About Me
Whether I find myself at home in the beachy bliss of the Monterey Bay Area of California, or afar in some curious yet captivating place where escapades call, I am enamored of the people, pleasures and pursuits that propel my pen to remember the humorous and beautiful, the charming and disarming, the zany and amazing: All the stories I love to discover in our wondrous world.
My award-winning essays have appeared in a plethora of publications, notably the “Best Travel Writing” and humor anthologies curated by Travelers’ Tales.
Out now is my travel memoir, An Apartment in Paris, a book of love, family and fun set in the City of Light.
Stories
Featured in the Iron Horse Literary Review, Bruno in the Afternoon tells the tale of the quintessential French lover.
Included in this group of winning travel-writing essays, Submitting to Shasta describes how being one of four on a rope on a slope is hardly like enjoying the poetic adventure promised.
In this collection of the year’s best travel essays, Sun Valley With Dad highlights how an adoring daughter is shown just how it’s done, on the ski hill as well as in life.
How I Got My Oh-La-La joins this anthology of outstanding travel stories to reveal how to go from frump to fabulous in a few important French lingerie lessons.
The Camino Less Traveled, with Gato
When a three-week-old Spanish kitten – blind and sick – crossed our path on the Camino de Santiago, the Legendary Way my friend Gina and I were walking to honor our seventieth birthdays would take an astonishing and wildly unexpected direction. Read below the ongoing tale of how little orange Camino – true to the Santiago promise of surprise – would come to revamp our lives.
Part 8: My Camino
Officially, there are 281 recognized Camino de Santiago routes, encompassing over 51,500 miles through 29 countries. Some are the best known and traveled, like the Camino Francés, Camino del Norte, and Camino Portugués; others are more obscure or recently restored....
Part 7: The Vet and the Vanquished
Becky and Jim, a spirited sixtyish couple that Gina and I met Day 2 of our Camino, had dropped out. “I don’t believe it.” Gina alerted me by text when she saw the Facebook post. “They were SO gung-ho.” Just so! Fit, fierce, and committed since the previous year when...
Part 6: Beautiful Biarritz
“Okay, kitty, it’s just you and me now. What do you want to do?” I stared at little Camino lying in my lap paws up, staring back. His big milk-plump tummy taunted him, sleep, sleep, sleep, but instead he fixed his eyes on mine, defiant. He didn’t speak, yet I clearly...
Coaching
The Latest
Fifteenth Annual Solas Awards
The Solas Awards are the Olympic Games of travel writing, where each year publishers of Travelers’ Tales, the prestigious and popular story anthologies, award medals to “the best travel writing today” in various competitive events. In the Fifteenth Annual Solas Awards recently announced, three of my essays – set in Paris and included in my book, An Apartment in Paris: Stories of Love, Family, and Fun in the City of Light – were honored with medals. On the winners’ podium are:
Travel & Memoir: Bronze, for Best Travel Story
For the Best Travel Story in the Travel & Memoir event, Lunching with Renoir’s Boating Party won Bronze, a medal that “honors writers whose work inspires other to explore.” Set at the very Seine-side café where over eight…
Travel & Food: Gold, for Best Travel Story
In the Best Travel Story in the Travel & Food event, where food and friends and foreign culture are celebrated, Mastering the Art of (Liking) French Cooking won Gold. In this story, famous foodies and Francophiles Julia Child…
Grand Prize, Best Travel Story of the Year: Bronze
In the overall Grand Prize – Best Travel Story of the Year event, a competition that honors “extraordinary stories about travel and the human spirit,” Marriage, Dubois Style won Bronze for what judges called its “witty…