A Personal Account | ZEM Wellness Clinic Altea, SpainPart Two of Two. Read Part One: “What Hippocrates Started, ZEM Finishes” I arrived on a Monday. I’d been sick that morning. Nothing that required a doctor’s visit, just my bed and a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. But I got up and boarded the train to […]

I got off the high-speed train in Alicante and was at ZEM forty minutes later, deep in the Altea Hills, sheltered by the Sierra de Bernia. The town’s name comes from the Greek word for healing, which feels less like branding and more like an inheritance. The light here arrives before seven in June and […]

I have been doing this long enough to be selective about where and how I spend my time. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how I work at an industry conference, why I went, what I did while I was there, and what it means for the clients I serve. The Emotions Travel Show in Madrid […]

Before there was a Boston Tea Party, there was a cider tax.  This is not a metaphor. It is a sequence of events that most Americans have never been taught, possibly because it requires crediting the English West Country with accidentally inventing the American Revolution, which is awkward for everyone. Here’s what happened. In 1763, […]

I was told the stones might speak. A friend had stood here a few months before I did and said she had received a message. So I came… listening. And I heard. I understood and felt a quiet, unmistakable knowing. I also grasped that we understand far less about our beginnings than we think we […]

A Visit to the Roman Baths — and Why Bath Deserves Far More Than an Afternoon I had forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes inside one of the most remarkable sites in the Western world. A place where water has been rising from the earth at the same temperature, from the same source, for hundreds of thousands […]

Bath, the Royal Crescent, an Abbey That Shaped Every Coronation Since, and Why You Need More Than a Day I stood at the Royal Crescent and felt time fold. I was sort of hoping I’d fall through time a la Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser! (That’s an Outlander reference for those of you who’ve never felt […]

On traveling light, traveling well, and a makeup artist who finally talked some sense into me. I was checking into the Corinthia in London when I saw them: five black Rimowa trunks, moving in procession across the lobby like a minor military operation. A couple – unhurried, immaculate, apparently unbothered by the logistics their luggage […]

At some point in a well-traveled life, the beautiful hotel starts to feel like a very comfortable version of the same thing. You’ve been to Europe. You’ve done the tours. You’ve stood in front of the landmarks and felt the appropriate amount of awe. And then you’ve gone home and wondered if there’s a version […]

Bermuda can feel, at first glance, almost impossibly self-contained. Turquoise water, white roofs, old forts, ships moving slowly across the horizon. It has the quality of a place that has always looked exactly like this, that arrived fully formed and has simply been maintained ever since. That impression is wrong, and interestingly so. Bermuda is […]