Unpacking from the Trip I Didn’t Take

Greetings, readers! Labor Day is now well behind us and the summer days are winding to a close. This means the rains of fall have returned to Ann Arbor, night is falling quickly, the overnight temperatures are dipping ever further toward winter, and the morning drive is darker. I can feel the seasons pressing forward […]

The Magical Thinking We Do

A trip left unfulfilled leaves an emptiness in its place: a vacuum. And an uncontrolled vacuum is a force of destruction. Look around you at the world today. Look at COVID, which has cost so many lives. Two years ago this week, I was supposed to be in Portugal but there was a great deal […]

In Which I Didn’t Pay Much Attention

Miguel, my driver from the airport, hadn’t heard of my hotel. I looked at the reviews again, slightly worried – there weren’t as many as I remembered, and nothing recent. What had I been thinking? When I was booking this trip I had considered several resorts, but they felt constrained or out of the way. […]

Laying Over

I’ve said it before: there are a lot of moving parts when traveling in a pandemic. Costa Rica shouldn’t have been bad. They don’t require COVID testing for entry, so that was one logistical bar I didn’t have to hurdle (I did pre-trip testing anyway, and that was negative). And they don’t require an international […]

I Know Those Songs, But I’ve Never Heard Them Before

The hands of the clock had ticked to well past 9:30, the sun was a distant memory, and Dan and I still sat at the restaurant, lingering over our food, and just allowing ourselves to be here, in this moment, with the call of sleep whispering in our ears. The men smoking and singing at […]

The Spiced, Perfumed Air is Hot

In the evening twilight, when the sun has set over the mountains to the west and the sky is still streaked with oranges, reds, and purples, the Nile shines like a silvery serpent as she flows northward from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean Sea. I am in Luxor now, which in ancient times was Thebes, […]