Hampstead Heath, London; Summer 2005 An art installation in Hampstead Heath in London in the summer of 2005. I love this – it really plays to the idea of living in a magical world. I feel like we are all miniature people, like Borrowers or Lilliputtians, and a giant is going to come along any [...]

When I tell people I have been to Detroit, they are usually surprised. When I tell them I liked it and would recommend it to other travellers, they are usually even more surprised. For starters it’s in “Flyover Country” and is not somewhere foreigners would generally go. Secondly it’s a city known for industrial grit [...]

Will Peach is one of the site editors over at Gap Daemon, the gap year travel website for backpackers and young travellers. He has written a guest post for me on Christmas in London, which I know from experience is one of the best places to spend Christmas. Will has done a great job researching [...]

Whatever route you take, the drive into Mendocino ends by hugging the coast on California’s scenic Highway 1. On one side of the road you have green hillsides with the occasional farmhouse or inn tucked away and on the other, the ocean. Mendocino sits on the ocean side of the highway so the maritime feel [...]

One of the loveliest things about Mendocino is the natural beauty. It’s an artsy little town on a spectacular and relatively undeveloped stretch of coast. It’s about five hours’ drive from San Francisco if you take the short way, up Highway 101 and then cutting through the Anderson Valley. You could also take scenic Highway [...]

In 2008 I went to Cambodia with photographer Peter Garmusch to write this story on traditional Khmer silk and to do preliminary research on a potential story about restoration work on the Angkor ruins. One of the strangest things we saw was a floating village near Siem Reap. We arrived too late in the day [...]

I have hosted accommodation prizes for Passports with Purpose for the past two years running. In 2009 I hosted two Caribbean resort prizes – Coconut Bay in St Lucia and Tranquility Bay in Belize – and in 2010 I worked with the Fairmont Olympic in Seattle. They were all fantastic sponsors and the prizes sounded [...]

The prizes in Passports with Purpose always sound fabulous but do they live up to the hype? Julie Schwietert Collazo has penned a guest post about her stay at Tranquility Bay in Belize. Julie was the beneficiary of the accommodation prize donated by the resort in the 2009 Passports with Purpose, which raised money to build [...]

Read the article to learn more about San Francisco’s historic F-line streetcars. This is day 27 of NaBloPoMo – National Blog Posting Month. I am publishing 30 posts in 30 days for the month of November. Previous NaBloPoMo posts: November 1 | David Austin roses at Carriageworks, Sydney November 2 | Books in Krakow, Poland November 3 | Rhyolite, [...]

Have you ever read the 1940s classic The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford, or the sequel Love in a Cold Climate? The books are largely autobiographical so fans of the book may be interested in seeing the house where Nancy and her sisters lived in their childhood. This is Batsford House in the Cotswolds, [...]