Europe
I've lived in Germany, France, England, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Ireland. Long enough to know that the good version of Europe is rarely the one in the brochure.
It's a cove in Taormina instead of the crowds on Capri. A gelato counter with dull, unglamorous colors, because that's the one an Italian would pick. The inside of the Sagrada Família at sunset, when the light turns red and orange and the whole church catches fire. A piazza in Rome at nine at night, still filling up, everyone eating late and no one in a hurry.
Last year, in County Cork, I stopped to let a flock of sheep cross. I ended up having dinner with the shepherd and his wife. Can you even imagine?
That's the Europe I can plan for you. Not the one you can find online.
Asia
I lived in Kyoto and Gifu, and after college in Hong Kong and Shanghai. It's the part of the world I never stop wanting to go back to.
There's a word in Japan, omotenashi, for a kind of service that goes past hospitality into something closer to devotion. Leaving an onsen in Hakone, the manager came running out after me insisting I stay for a meal, on the house, because I was a valued guest. It was my first time there.
That's the Asia I know. A back-alley noodle counter in Osaka where the sake and the conversation are the best of your life, language barrier and all. A temple in Kyoto or Taipei that no one has told you about, where the monks will talk to you like a friend. A stretch of coast in Goa more beautiful than any Caribbean beach I've seen, and the people even better.
It is ferociously beautiful, and it is nothing like the West, in the very best way. To me it feels like home.
North America
I was born in Brooklyn, grew up outside Chicago, spent my summers on the bayou in south Louisiana, went to school in Indiana, and have lived in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. Forty states so far. I know this country the way you only can by living in a lot of it.
Years ago I hiked down into the Grand Canyon with a Hopi guide. We still write letters.
That's the thing people miss about traveling here — they think they already know it. But there's San Francisco at sunset, when the buildings all seem to lean toward the light. Bears in Montana. Cherries from Door County eaten on the beach when you're too tired to swim. Fireflies and bonfires on the Louisiana bayou at eleven at night. An island where there are no cars at all, just the water and the quiet.
Americans skip their own country to fly across an ocean. I've done both, and I can tell you: some of the most beautiful places I have ever seen are right here.
Fifteen cruises, and counting. The Caribbean and Mexico, Alaska twice, the Mediterranean with Silversea, and river journeys down the Rhine, the Seine, the Danube, the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the Ganges.
Here's the thing most people don't realize: ocean cruising and river cruising are almost opposite experiences. An ocean cruise is bold and social — it's celebration, it's making friends by the second night, it's as much or as little as you want. A river cruise is quiet. It's the vista out your window changing all morning, and dinner somewhere small that evening. Both are wonderful. They're just wonderful for different people, and knowing which one you are is the whole trick.
I've stood on a freezing deck in Alaska watching the ice, and I've done the Ganges in the heat, and I would go back to either tomorrow.
I'm a Silversea Cruise Specialist, and I know these ships — which ones, which cabins, which routes are worth the days at sea.
Cruising
Off the Beaten Path
If there's one thing that runs through everything I plan, it's this.
The famous version of a place is famous for a reason, and I'll never talk you out of it. But it's rarely the part you remember. What you remember is the tiny winery down a road you'd never have turned onto. The temple nobody mentioned. The bakery you walked into near closing, where the family invited you to stay for dinner. The beach in Albania instead of the one everyone photographs.
I know the famous things. I also know what's twenty minutes past them, and that's usually where I'll send you.
If you're dreaming of somewhere that isn't on this page, tell me. I've been to more than fifty countries, and where I haven't been myself, I know exactly who to ask.