A Photo Essay of Cajamarca, Peru By Danielle Krautmann Charlie and I just got back from a long weekend in Cajamarca, where we celebrated my husband’s 30th birthday. Cajamarca is the city nearest to Cerro Corona, the mine where Charlie works, which is about a tw0-hour drive from the city.  Although Charlie knew he liked Cajamarca, [...]

Visit Tokyo on a Tight Budget By Katherine Whatley To a foreigner, Tokyo conjures up images of kimono, sky scrapers, Godzilla and crazy fashions. A city with a great vibe, it’s somewhere that any self respecting tourist should visit once. But let’s face it, Tokyo is expensive. It’s easier to spend more and more money [...]

One of my favorite views of probably my favorite city of its size in all of Europe, Porto, Portugal is a city I would visit again and again. Despite the many tourist friendly activities in the city, I somehow avoided most of them and just spent most of my five days wandering through the maze [...]

The Wheels of the Combi Go Round and Round By Danielle L. Krautmann Currently Lima, Peru has no public transportation.  This restricts Limenians to use either taxis, buses, cars, or “combies”.  Charlie and I don’t plan to get a car while we’re here because it’s easy enough for us to get from one place to [...]

By Stephen Bugno Here are some practical tips to improving your travel and your writing. Get the details Write descriptions of the five senses. A big mistake in my past 22 years of travel journaling (I started keeping a journal on a family vacation to the Southwest U.S. when I was seven years old at [...]

One of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen, the Mumbai Victoria Terminus train station stands as a glorious testament to 19th century architecture in this city of nearly 14 million people. It has been renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. The famous landmark, built in the Gothic style, was designed by Frederick William Stevens, in 1887-1888 [...]

A Visit to the Zoo and Some Cultural Observations By  Danielle L. Krautmann Per suggestion of one of my lovely readers, last week I visited Parque de las Leyendas, a zoo in Lima.  A quick bus ride from my house and cheap admission, the trip was definitely worth it. But not because of the animals. [...]

By Stephen Bugno Enough from the nay-sayers! British food is good! It is time for the unfavorable reputation of English cuisine to end. In my 20 days in England, I didn’t have a bad meal. The most memorable were the home cooked meals I had in Yorkshire and pub food in the cities and across [...]

On a Sunday afternoon my brother and his coworkers and I took a trip 35 km out of Bordeaux to the vineyards surrounding Saint- Émilion. The village, now a World Heritage site, was overrun with day-trippers (like us), souvenir shops, and wine stores. An easy five-minute stroll in one direction landed me in a quiet [...]

Making friends in Lima Like my Aunt Vicki, I love making lists.  To-do lists are my favorite, but I also enjoy making step-by step instructional lists, lists of places I want to travel, lists of potential blog topics, of men I’ve dated, of men my friends have dated, of men I’m currently dating (short list).  [...]