Contributor to US News & World Report Travel and to Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel. Writer addicted to sunlight and road trips. Aspiring novelist. Always curious.
A new kind of tourism: Virtual travel in the metaverse
You might not need to hop on a plane to travel in the near future. 5G can power a new kind of tourism, one that allows virtual travel to Venice, Seoul or even the Pompeii of the past.
Going forward more of our content will be permanently logged via blockchain technology—enabling us to provide greater transparency with authoritative verification on all changes made to official releases.
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Imagine checking off the destinations on your bucket list—those pricey dream vacations where you ...
Instead of arid emptiness in the California desert, I found resilience in Joshua Tree National Park at a time when I needed it most
Even in the harshest conditions, the Mojave knows how to start over. For writer Katrina Woznicki, it offered a lesson in perseverance after divorce.
Under a gorgeous blue-ribbon sky, a breeze catches the door of a decaying 1930s pickup sinking into the desert, and slams it open and shut, like some ghost truck. It is a classic American Wild West sound, that desolate creak captured in movies, but contrary to mythmaking, the truck — one of the relics of fortune-seeking miners, found on the hikin...
Rider of the Storm
After years of winter depression, a New York transplant gets a fresh view of January.
Generations Talk Money: Q&A With Millennial Rose McAleese
Rose McAleese credits her upbringing as the child of an Irish immigrant for giving her an appreciation of the value of a dollar. The 29-year-old also grew up in a household where her mother was the breadwinner and her dad worked odd jobs. That experience, she says, taught her that women could achieve financial success.
Today, McAleese is a Los Angeles-based screenwriter, which means sometimes she has great-paying freelance gigs and sometimes she doesn’t. Whether she’s flush or pulling in meag...
Generations Talk Money: Q&A With Gen Z's Caroline O’Reilly
Caroline O’Reilly, 20, felt fortunate growing up. Her family’s finances were stable, even during the 2008 recession, when they watched homes in their neighborhood in Hagerstown, MD, going up for sale around them. The community already struggled with a poverty rate hovering at 27%.
O’Reilly is now entering her senior year of college at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. For the past four years, she has worked for the restaurant chain Red Lobster, mainly during summers and school breaks, ...
What to Do When Relatives Ask for Money
Should you lend money to a loved one or family member? Maybe your sibling could use help with a down payment, your favorite cousin has hit hard times or a parent who made some bad financial choices now needs assistance.
Your first impulse may be to help out. But conventional wisdom cautions against loaning relatives money: After all, you don’t want to give the impression that you’re the “family ATM” or risk straining family ties. The fact is that there’s no easy answer; mixing family and debt...
Spring Cleaning? Why Not Spruce Up Your Finances, Too?
Winter spending can add up quickly: The holidays take a bite out of your budget; heating the house leads to higher energy bills; and on cold days, maybe you ordered more takeout than you should have. But now that spring has arrived, it’s the perfect time to clean up your finances and clear away bad spending habits or financial excesses. These easy steps will help you declutter your finances.
Shred Old Documents
Do you have stacks of paper lying around collecting dust? Or financial documents s...
The Culver Hotel: A Contemporary Time Capsule
Flatiron buildings aren’t common in Los Angeles, a city more known for horizontal mid-century sprawl than for the 1920’s desert boomtown at its true core. A few weeks after relocating from the New York City area to Culver City, a neighborhood next door to Santa Monica and a brief drive south of Beverly Hills, I was stuck in traffic—in true Southern California fashion—and found myself in the shadow of a very vertical flatiron building that looked like a slice of old New York. It stood out to m...
Wallaby and Green Ants: A Culinary Odyssey in Australia’s Northern Territory
One of the best meals in my life to date occurred when I was so jetlagged that I poured a little wine into my lap because my brain and arm had miscalculated the distance between the glass and my face. Thankfully, forkfuls of food got where they needed to go. Despite fatigue and confusion about not only my current time zone but also my hemisphere, my taste buds knew what they knew: This meal was like no other.
After three flights involving about 25 hours of travel, my first trip Down Under bro...
The Roxbury Motel: Imaginations Unleashed in the Catskills
The beauty of walking into the Catskills’ Roxbury Motel is that whatever was weighing you down that day—money, parenting, traffic—vanishes instantly. Roadside lodging rarely offers jaw-dropping moments, but as soon as you slide that key into one of the lime-green doors and step into your assigned room you’ll have one, and be too enchanted to wallow in your daily stresses.
And it doesn’t matter which room you walk into: MaryAnn’s Coconut Cream Pie (room 27) or Miss Kitty’s Saloon (room 22) or ...
Alkina Lodge: Embracing Nature in Style
There are advantages to receiving an itinerary late and not knowing where you’re going or spending the night. After an unforgettable, astonishingly beautiful drive along Australia’s Victorian coast, my group turned inland onto a winding road in Wattle Hill, and then we were in a driveway attached to what looked like a bunch of Legos. We got out of the van and were enthusiastically told by our hosts that dinner would be ready soon.
Then we went inside the hotel and saw our rooms.
Alkina Lodge ...
Aside Macau’s Casinos, a Thriving 16th Century City
Ask a resident of Macau where to buy the freshest egg tart or enjoy a phoenix egg roll, and you’ll likely get an answer you can’t plug into Google Maps. The response may begin with something along the lines of: “Turn left at the McDonald’s, walk a few blocks, make a right, maybe another block or two, look for that church, St. Dominic’s, there’s a street off that,” which might leave any visitor at a loss.
That’s because the Macanese don’t follow official street names, which are written in both...
Obsessions: Hotel Pools
My essay about my lifelong obsession with hotel swimming pools around the world.
Bellfire Tipi: A Fine-Tuned Twist on Glamping
We arrived in darkness, late because of Friday night traffic on I-87 North, everyone escaping Manhattan at the same time for someplace quieter. With a few stars not really lighting our way, we used our iPhones as lanterns as we were guided through a field towards the edge of some woods. Here, in Roxbury, New York, in the heart of the Catskills, our hosts maintain a tipi. We slept in it that night, but didn’t truly see where we were until the following morning. Trees. Charm. Birds singing. It ...
Open: Alive Among Italy's Dead
Less than 9km from Mount Vesuvius, near the entrance to Pompeii, a vendor sells bottles resembling penises. The corked bottles are red, white, blue, and yellow and painted with kissy faces or with sad or surprised expressions.