Tag: travel
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On coming home, again
I have changed my life’s trajectory several times over the past 10 years. I’ve been a college admissions adviser, a ticket booth operator, a family-owned farm employee, a fruit and veggie factory worker, a radio intern, a content producer for newspapers, a nonprofit children’s counselor, a photojournalist, a freelance magazine writer, an EFL educator and…
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One week in Istanbul, Turkey
A friend once described Istanbul as a “storied city,” and that phrase stuck with me. Istanbul is a city of diverging stories that defies classification. It’s impossible to cover everything within the space of two or three days, and although I spent about a week there, I barely scratched the surface. I was lucky enough…
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I’m moving to Spain!
When I last wrote, I was in the process of moving the tiny house to Austin. As of now, I will live in the house for the next two months in Corsicana, but my ultimate plans have changed. In September, I will move to Spain. After a series of logistical failures and fortunate events, I…
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Build your own travel map
I’ve been using the site Roadtrippers, which allows users to build their own travel maps. The site has categories for accommodation; attractions and culture; food and drink; outdoors and recreation; points of interest; vacation rentals; camping and RV; entertainment and nightlife; services, shopping; sports and even motoring. It also shows how long you’ll be driving,…
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Travel Playlist
My favorite songs about travel: “Lonesome Cities” by Nina Simone “The Traveling Kind” by Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowel “The Long and Winding Road” by the Beatles “I’ve Been Everywhere” by Johnny Cash “Rivers and Roads” by the Head and the Heart “The Passenger” by Iggy Pop “I Will Be Back One Day” by Lord…
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My winning travel essay!
It’s finally here! Last February, I placed in a travel writing contest through the magazine Transitions Abroad. They’ve posted the article to their website so you can have a look here. The name of the essay is Neighborhood of Nations: exploring culture without leaving home. It’s about my internship working with refugees in Fort Worth,…
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Coming Home
I’ve visited a new place every year since I was 17. After constant movement through flights, bus rides and cross-country road trips, it’s curious to come home and be still. Every day I drive to an office, sit at a computer I can’t afford and process pieces of information for other people’s lives. I help…
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Travel 101: Trusting Strangers
I was standing at a train station in Vienna, Austria wondering if I’d made a mistake, that my father was right and I had been talking to a 40-year-old plumber the entire time. Then I saw her. I recognized Stef at once. I could tell by the way she walked, by her style of dress,…
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Travel and Privilege
Košice, Slovakia 5:28 a.m. Tuesday June 10, 2014 I could begin this post with clichés about the journey being better than the destination and about how wanderers must lose their way to achieve fulfillment, but I’ll spare you the scrolling. You’ve heard it. Instead, I’m going to talk about privilege. Now privilege is a buzz…
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I’m being published!
Really pleased to announce I’ve won another writing contest with the travel magazine Transitions Abroad. This was for their 2015 Expatriate Writing Contest. The name of my essay was Travel for All: the Expatriate vs. Immigrant Debate. I got the idea after reading a Guardian article about the stigmatization of immigration compared to the privilege of…
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What am I doing in Slovakia?
What am I doing in Slovakia? Slovakia is a small Eastern European country, nestled southeast of the Czech Republic and south of Poland, above Hungary with a sliver of the Ukraine to the right and Austria to the left. The main language spoken here is Slovak. The Republic gained its independence in 1993 and was…
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Mystery of the Hradová Ruins
On the outskirts of Košice, among the low mountains and surrounding forest are the ruins of Hradová Hill. Very little is known about these ruins although they belonged to one of the largest medieval castles in Slovakia. “It is definitely a castle established by a king,” said Matej Ruttkay, head researcher of the archaeological institute…