Posts Tagged: Travel

It took me a while to get around to it, but here’s my roundup of my best moments and favorite things from 2024.

My journey through Japan was a whirlwind of ancient temples, bustling cities, serene landscapes, and unforgettable culinary experiences. After landing in Tokyo, we checked into the Park Hotel, which offers great views of the city. We visited Yasukuni-jinja Shrine, a Shinto temple dedicated to those who died in service of Japan. Dinner at Ginza Bairin Main Shop meant delicious tonkatsu, crisply fried pork cutlet. Then Lauren and I strolled through the Ginza neighborhood. We decided to grab drinks at Beer Lupulin, a tiny bar with a good selection of draft beers and Japanese whiskies.

I rang in 2024 from a cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains, surrounded by family and friends. It was a pretty great New Year’s Eve, and now it’s time to look back on 2023.

My flight arrived in Athens late on a Friday night. I took a car straight to the New Hotel and went to bed. The next day we set out to explore the city, walking over to the National Archaeological Museum, which boasts one of the most impressive collections of artifacts in the world. Among the many highlights is the Artemision Bronze, a statue of either Zeus or Poseidon that was fished out of the Mediterranean after a shipwreck.

Once the capital of Russian Alaska, Sitka is now a gorgeous town nestled among the islands of the Inside Passage. Surrounded by green hills, then larger mountains and icecaps to the east, and the ocean and smaller islands to the west, Sitka is usually listed among the prettiest towns in Alaska, and often among the prettiest in America. I was supposed to visit on my last trip to Alaska, but bad weather delayed our flights, and we had to skip the town altogether.

I spent the last days of 2022 with my family in the lovely southern California town of Oceanside. As 2023 begins, I’m taking a look back at the best of 2022, from my favorite books, movies, and music, to my best travel and culinary experiences.

Few cities can rival Berlin for dramatic twentieth-century history. Largely destroyed by Allied bombs in World War II, Berlin was rebuilt, then quickly became the epicenter of the Cold War. Divided by a wall and terrorized by a brutal secret police, the city and country were emotionally reunified at the end of the century. Today Berlin isn’t the most beatiful city in Europe, but its gritty charm, fantastic restaurants, and incredible museums make it one of the most fun and interesting.

The summer of 2022 was a rough one for travel, but American Airlines led the way in flight cancellations. We ran into the buzzsaw of American’s incompetence on our way to Peru: we were supposed to depart San Francisco on a Saturday morning and, after a brief layover in Dallas, arrive in Lima shortly after midnight local time. Thanks to American’s inability to properly weight the plane, our connecting flight to Lima was delayed 15 hours, forcing us to spend the night in Dallas and lose the first day of our vacation.