My grandmother always promised me a painted horse if, that is, I expressed a love for her Gladacres Farms, where Pidge, my single parent mother, would exile me six weeks each summer during my adolescence. While friends waterskied away the stifling upstate New York heat at various Finger Lakes' cottages,...

Light doesn't fall anywhere in North America as beautifully as it falls upon the coast of Maine. I spend a few weeks of every summer in the Midcoast region outside of Bath and, years after my first trip, I remain astonished by the golden glow that settles on...

The math is easy, even for a writer. 800 concerts in ten days equals 80 concerts a day at Montréal's International Festival de Jazz. But how does this city, among the world's Francophone entertainment capitals, juggle over 100 festivals per year, especially considering the magnitude of...

Sure, Marshall Law hurts tourism, but you shouldn't allow the street violence that followed last August's extradition of a Kingston kingpin to sully Jamaica's reputation as the best dance floor in the Caribbean. I suggest you head over the fabled Blue Mountains for some adventures in north shore's Port Antonio,...

I've never been in the military, but my covert operation to reclaim my child in the late 90's felt similar to the psychic g-force that must accompany a soldier making his first blind descent into the Kabul airport. An avowed pacifist, I squirm using the military analogy but I can't...

My son, now 23 years old, sleeps across the room as I write. I'm visiting him in Jamaica, where he's spending three months as part of his Thomas J. Watson postgraduate fellowship. He spent last night on a boat with a friend he'd met a few weeks ago in Kingston....

Okay, let's get the major screw up out of the way first. Like the cobbler who fails to provide his kids with footwear, this writer of more than 100 travel stories a year failed to get his kids' passports together for a weeklong multigenerational trip to Sayulita, Mexico, forcing him...

I define soft adventure this way: "adrenaline rushes that won't kill you and end with a really good bottle of wine." Having this vocational tagline conjures knowing smiles from other freelance travel writers and thinly veiled envy-to-ire from friends at dinner parties. The last conversation a 60-hours-a-week Microsoft developer wants...

A clarification. The situation I describe during this present series occurred eleven years ago. Were this a present crisis, had my son's mother not sent him home after winter break, I certainly wouldn't possess the focus to write a word. Today, my son's mother and I remain cordial, proud of...

If you listened carefully over the last weekend of winter break, you would have heard the collective sighs of custodial parents in airports across the country, as their children deplane from holiday visits with out-of-state parents. Regardless of how airtight our custody agreements may appear, angst during visitations weighs upon...

Parenting is always a numbers game. There are the expenses: violin lessons, summer camps, and braces. There are dates: birthday parties, lacrosse practices and grandparents visits. As married parents, these numbers roll by as shared inconveniences like house payments and car insurance, automatic withdraws from our adult lives.

But...