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I don’t do bucket lists or trips of a lifetime. Places are not to be consumed like products; the journey is not an inconvenience. Travel is iterative: each trip is a prototype for the next time I visit an area; there’s no pressure to tick off all the boxes.

When I was growing up in England, the day after Christmas was a day for relaxing and eating leftovers. Television advertising, finally freed from promoting the excesses of Christmas consumption, switched to hawking packaged vacations.

I celebrate the little details of every day in my Microposts. In this post I somewhat arbitrarily chose one micropost for each month of 2023.

Next week, my partner, two friends, and I will be hiking a section of the Reivers Way in Northumberland, England, from inn to inn over five days. The Border Reivers were notorious for terrorizing communities in the area around the border between Scotland and England from the 13th to the 17th centuries. Some of them… Continue reading In the Footsteps of Border Raiders, a Saint, and Vera

Travel influencers urge us to buy unnecessary gear, such as a document organizer, a hotel room blacklight, or an in-flight clip-on cup holder. I add passport covers to that list.

In normal times a flight from Minneapolis to Tokyo would take us through Russian airspace for several hours. This is no longer possible.

Here’s a list of planning details that needed attention as we got closer to traveling to Japan with our nephew and his dad.

My partner’s uncle was a soldier in occupied Japan at the end of the Pacific War. The story could’ve been so different.