Sadly, I haven’t had the chance to stay in a Japanese ryokan (guesthouse) yet. With luck, I will in the future. In the meantime, I did stumble across an English-language website that handles bookings for ryokan across the country, JapaneseGuestHouses.com. It gets praise for good service in two reviews on Trip Advisor (even if the […]

It all started when I began wondering where passports came from. I pitched every magazine editor I knew on a story about the history of passports, but no one–and I mean no one–was interested. Fine, I thought. I’ll broaden the concept and make it into a book. The history of passports eventually became a chapter […]

I arrived in Richmond, B.C., this morning for a conference jet lagged and hungry. So after checking into the conference hotel, the River Rock Casino Resort, I asked the concierge in the casino where I could find some good Asian food within a short walk. Even though the hotel lies on the edge of Richmond’s […]

Welcome2France.com, which specializes in luxury apartment rentals in Paris, has just announced last-minute discounts of up to 25% on some of its properties. Most of the deals are valid February 1-15 and March 1-15, but there are a few available in late March. Many owners require a minimum stay of five days or a week. […]

My husband and I stood uncertainly on the front step of a tall, 17th-century canal house in Amsterdam’s infamous Red Light District. We’d never done anything like this before, and we weren’t at all sure how it was going to turn out. We’d even come up with a signal we could use if one of […]

Think of London and what pops to mind? Big Ben, the West End, Piccadilly Circus? That’s how many tourists experience it, but most Londoners themselves live in rather more ordinary surroundings. And, if Monty Python is to be believed, few are more ordinary than the suburban Sussex town of Esher. (In one Python episode, Eric […]

Until very recently, if you Googled “house swapping,” you’d generally uncover sites such as HomeLink and Intervac: organizations that focus on helping vacationers switch homes for a few weeks at a time. Lately, however, I’ve been hearing about more people arranging longer exchanges. Swaps of six months to a year have long been a small […]

OK, I hear you saying. First she writes about some posh resort (see my post earlier today about reggaelates), and now she’s writing about bus tours? Isn’t this the blog for people who want to get beyond the usual tourist spots? Bear with me. These bus companies appear to go far beyond the usual “And […]

OK, this post deviates a bit from my standard “like a local” fare, but a press release just crossed my desk that made me laugh. The world has officially gone mad. The spa at Jake’s, a boutique hotel in Jamaica, has just launched “Reggaelates”: Pilates classes set to reggae music. Somewhere, Bob Marley is sighing […]

I’ve heard of people travelling from city to city as serial house sitters, but I’d never heard of someone doing so as a pet sitter…particularly when the “pets” in question include rabbits and chickens as well as the more common dogs and cats. But a recent story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune profiles Minnesotan Anne Estes, […]