Pam Grout

If you're a writer, Key West is on your bucket list, likely in the number one spot.

This bohemian island city, the southernmost in the contiguous United States, is where Ernest Hemingway produced nearly half his life's work including To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell...

The Florida Keys, a necklace of coral islands stretching 127 miles from the tip of the Florida peninsula, epitomizes the art of reinvention. Not only have the Keys and the people who live there survived countless floods and hurricanes, including three that finally put the kibosh on Henry Flagler's Overseas...

Someone needs to tell Caitlin Brotz that she could get a lot more than $12 for the anti-aging face serum she developed from pomegranate, blackberry and carrot seed oil.

After all, the big guns -- the Lancomes, the Crème de la Mers and...

Although Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein are the stars of the IFC hit Portlandia, the city where it's filmed deserves its starring comedic role. And it's not just because it has a vacuum cleaner museum, a skateboard museum, a bathtub art museum and a museum devoted to hats.

The...

When your room key features a black and white photo of Betty Ford dancing on the Cabinet Room table, you have to figure you're probably not in an ordinary hotel. Other hints would be the room service menu that offers Thai food, even at 3 in the morning, or the...

Tourist destinations are not created equal. If you're a liberal like me, you'll appreciate these top five reasons to add Montreal to your bucket list.

1. Equal rights are taken seriously.
Peek into the annals of most city histories and you'll likely find a male, usually memorialized in a...

If you're over 40, you should probably click out of this page as soon as possible. This post is about an all-night party in Montreal that doesn't even kick into high gear until 3 a.m. or so.

Yes, I'm talking Nuit Blanche, the final celebration of Montreal En...

Soweto is overcrowded, dirty and noisy. It has high unemployment, a rickety infrastructure and a tangle of narrow streets lined with shanties fashioned from corrugated iron sheets. It's also one of the most fascinating, joyful, high-spirited places I've ever visited.

We're sitting on a patio at Sakhumzi,...

Remember when you were in kindergarten and your mom pinned a note to your lapel, informing anyone who found you who you were and where you belonged? That's what this article is, the digital equivalent of a "pinned note" that will point you in the right direction in case you...

Thanks to the Oxford University's Department for Continuing Education, you don't have to be a Rhodes Scholar to make your away across the Atlantic and wander the hallowed halls of the oldest university in the English-speaking world.

The Oxford Experience, a residential summer program, is designed for...

It was all I could do to restrain myself from breaking into loud, boisterous gales of The Lion King's "Circle of Life" when I first saw the Sunland Baobab Tree in Limpopo, South Africa. It's by far the most magnificent specimen of plant life I've ever been lucky enough to...

Scientists will tell you that vervet monkeys eat fruit, figs, flowers and termites. Don't believe them. In Limpopo, South Africa, these grayish monkeys with the white-fringed, black faces prefer coffee and sugar.

If you so much as leave your window cracked, as I did at the Shiluvari...

Memo to Governor Rick Perry:

I notice you didn't make an appearance at COP 17, the United Nation's most recent stab at controlling climate change. I realize you were probably busy, beings as the Republican presidential nomination process is in full swing. Oh yeah, that and the fact...

Although I didn't actually hear them yelling "De Plane! De Plane!," the family of baboons sauntering next to the runway in Hoedspruit, a small airport near Kruger National Park, reminded me of Tattoo welcoming our small prop plane to South Africa.

It was also a promising sign that this...

Vacations, as we all know, cost money. And somebody benefits from the dollars we expend to "get away from it all." So here's my question: Would you rather line the pockets of the big corporations who run the major hotel chains, or would you instead like to use your buying...

There's a small brass circle on the stage floor of the just-renovated art deco Franklin Theatre. It reads: C.O.U. It stands for Center of the Universe and, when it comes to music, it's not an exaggeration.

This 300-seat theater on Main Street of historic Franklin, Tennessee regularly books...

"Too much of anything is bad, but too much of good whiskey is barely enough." -- Mark Twain

If you're one of those Scotch geeks that swears by having a wee drink every now and again, you may have already made the pilgrimage to the motherland. Chances are you've visited...

One October, I tucked a leaf from a scarlet oak into an envelope and sent it to a friend in Florida. I was hoping it might silence his insistent, "Why do you live in the Midwest?"

He wrote back: "Enough said."

It's that time of year when Mother Nature...

I would never admit this to the average third grader. But at an Ecuadorian cooking school, I dined on guinea pig.

It wasn't my favorite of the many dishes I learned to prepare at this out-of-the way cooking class in Panecillo, a tiny village outside Otavalo, but it was certainly...

You have a choice. Two General Admission tickets for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art or two days in Little Rock, Arkansas. For the same $50 you can see a dozen museums in Little Rock and still have money left over for a plateful of tamales smothered with...