Japan, any place but the States. Shame on me.

 

Now, I'm based in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, and she’s launched, living in New York, thriving. And, I feel I can spread my wings and go where the wind and my inclination take me.

 

So far, they’ve had me in Paris several times, visiting Greece, and fantasizing about where I can go next. Stay tuned for that. Because now I know: I yearn to travel. And I think I understand how not to feel like a tourist, as obvious as I may sometimes be to the residents of places I visit. I crave the experience—not of sight seeing, but of absorbing and appreciating the history, culture, architecture, food, and customs of foreign places. With this website, I want to share my experiences with others.

 

Here's the bottom line: if you’re in your teens or twenties and keen to travel: find a way to do it. If you’re in your sixties or seventies, single or coupled, find a way to do it. You’ll have great and not-so-great experiences, but do it. If you go with an open mind and an open heart, it will widen your world and enrich your life more than you can imagine.