Wanderlust: What Inspires Women to Travel?

“What book or film has inspired your solo travel or group travel?”   I posted that question on four sites for women travelers, from millennial travelers to senior travelers, from solo travelers to group travelers (Girls Love Travel, Female Digital Nomads, Not So Young Female Bloggers, and Over 60 Female Travelers), asking them to share the books and films that …

Apollo 11 and the ‘60s: Why I Felt Nothing

According to the network news broadcasts, some 650 million people around the world watched the moon landing in 1969 and were “united” by the success of the Apollo 11 team. I had a different experience of those events. Although the mission seemed wondrous at the time, what else was happening that year made the event …

Talking Turkey: Another Best/Worst Trip

It was 2:00 a.m. and we hadn’t slept for almost 35 hours. We had been waiting for a car to pick us up from the airport in Istanbul, and I couldn’t reach our hotel on my phone. Then I realized that the man standing near me had been holding up a sign since we arrived. …

Part 2: When Dreams Become Reality Then Become Hell: Traveling to Tibet in 1987

The journey continues In the winter of 1987 I entered Tibet by walking from Kodari in Nepal to Zhangmu in Tibet—a journey of about three miles. As I ran across the steep hill from the town to the road, what looked like boulders tumbled around me. The sounds of the large rocks whizzing by became …

When Dreams Become Reality, Then Become Hell: Traveling to Tibet in 1987

“At 6,000 m (more than 19,500 ft.) above sea level, the Tibetan Plateau is both remote and hard to reach.” ---the BBC So I had always dreamed of reaching the “the roof of the world,” Tibet. I finally made it there in 1987, which turned out to be an inauspicious year to go. I had …

I’m Not a Stalker…But My New Friends are All 40 Years Younger than Me

Not that I’m counting, but the last time I checked the “largest online community of female nomads” site, I had 542 likes and 153 comments. And all of the comments were at least civil, a strange and heady sensation. How did I, a 71-year old almost-virgin blogger, get to that site? Well, I found it …

The Summer from Hell: Worst Trip I Ever Took, part 2

My brain hurts from trying to unearth memories of my truncated career as a tour guide for preteens and teenagers in Europe nearly 45 years ago. I believe that the experience (both the disasters and my inability to evade them) made me decide not to have children of my own. My daughter was born 15 …

The Summer from Hell: Worst Trip I Ever Took

So the ad appeared as if sent by a celestial messenger: Help Wanted---Tour Leader in Europe. It was 1976, and I was out of work. I had a series of short-term jobs vaguely related to my education in broadcast journalism---a low level job at a network news video library and a writing job at an audio production …

Travels with Babs Darling: On My First Tour

When I was growing up in the 1950s and early 60s I was an obsessive reader. One of my favorite subjects was travel, and I became fascinated by countries I considered “exotic” (definitely meat for a kid from a small town on the border of Newark, New Jersey). I daydreamed about Tibet and Machu Picchu …

Someday YOU’LL be a Mother and You’ll Know How It Feels: When Your Child Takes to the Road

It was 1970 and my first trip to Europe. My parents accompanied me to the airport, and, as I was on line headed for the plane, my mother said, “If you’re not back in six months, you’ll never see me alive again and my death will be on your hands.” Flabbergasted, I turned to everyone …