This week’s #FriFoto topic is “Special Moments.” It seemed a little too Hallmark to put up a shot of Don and I on vacation, so I chose this candid photo I took in Paris in 2010. It was an unusually warm March day, and people apparently felt no shame taking it to the streets. City of...

It’s the time of the year where I start ordering gift baskets or a box of chocolates for certain far-flung relatives. Before my trip to Switzerland earlier this fall, I would have flipped through a Harry & David catalog, ordering whatever bonbons looked the tastiest. Now, though, my chocolate...

Photo courtesy of UggBoy, Flickr Creative Commons One of the biggest arguments that I have with my husband when we’re on the road together concerns the hotel  mini bar. I avoid them like the plague, preferring to save money by buying snacks and money at a nearby grocery store. Whereas he can’t...

This week’s Photo Friday (#FriFotos) theme is “skylines.” Instead of a world capital or big city, I wanted to present the quaint beauty of Lucerne. Switzerland, which I visited for 10 days in September. Switzerland knocks you over the head with its cuteness, to the point where it’s...

This article previously ran on Frommers.com. It’s inspired by the application process that I went through for my September trip to St. Petersburg. Because we were traveling independently – yet still as a group – we had to get Russian visas. Several in our group found the process took...

  The business of Santa is alive and well in Lapland, which seems to have cornered the market on all things St. Nick, at least for Europeans. On my recent trip to Finland, I found that Rovaniemi’s campaign, more than 50 years in the making, to serve as Santa’s hometown has paid off handsomely...

My hatred of glasses goes back more than 30 years, when an optometrist  put a pair on me and said, “Does that seem better?” He had no idea. Until that day, I had always seen the world in shady outlines, a beautiful blur that fueled my imagination (even if it did cause me to trip a lot)....

This week’s #FriFotos theme is Trick or Treat – so we thought we’d go the sweet route and post a photo of a mouth-watering dessert from Cal Pep, which serves some of the best tapas in Barcelona (I mentioned them before in my post on where to eat in Barcelona). Cal Pep looks somewhat...

I grew up in Minnesota, so I knew a bit about the good – and bad – aspects of Scandinavian cuisine (lutefisk, never again!). But I was surprised to discover that the simple flavors and natural ingredients of Finnish food suited me, and we ate well on our visit, particularly in Helsinki and...

What surprised me the most about my visit to Finland is that Finnish design is not just something that you see in the shops of Helsinki. It’s a way of life, and one that reflects their history and innate quirkiness.When babies are born, the Finnish government gives the family a box full of goodies,...