On the Road

In Travel Journalism, After Every Disaster Comes “the Perfect Time to Visit”

But what big little lies do we tell ourselves when PR companies spin a local disaster into a travel opportunity?

Feb 09, 2023
Walking Off Grief on the Appalachian Trail

Every hiker is called to the trail for a different reason, but we all share a common goal: We all want to finish.

Feb 02, 2023
The Whole Country Is Fighting: A Dispatch from Ukraine

“The whole country is fighting,” one of my relatives told me. It was a throwaway remark, but it was the most apt thing I heard that weekend in Ukraine.

Dec 06, 2022
Revenge Travel Helped Me Learn to Manage My Anxiety

Though I estranged myself from my toxic family, their hold on my mind still needed to let me go. So I got on a plane and left.

Nov 28, 2022
Finding Peace at the Most Beautiful Taco Bell in the World

I need the ocean to quiet my thoughts, the surfers to remind me I’m a person, the Taco Bell as a place where I become solid again.

Jan 13, 2022
Traveling With My Parents Taught Me “Growing Up” Is Not “Growing Old”

My parents were old. It was time to take seriously the last years we had left. That is not, of course, how they saw things.

Sep 08, 2021
Searching for a Piece of Home in Havana

On the plane, I felt the tension of visiting so many unspoken truths.

Biking Back Home in Bogotá

Bogotá has the largest network of cycling infrastructure in Latin America. It is a city that begs to be biked.

Aug 23, 2021
Our Hair: How I Found Community and Coconut Oil in France

Across the thousands of miles, and the hundreds of years of historical and cultural distance, Albertine and I had our hair in common.

Jun 21, 2021
Who Gets to Travel to “Find Themselves”?

The spirit of manifest destiny has been rebranded into the travelogue.

May 13, 2021
I Will Always Be Able to Find My Father in the West

Out on the road and in the great outdoors my dad and I discovered we were more like each other than we believed.

Feb 05, 2021
Bodh Gaya Sells “Enlightenment” to Tourists—It Sold Me a Philly Cheesesteak

My heart is set on the Philly cheesesteak—the only one, I’m certain, to be found in India.

Oct 22, 2020
What Public Bathrooms Taught Me

The problem, of course, is that the public toilet involves doing the private in public.

Sep 24, 2020
Finding Biodiversity (and Chocolate) in the Forests of Ecuador

As a person who spends a lot of her time reading, writing, and teaching about endangered creatures and environments, I craved something hopeful.

Apr 08, 2020
Shocked Quartz: Traveling with a Chronic Illness

Will the vertigo again become acute? Will the stress of this, or some root cause that spurs it, end my life before it might otherwise end?

Mar 26, 2020
In Search of Wonder in Iseyin

It’s Nigeria, after all. Hope is what keeps many alive. In plethora of sufferings and fears, prayers abound.

Feb 20, 2020
A Nigerian’s Field Guide to Survival in Positano

We pass other boats and, from each one, there is the double-take, a stare. Two boats full of only black people is apparently a rare sight.

Oct 23, 2019
Facing My Fears in the World’s Largest Sand Desert

We were three single Americans with a whiskey handle. What reception would we wake to if we fall asleep on the wrong sand?

Dec 20, 2018
On the Haunting Beauty of Roadside Crosses in New Mexico

The roadside cross is a jarring balance of the emotional poles, internal and external, surely an action by and for the remaining soul—not the one who has departed.

Sep 11, 2018