Packing for Paris is not just clothes. What about all the electronic “gear” we’ll need for a working trip? Packing is always hard for me. With memory loss and attention deficit from my stroke, it sometimes feels as though I’m running around the house for days trying to determine what I’ll need. Making lists helps. [...]

My French friend, Antoinette, has been advising me on what it takes to be stylish in Paris, where she and I will be traveling this fall with a group of friends. Jungle Pants are out, out, out! As are waist packs, fanny packs, and­–mon Dieu!–tennis shoes. Instead, we’re to put on bright lipstick, stash all [...]

My office is awash in yellow stickies this week … Don’t forget! Underlinings, stars and exclamation points decorate every page. It’s clear there’s more  to remember than my brain can handle. Here are just a few of the admonitions swirling in my damaged  brain … I must pause and pull this together into an at [...]

It’s a pleasure to have four of my stories published over the past few months in three different anthologies. Each story, in its own way, explores the theme of traveling with chronic illness. That’s something I think about often as a stroke survivor and autoimmune patient chained to a steady diet of blood thinners to [...]

I’m excited that my story “Bali Shadows” is featured this month in the fabulous travel e-zine Passionfruit.com, edited by Michele Jin. I first traveled to Bali 20 years ago “my first-ever trip to the bush, my first-ever overseas trip with Jack, a month after he slipped an engagement ring on my left hand.” I returned [...]

Don’t miss  Linda Watanabe McFerrin’s new story “Bali Belly and the Zombie Apocalypse,” up today on World Hum, the best travel-zine in the Ethernet. Linda spins a spooky tale that will make you rethink your travel medicine bag. She proves, once again, that old travel-writers’ saw: Anything that doesn’t kill you is  fodder for great [...]

  Am I Crazy? As an autoimmune patient with APS, as a stroke  survivor on blood thinners, people sometimes ask why I travel to places teeming with opportunities for disaster. “Places where medical care is thin, the water is often unsafe and the food chancy; places with infectious diseases, malarial mosquitoes, venomous snakes and the [...]

  It’s a jungle out there and I just can’t get enough of it! Come help me celebrate publication of my story “Why I Still Travel to the Wild” at a book party sponsored by Left Coast Writers. It’s  on Monday evening, November 14, at 6 pm at Book Passage San Francisco store at the [...]

The Australians call them ‘mozzies’–such a cute name–as though mosquitoes were just pesky little creatures that buzz and bite, one of the minor annoyances of venturing off the beaten track. I used to think of them that way, too, until I started traveling to the tropics and meeting people who’d had malaria, dengue fever (its [...]

  So far, this has been a three-bears summer where I live in Lafayette, swinging from a too-cold foggy chill to a too-hot swelter with the sun beating down and the temp pushing 95. I’m missing those “just-right” days we usually count on at this time of year. The chill is easy to manage with [...]