JUMPING THROUGH FEAR When my husband Bud and I traveled to New Zealand in 2004, we knew the trip would include stunning scenery and fun adventures. We traveled with Overseas Adventure Travel, a company we’d used before that does an excellent job of exploring the more famous highlights as well as lesser-known marvels. What we … Continued
Taking the Stairs There is no elevator. No shortcut. No free ride. Sometimes the only way up is step by step powered by sheer will.“There it is. This is where the Olympic Team trains.” my mother announces. The five of us squished together in a Toyota Prius, nudge one another. Groggy from the drive, I … Continued
A number of Irelands co-exist in my mind. The lullabies my father used to sing painted Ireland as a land of green meadows and thatched cottages, a tame, quiet place inhabited by fishermen and beautiful maidens and sad mothers. The mythology book I treasured as a child, wearing the pages thin from reading and re-reading, … Continued
I hate spiders. Hate them. With a passion. Yet, that first morning in Nicaragua, after sleeping only three hours following a delayed flight from the United States, I stepped into the eco-hotel’s bathroom…and a spider was exactly what I saw. Brown, hairy, and huge, that awful thing could have eaten a small child. Or at least … Continued
Forest! A word that creates excitement! A word that has the capability to generate immense thrill! Moreover, it is a word that defines silence. I have always tried to find a place where I can feel my pulses, my heartbeat. A place which will bring the courageous nature out of me. From the street of … Continued
When our cruise ship docked at Roatan—a small island off the coast of Honduras—I naively assumed my five coworkers and I were about to put on our explorer hats, don our khakis proudly, and head out on an adventure full of slithering, poisonous snakes, hikes up serpentine trails to ancient ruins, and run-ins with shrewd … Continued
Orange Dust. That is all I could see through those dirt streaked windows of the small truck five of us were stuffed in. The thick, orange dust that hung over that anonymous African highway dimmed the light of the setting sun. Our only company was the dark shadows of bodies and trucks moving down that … Continued
I had made up my mind not to visit eateries along the coastal region because of the lousy service provided in some of them. I assumed they were all the same until I visited The Moorings Restaurant at a friend’s request, and was bowled over by the level of service and quality of food. … Continued
The mountains stand as majestic sentinels over the land, and the mountain goats are everyday yard pets. Many Glacier Valley is filled with a series of deep, rich glacial lakes, and on one stands a giant brown hotel. Many Glacier Hotel, built in 1914, sits at the base of Mount Allen, hugging the shores of … Continued
You cannot really tell how immense the sea is when you are looking at it from the beach, you know is huge, is right there in front of you, expanding for miles and you know that when you go to it you cannot just keep on walking inside it since eventually you … Continued