Dahab, Egypt There are a gazillion things to observe when on the road, and here's one of my favorites: the books people read. Anytime you see someone reading a book, they're traveling. There is of course the geographic location in which they are actually reading. The English fellow above, for example, is sitting on the...

(on the road to) Weyto, Ethiopia It's Christmastime, which means the TV-version of Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas! , published in 1957, has been in a few of our living rooms. Among other things it's a nice little travel story, showing the positive effect that sliding off our perch and encountering our neighbors...

Masaya National Park, Nicaragua Some things in life frustrate me. Take, for instance, how small the travel sections of most bookstores are, and how narrowly the genre is defined. I’m aware that narrow definitions are helpful and even necessary, not least when organizing a bookstore. But there’s a danger in this too, especially when we...

Bangkok, Thailand Selecting reading material for the road can be a daunting task, even in a relatively small bookstore such as the one in Bangkok pictured above. Interestingly, one of my favorite reads came not from a bookstore directly but from my mom through the mail. I was traveling across Asia at the time, and...

I realize that I read abnormally fast (mostly because all of my friends say "Hey, Claire, you read abnormally fast!") but I surely can't be the only one who occasionally dreads long flights, train rides, or car trips because I absolutely know I'll finsh my book before I get there and be stuck with the...

Wandering the world from new friend to new friend means meeting people you'd never imagined, forming bonds and relationships you'd never hoped for...and then having to leave them all behind. Living anywhere means making connections -- finding a coffeeshop where they recognize your order, going camping in the jungle with a group of Australian skydivers,...