YAY! After three long months of awkwardly hiding my nausea, fatigue, and increasingly poofy waistline, my husband Colin and I can finally announce: we are expecting our first baby this November… and we are so excited!!!!
As we walked through Boston’s Lilac Sunday in the Arnold Arboretum (aren’t these flower photos gorgeous?) with our mothers on Mothers’ Day, I thought back with a chuckle to 2010 when I was traveling [...Read More!]
WOWZA did we have a lot of snow in Boston! Two feet, to be exact. Raging winds whipped the wet, fat snow of Blizzard Nemo all over our city. Windows shook, the view was waves of white, and schools were closed for three days. Driving was banned, and travel ground to a halt.
Being married to another teacher is splendid on a triple snow day like this. Colin and I ate tons of ice [...Read More!]
In your daily life, do you ever misplace your keys or phone, then spend hours looking for them? During travel, have you ever accidentally left behind pieces of clothing or toiletries… or even your passport? Do you ever arrive at work or school only to slap your forehead, wailing, “I can’t believe I forgot that paper at home!”?
Follow these four rules, and you will never again forget behind or lose your belongings.
RULE #1: [...Read More!]
This is the FIVE-HUNDREDTH article I have written on my Around the World “L” Travel Blog since its birth in 2009! The timing is fitting for three reasons. Read on to hear them…
First, as you can see from these photos, I just got married!
What does that have to do with this site? Well, I started this blog when I left my job to voyage around the world for a year alone in [...Read More!]
Want to improve your romantic, friendship, or family relationships?
Here’s an easy method that works, and is even backed up by science: Travel for a day trip or longer.
Why does travel enhance human connections? Expansion.
To elaborate on the research behind this, let’s draw from the excellent New York Times article, “The Happy Marriage is the ‘Me” Marriage.” In this article, Tara Parker-Pope pulls together a number of recent studies to explain that happier [...Read More!]
“Argh!” my friend emailed, “How are you able to juggle all your work and social and fitness obligations??”
“Help me organize my life!”
In the email I wrote back to her, I realized that I have, indeed, honed a set of concrete Life Juggling strategies that have enabled me to get a ton done (click here for examples of uber-productivity) while still staying sane.
Allow me to share these productivity tricks with you now, as you [...Read More!]
Hello From Madrid, Spain, where I am on a wonderful, whirlwind Free Teacher Training Tour run by EF Tours!
On this 5-day trip, I am in training with a group of teachers who have flown in from around the United States to prepare as much as possible to lead a group of our students abroad. In my case, I will be leading 42 Boston students to Beijing, China in just 1.5 months!
So far, this [...Read More!]
On Wednesday I came home to find a rose petal scavenger hunt!
Under the largest petal was a beautiful letter from my beau, Colin, along with the instructions: “Go to the smallest suspension bridge in the world.”
I Googled the clue… and it turns out the smallest suspension bridge in the world is in the Boston Public Garden!
I sprinted the five blocks from our apartment to the garden and onto the bridge over [...Read More!]
Yesterday was the first day of Fall, the Autumnal Equinox. And for myself and hundreds of other people who knew and loved a remarkable man named Kolajo Afolabi, yesterday was also a fall from innocence into deep grief as our dear, dear friend fell while running and passed away from the resulting injuries.
To celebrate our friend’s life, a life of warmth, contribution, love, and joy, I invite you to gaze at these [...Read More!]
Tears poured down my cheeks and into my gourmet hot dog as I sat across from my friend Meg, less than a week before my flight to Beijing and the subsequent 50-something hours of trains and buses I will take through Chongqing, Yunyang, and Shanghai.
“I’m sorry,” I choked out, “but I’m always a complete mess before international travel. Every little thing makes me freak out: an offhand remark from a friend… a [...Read More!]