“On the road again. I just can’t wait to get on the road again.” Willie Nelson begins any road trip I have these days, even if it is just between my home in Los Angeles and visiting friends in Northern California. He expresses pretty perfectly the feeling of freedom I get when I leave the…
The rain is just starting to fall as Clara Reyes and I begin meeting, so we duck into a covered cabana at Seaview Beach Hotel in Philipsburg, the capital of the Dutch side of Sint Maarten. Sitting on white couches, we smile at each other, two strangers sizing each other up. Clara is the Director…
Welcome to the first of what will be a probably-irregular feature here on The Royal Tour. While I’ve written reasonably frequently about how I personally travel, I’ve given some push back to writing about my process of writing. I’ve thought it was less relevant, less interesting. But I’ve now given in, so this is for…
As I write this, I’m getting ready to leave for a Morocco and Tunisia trip. (It will not be published until well after that trip.) A friend - and frequent traveler - asked me if I feel safe going to Tunisia. She said she wouldn’t, especially not as a Jewish woman. This conversation coincided with…
When I first started The Royal Tour, solo travel was something that scared me. What if I got somewhere and had nobody to talk to? What if it wasn’t safe? What if restaurants wouldn’t take a party of one? Worst, what if I was just bored without a companion? Shortly into that first year, a…
I’m going to do something a bit different with my year in review post than in past years. Normally, this is an article to talk about where I went during the year, how many new countries I visited, count my number of flights, and remind both you and myself of some of the highlights. And…
This is a topic I’ve been asked about a lot, and finally gotten around to writing down. No, I’m not a moralist or an expert on human psychology. What I am is someone who meets a lot of people all over the world. I interact with locals and tourists, with singles and couples, with large…
Call it a happy accident or call it fate; either way, it is apropos that I am sitting here alongside Love Creek, a burbling brook running between my cabin and the house of my Airbnb host. Three bridges cross the creek, hence the name Three Bridges on Love Creek for Desiree Amor’s property. Desiree, A,…
In 2018, my life was at a bit of a crossroads, to put it mildly. I had survived a 2016 suicide attempt, thrived in an intensive outpatient program and other subsequent therapy regimens, and flopped at a real endeavor to go back to work. I had been writing here on The Royal Tour since mid-2017,…
Editor’s note: we think of an expat life as one of constant adventure. And while Mike certainly had a lot of that while living in South Korea as he shares, he also talks about it as the opportunity to disconnect from routine and focus on self-betterment. That is a powerful message. For more of Mike’s…