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When I was a little girl, we had this towering bookcase of old National Geographic magazines. I would run my fingers along their tell-tale gold spines, trying to choose an edition to pull & read: Uganda Up-Close, Whale Poaching in the North Sea, Balinese Temples. These geographic snippets gave me butterflies, as visions of gilded […]

That impending moment of descending in a jet through the rust red smog of the city. That was my first memory of Kathmandu. It’s a bizarre notion, landing in a city on the opposite side of the planet. My heart swooped with a thousand fluttering wings. From the plane window, I saw haze and square […]

It’s been awhile since my last Wednesday Wandering, mostly because I’ve been busy wandering!  I am “living” in Wales until May, which is the natural course for a young lady with a British fiancé. We do a lot of back-and-forth.  Life has been busy-busy, full of long work hours and steadily warming days. “The Crud” […]

I adore all things kitsch: oversized fish monuments, festivals dedicated to seasonal crops, antique junk shops. They all speak to my inner tourist, which only seems to emerge in my home state of Minnesota. Fall is the best season to enjoy all the kitschy goodness of the north woods, as well as the colorful chorus […]

Some days when I open my front door and breathe in the morning air, some scent triggers the nostalgic region of my brain, and I swoon a little. It’s something sweet and pungent, like the smoke from juniper branches burnt every morning in Himalayan households. Outside their front doors, branches burn in large urns, an […]