It’s been a blessing, this idea of going to sea. It came to us from Ireland, not COVID. A year ago, when international travel was still a thing, we came home from watching sunsets over foreign seas to explore waters to the west. As 2020 opened, with its unexpected horrors…

This story is from Before the Pandemic, when we were still traveling overseas. Honored as best non-fiction and printed by the Nassau Review for distribution in May of 2020, it wound up boxed and locked in a closet when most of New York shut down and the journal lost its…

What of the values the flag represents?

Discovering the green & the blue — “Congratulations on your 50th trip on the River Shannon!” read a banner over the desk in the boat office as we arrived. The congratulations were not for us. This was our first. Having circled Ireland’s outer edges two years ago, we were heading for a passage through the midlands, along…

Wandering western Ireland — First thing I checked each morning, out the upstairs window facing west: Can we see Croagh Patrick? Is its elegant triangle on the horizon? Do shrubs point their shadows across the fields in its direction? Or is it obscured by the weather? It’s Ireland, mid-September. Croagh Patrick is Ireland’s holiest…

my aunt asks when I call. “We’re still in Lisbon.” “Still?” She says, with a tone that speaks an unasked question: What do you do for so long, in a place you’ve been before?

We were lucky to get out of town. First, I worried about the government shutdown and back-ups at the airport. Then, flights were canceled…

Leaving home, I had some questions. After loving Lisbon a year ago, we came again this year to dwell a bit. We unpacked our bags to enjoy two weeks without an early-morning launch toward another destination. Two weeks for markets, some “home-’’cooked food…

…in Tuscany’s October or Paris in November? Last time, my first, Tuscany was April, and May came along in Paris. They were warm and sunny, lush and green. That time, I was charmed by the somber weight of time in Tuscany’s hill towns. …