Where We Get Our Food : Corn Harvest in the Texas Panhandle

I’ll admit it. I’m a city girl. That’s not something most Texans admit. There’s a lot of country pride in my state. But I grew up in a big city suburb and I’ve never lived in anything even remotely close to a town. I don’t know anything about farms. My husband is a farm boy. …

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The Tsingy of Madagascar

The Tsingy of Madagascar

The tsingy of Madagascar ate the thin, needle-like rock formations in the country with have a soft, sweet sing-song name. As I teetered with one foot on a knife-edge and the other in the air, the word soft didn’t come into it. I gripped the tsingy and tried not to look down—a long, long way …

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Visiting Dry Tortugas National Park, Florida

Dry Tortugas National Park, Florida

Dry Tortugas National Park is one of the least visited national parks in the United States, with only 60,000 visitors per year. This is primarily due to its remote location 70 miles west of Key West, Florida. It is also the most aquatic of all the U.S. national parks with 98% of the park consisting …

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How to Travel the World on an Indian Passport

Indian couple traveling the world on an Indian passport.

The experience of traveling the world on can vary greatly depending on a traveler’s passport. A lot of Americans and Europeans assume they have the most powerful passports in the world, but that honor falls to Japan, where passport-holders can visit 190 countries without a visa. Many people in the world, however, are not so …

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Medina of Marrakesh

Medina of Marrakesh UNESCO World Heritage Site

From the World Heritage inscription: The capital of the Almoravids and the Almohads played a decisive role in the development of medieval planning. Marrakesh (which gave its name to the Moroccan Empire) is the textbook example of a large Islamic capital in the Western world. With its maze of narrow streets, houses, souks (markets), traditional …

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Comparing Gary Arndt’s and Francis Tapon’s West African Experiences

My friend and author, Francis Tapon, has been traveling around Africa for the past year. While I was sailing up the west coast of Africa this year, he had been traveling across similar territory by land. Given how different our trips were, I thought it would be interesting for Francis to compare his observations about …

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My Most Memorable Hotels of 2012

For the second year in a row, I’m posting the list of my most memorable hotels of the past year. As before, this list isn’t necessarily a list of the “best” hotels. I don’t go out of my way to find hotels to review and I’m not a hotel reviewer. I don’t have a checklist …

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October 2012 Questions and Answers

It is time once again to dip into the proverbial inbox and answer the burning questions that internet has been dying to ask. Happy To Be Homeless asks: Do you ever worry about your carbon footprint on the world? I’m not a huge environmentalist by any means, but it seems that you take numerous long-duration …

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Sian Ka’an

Sian Ka’an UNESCO World Heritage Site, Mexico

From the World Heritage inscription: Sian Ka’an is situated on the eastern side of the Yucatán Peninsula in the state of Quintana Roo. Where possible, boundaries were defined to coincide with natural features: the site is bounded by the Caribbean Sea and the barrier reef to a depth of 50 m in the east; by …

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