travel

Prologue: It’s important to travel after a death, they say, to help process loss from a new vantage point. A month before my wedding in 2016, my mother passed away…

Plastic containers of dehydrated tofu, dense packets of black bean paste and glass jars of chili oil marked with red simplified characters line the second shelf of the pantry in…

In Paris I was trying to buy a ticket for the fast train to Angers. Interrupting, the lady at the desk rattled off something, then laughed haughtily. In fractured French,…

Living in Thessaloniki, Greece, in the shadow of Mount Olympus, it feels only natural to claim being shot by Eros’s arrow. [Cupid only works in Italy and was unavailable –…

A Full Irish Breakfast On our first morning at the Charleville Lodge in Dublin, I awoke to the sound of maids in the corridor. They beat pillows with dull thunks…

I’m traveling into unknown territory with a man I just met. His name is Karl, my safari guide here in Namibia, and we’re driving along a coast shaped by death…

Image Credit: Nsey Benajah One week out from Christmas, I am sitting in a narrow bathtub in my hotel room in Pine Mountain, Georgia. Mildew thrives in the poorly caulked…

Our tour guide pulls over on the side of the road, a few hundred feet from a gas station. We wait inside the battered white van as a hard rain…

Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London rises from the ground 750 feet from the original site of the theater, the one built by the Chamberlain’s Men. Its white timbered exterior glows…

In July of 1999, I sat on a bench atop the Palatine Hill in Rome, as alone and grief-stricken as I have ever been. I was twenty-one years old, and…

Place names often sound to me like incantations. If the whole world can be conjured by shapes drawn and labeled on a map, then this world is surely the result…

I arrived in Rome at the end of a hot June, to study Italian for a month the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I hadn’t brought…

Featured photo — “a city through a jungle” —  from author Katie Simpson. Each night my dad made the same toast: “to another day in paradise.” Our glasses clinked as we…

I.  I crossed the Canadian border in mid-June. The border agent peered at me as I explained that I was going to Horsefly to visit some friends. He told me…