An Ode to Sunrises
And why you should get up to see them when you travel I am not a morning person. My husband will confirm. I am a grunter after I wake up, responding to any and all attempts at communication with a caveman-esque guttural growl. This makes me an unlikely candidate to be an advocate for sunrises, […]
Travel Thoughts and Tips
I had the brief thought of adding up all of our hours of travel over the past year—and then quickly thought better of it. We logged over sixty hours of driving between our layover stop in Turkey last June and our recent family road trip around South Africa, and that doesn’t include any of the […]
The Day We Ran to Every Gate + Dutch Baby Pancakes
The trip to remember for our family started in Chiang Mai, Thailand. We were returning to our country of service in the far northeast, a hundred degrees colder than Thailand! Nothing can prepare your body for that drastic shift! Little did I know, the weather shift wasn’t going to be our hardest feat for the […]
Travel, Sketching, and an Extraordinary Life
“The only real voyage of discovery . . . consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” —Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time I took a sip of the iced mocha I ordered from the beachside cafe. With its grass-thatched roof and rustic-chic decor behind me, I gazed out over the […]
This Month’s Theme: Travel
Cue the stories. We all have them, right? The time we finagled our way through all the hoops at the ticket counter to somehow get on that plane. A roadside bathroom stop in the middle of nowhere. A layover that turned into hours or days holed up in an airport terminal with hope for escape […]
The Stranger
“The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.” Deuteronomy 31:8 Looking around frantically in a bustling crowd, I try to find the signs for the ferry station. People brush up against me, carrying luggage and crying […]
Tips for Traveling With Kids
Travel season is upon us! You may have already gone back to your home country, as many workers do over the summer, but maybe you can use these tips for the return trip. Our family has traveled with 1, 2, and 3 kids, from 5 weeks old to now 10 years old. Each cross-world trip […]
An Epic Tale of Texans, Tacos and Guns
Our last few years in China, we went on visa runs every 60 days. Since all my kids have November birthdays and our one-day trip to Seoul came up in the same month, we decided to take them to Toys R Us to pick out a toy for their birthday. We landed at ICN, took […]
This Week’s Theme: Travel
If we gathered all of your travel tales, stories from airports and train stations and tuk-tuks around the world, they would be enough to fill an entire library of volumes. You have confidently mastered security lines and subway schedules, but still have to deal with canceled flights and changed plans, all of the unexpected sides […]
Here, Hold My Bag
Do you remember that first trip, the one on your own? That first passport photo, tickets printed on actual paper and mailed to your house? Maybe you were just out of college, in your early 20s, setting off on some sort of wild adventure (well, as wild as us Good Christian Girls™ get). Or perhaps, […]
Oh, the Places He’ll Take You
My first international flight was at the age of 19. To Israel. Solo. For some reason, this seemed perfectly reasonable and not as alarming as it should’ve been. It’s possible my mother was in bits when I took off from Chicago’s O’Hare, transferred in Munich, landed in Tel Aviv, was collected by a taxi driver, […]
When Traveling is Turbulent
It was four in the morning and beads of sweat were already dripping down my forehead. I had carried my two fifty pound bags down five flights of stairs, my stomach churning with anxiety. The torrential thunderstorm outside didn’t help, either, as I started imagining myself sitting on the plane as it plummeted into the […]