Category: Life Lessons
-
Bag The Fish
A Step-By-Step Guide to Salmon en Papilotte Cooking food wrapped in something is about as old as cooking itself. People were steaming fish in leaves, clay, and bark long before anyone owned an oven. The French version, en papillote, is just the dressed-up cousin of that idea. Papillote originally meant a twist or wrapper of paper. It’s the…
-
A Double-Butted Adventure
A tandem bicycle trip across the United States sounds like a cute travel fantasy until you put it on a calendar, start training, and realize the road does not care about your mood. Teri M. Brown proves that point by riding from Astoria, Oregon to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 2020, when travel restrictions…
-
Sailing Through Life
Selling everything to sail around the world sounds romantic until you hear what it actually costs. It isn’t just the money. It’s your identity, your routines, and the comfort of having a backup for everything. In this episode, Rita and I talk with Alison Gieschen and her husband Dan, who traded a successful equestrian life…
-
Storytelling and Travel as a Path to Healing
Life doesn’t follow a map, and I think that’s exactly why this conversation stuck with me long after we stopped recording. Rita and I sat down with Shannon Lampkin, a travel storyteller, author, and podcast host who started “Travel Time Stories” as a show about adventure and then watched it turn into something bigger —…
-
Get Your Vote Counted
Six years ago in October of 2020 I posted a blog about the importance of voting in that year of COVID. Despite the extra precautions needed because of the pandemic, we had just taken advantage of early voting to get our voice heard. In that article I wrote that I never feel so patriotic and…
-
Travel More for Less
The fastest way to travel more isn’t a bigger paycheck. Believe me, I’ve had a few different paychecks over the years. Some good, some not so much (looking at you, worm farm), and the size of the number was never really the problem. The real trick is having a better system. Travel writer and coach…
-
Hands Off the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
I have some wonderful memories associated with The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Over the last 25 years I have attended plays, musicals, and more. It was there when my first wife, Carolyn, was fighting cancer and needing a scooter if any kind of walking was involved, that we were able to…
-
Expat Parenting and Solo Travel
Paula Barnes has been living the expat life for close to two decades now, and if there’s one thing her story proves, it’s that confidence in travel isn’t something you’re born with — you build it, one uncomfortable moment at a time. She and her husband left Australia thinking they’d do six months in Taiwan.…
-
The Gift of Time Together
Coming home exhausted from a trip usually isn’t a travel problem — it’s a planning problem. We learned that the hard way more than once, which is probably why this episode hit home for us. On this one, Rita and I sit down with Paul Partridge, a former financial advisor who traded spreadsheets for travel…
-
Confessions of an Exploited Amazon Author
Let me tell you something about the publishing business that nobody tells you before you get into it: Amazon is not, in fact, running a charity on your behalf. I know, I know. Shocking stuff. But here’s the actual math, because I did it so you don’t have to. Say I sell a paperback for…
