It’s difficult to write an essay when you are constantly on the move, interacting with fellow travelers, giving talks, eating too many delicious meals, and just plain being absorbed in the magic of Christmas Markets along the Rhine River. But what about pulling out a … Read more
I’m sitting at the gate in the Piedmont Triad Airport (Greensboro, High Point, Winston-Salem). It’s a delight to fly out of this airport. It’s got everything necessary, yet is quiet, friendly, and overall the opposite of frantic. My route will replicate one I would have … Read more
It was cheesy, I admit it. There we were, joyfully circling the same fountain that Julie Andrews and the actor-versions of the von Trapp children skirted as they sang “Do, a deer, a female deer.” We ran through the same arbor, flinging our arms as … Read more
The scene from my room’s balcony encompasses a shimmering finger of Lake Lucerne and a green foothill of Mt. Rigi, a 6000-ft. Alpine mountain towering over the village of Merlischachen. In the middle, a wash of snowcaps glistens to form the perfect vanishing point. The … Read more
Looking across the Danube through sheets of rain at the creamy façade and dark dome of Budapest’s Parliament, I shake my head in amazement. I did not expect to be in Budapest this week, sitting before my room’s picture window in the Castle Hilton, a … Read more
I’m writing on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving while gazing directly at a ridge of snow-covered Alps. The sun is setting in a blaze of white-and-black glory here in Interlaken, Switzerland, the site from which the Holiday Market Tour begins, my last Smithsonian Journey of the … Read more
This week has flown. It seems just yesterday that I asked Hank to search out art for last week’s essay about the possible demise of the key. (As usually, he found terrific paintings, do you agree?) So here I am in Amsterdam, hours away from … Read more
This weekly essay inevitably reflects whatever is on my mind (for better or worse). Right now, my mind resembles the state of a kitchen drawer containing everything from toothpicks to the tape measurer. Trapped in layers of mental miscellany, my ability to put together coherent … Read more
It was good to get home Sunday evening. Remember what that pigtailed gal with the doggie said to Auntie Em? “There’s no place like home!” Of course there are always places more majestic than home. More intriguing, more evocative. We saw plenty of them on … Read more
I have stayed in a lot of hotels over the past decade. My work on Smithsonian Journeys tours takes me through a string of European cities for weeks at a time. Also, my role speaking as “Professor Carol” puts me in a multiplicity of US … Read more