Travel

I took a red-eye to London. My flight landed at 9:30 in the morning. I’d slept fitfully, but was surprised to find I wasn’t aching with tiredness. Boarding the Heathrow Express, I rode into Paddington Station and transferred to the Underground for the last segment of my trip to a flat in Bermondsey. We started our tour of London with nearby Borough Market. The market features lots of food, including meat, dairy, and baked goods.

Contents Reykjavík The Golden Circle Southern Iceland Southeastern & Eastern Iceland Northern Iceland Western Iceland Landing at Keflavík International Airport in the early hours of a Saturday morning was a little disappointing. It was cloudy and foggy, and my first glimpse of Iceland through the airplane window was a barren rocky peninsula barely visible through the mist. Lauren and I disembarked from the aircraft and entered the terminal, a maze of duty-free stores, restaurants, and coffee shops.

I spent a weekend in late October touring two battlefields of the American Civil War with my wife and in-laws. We left Washington on a sunny Saturday morning and drove to Gettysburg. Fought from July 1 to July 3 of 1863, Gettysburg is often considered the turning point of the war. Robert E. Lee brought his Army of Northern Virginia, composed of about 75,000 men, to meet George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac, with about 104,000 men.

Lying between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians, the Shenandoah Valley is a stunning place brimming with natural beauty, historic towns, wineries, and breweries. I visited twice during October 2017, on two different fall weekends. My first stop was the Purple Wolf Vineyard. The vineyard lies on the White Oak Lavender farm, a delightfully pastoral spot west of Shenandoah National Park off of Highway 81. The vineyard has both indoor and outdoor seating, and sitting outside was perfect on an unseasonably warm October day.

Days 1-3: Bangkok It took exactly 28 hours to travel from my door in Orinda, California, to my hotel in in Bangkok, Thailand. My finacee, Lauren, and I had decided to take a trip to Thailand and Vietnam because we both had some time off during the summer of 2015. We flew out of San Francisco, via Singapore Airlines, at 1:20 AM in the early morning hours of June 24. After brief stops in Hong Kong and Singapore, we finally landed in Bangkok.

For his 60th birthday, my father, who has always loved hiking, mountaineering, and the outdoors, decided he wanted to go on an adventure with his family. He settled on rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon as his expedition of choice. Unfortunately, Grand Canyon trips tend to fill up as early as two years in advance, and we weren’t able to book one. Instead, we decided to raft the Colorado through Cataract Canyon.

Contents Norway Tallinn Helsinki Stockholm Copenhagen Reviews Norway After my trip to Svalbard, I flew south to Bergen, Norway. There I met Lauren and much of her family: her parents, sister, aunt, and grandparents. Our group of eight would travel together over the next two weeks, through five countries and seven cities. Upon our arrival in Bergen, we took a taxi to our lodgings at the Klosterhagen Hotell. After checking in, we walked around the area near our hotel.

“The bleakest barest most inhospitable godforsaken dead end of nowhere.” —Philip Pullman Arrival Horseback Riding Svalbard Museum Dog Sledding Hiortfjellet Barentsburg Reviews Arrival So the character Lee Scoresby describes Svalbard, an archipelago in the far north, in Philip Pullman’s excellent novel The Golden Compass. Nonetheless, visiting Svalbard has been a dream of mine since childhood, a dream that was partly inspired by that book. Apart from the literary basis, Svalbard is beautiful, has a fascinating history, and is one of the most accessible parts of the high arctic.

If you live on the west coast of the United States, India is about as far away as you can get. It really doesn’t matter whether you fly east or west, the distance and travel time will be about the same. Before 2012, I had never been to Asia, but that year I made trips across the Pacific to Cambodia and Timor-Leste. But when I traveled to India with my girlfriend, Lauren, and her family in December, it would be the furthest from home I’d ever been.

After my second year of law school, I spent half of my summer working at a big law firm in New York City and half working at Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, in its Juneau, Alaska, office. I flew to Juneau in late July and sublet a room in Douglas, a small town on an island just west of downtown Juneau. For a state capital, Juneau is a small town of only about 30,000 people.