Every hill town in Provence is mesmerizing in its own way. Photo by Victor Block

Naturally we started our trip off with a glass of wine at lunch. After all, it was too late for breakfast…  “Deux verres de vin rouge – um, uh -- pas sec. Un peu…” Finally I just threw my hands in the air and…

Wandering the hilly, narrow cobblestone streets in our home base of Montalcino, a medieval city of interlocking passageways, steps, and alleyways curving around and through and behind and beyond the main square, I reminded myself I was walking through history spanning eight hundred years.

Stopping for lunch, I…

Great Wolf Lodge

“You want me to get on that and go down where?” I gasped high atop the Alberta Falls waterslide, looking down to an alleged pool that was well out of visual range.  My 11-year-old granddaughter…

The Valley of Temples in Sicily, Italy is one of the city’s most wondrous sites   Photo by Victor Block

It happens all the time with Overseas Adventure Travel. I start out expecting to write about the trip itself – in this case,…

Amazon Nature Tours

I am a hiker.  But at home, no one uses a machete to blaze the trail prior to walking on it as Souza, our Amazon guide, did, creating a path in the overgrown rainforest step by step.  Slicing, swatting, swooping, chopping, no branch, bush, vine or twig was…

Haveseen/Dreamstime.com

When I encountered my first giant Sequoia in the Mariposa Grove, my head did not tilt back far enough to see the top. Walking around the trunk practically required a GPS. Leaving noise and civilization behind to walk among these ancient trees brought us to the…

Jumbie dancers at The Bucanner's sugar mill

The Manor House, which is still in use today, was built in 1653 by the Knights of Malta. The sugar mill, constructed in 1733, now serves as a venue for weddings. Former slave quarters dating back 250 years provide…

Shops fashionable and funky line Key West’s Duval Street ;  photo by Dreamstime

Key West, Florida is more than a place. It's a spirit, a funky energy that enters your soul and takes residence in your worldview as well as your inner vision. A state of mind…

The authors riding an ATV at Primland

“You want me to go where?!” my mind shouted as I barreled down a 90-degree embankment leading into a wall of mud -- and gravel-encased woods. I was driving – or more accurately surviving – an ATV excursion at the…

PHOTO OF CLOUD FOREST

The last 18 miles of the road leading to the Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica, full of ruts and potholes by design, takes over an hour and a half to navigate. The locals like it that way. And they choose not to fix it because it would be too easy then for…

           Admittedly, I’ve never heard of Lo-Wei, a unique exercise class that combines yoga, strength training and flexibility that stretched my body in ways my mind never thought possible. But it is only one of almost three dozen fitness classes, all part of the dawn-to-dusk workout, weight loss and education focus of the one-of-a-kind, all-inclusive Deerfield Health Retreat and Spa in East Stroudsburg, PA where my friend Kathy and I spent three nights a while back.

       …

I’m a travel writer. Words are what I do. My stories may not always sing, but I usually can put one word in front of another succinctly enough to craft a quasi-well-written article.  But when I heard about the newly opened Planet Word several blocks northeast…

“You’re going to a what?” asked my friend apprehensively. Yup. A hotel. Three of them actually for a total of six days as part of an " Empire State Road Trip" in upstate New York in early September, sponsored by the Harbor Hotels…

Yes, of course, the four capitals of Central Europe we visited on our Danube River cruise with Grand Circle Tours – Prague, Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest – were all wrapped in wonder, overwhelmed with their impressive…

“You want me to go where?” my mind shouted as I barreled down a 90-degree encampment leading into a wall of mud -- and gravel-encased woods. I was driving – or more accurately surviving – an ATV excursion at the Primland Hotel in Meadows of Dan, Virginia.

On the hour’s ride, when I was willing to unclutch the steering wheel long…

When the couple, here for their 20th visit, commented that it was the first time they had taken the house tour -– one of the staples of the Mohonk Mountain House experience -- I asked what they had been doing all those years. Liz and Dan Gleason from Haddon Heights, New Jersey replied:  “There’s just so much to do all the time, you just can’t fit…

Leaving Chautauqua, NY in a continuation of an Empire State Road Trip in upstate, NY, sponsored by the Harbor Hotels Collection, I headed toward Watkins Glen and the 1000 Islands. When traveling from Harbor House to Harbor House along the way, each hotel gave us a little cooler full of water, fruit and snacks to fortify us for the 3-hour drive between the three hotels. Cool marketing ploy!

I left behind a museum devoted to one comedic icon to pursue a more subdued testament to…

A sugar-mill dinner at Montpelier

A few years ago, the fact that an island was the birthplace of one of the USA's Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton, would have elicited very little excitement. But in recent years, since the advent of the hit Broadway musical Hamiliton, Nevis is all…

A travel writer’s worst nightmare? Being at a loss for words to describe something. And so it is with Meow Wolf, an immersive interactive art installation and technological wonderland with unending surprises at every turn in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Oh sure, it’s magical, mind-boggling, awesome, inspirational - but no mere words can capture the…

It is not often that a toilet and a tea ceremony form perfect metaphors for the culture of a country, but so it is in Japan.

The toilet falls into the realm of delightful personal discoveries – albeit all of them in the hotel bathroom of the Kyoto Park Hotel. First, a warm toilet seat along with musical options with a variety of buttons that cleaned more areas with water spray than I have nether region body parts, a portion of the large bathroom mirror that…