Travel

Time is a funny thing. We tend to believe that we have more than we do but wish we had more even when we misuse what we’ve been given. Then there’s that strange sensation of going back in time, at least when flying through time zones from one side of the ocean to the other. […]

We were all on the big bed – this is how we often watch videos on the computer – and it was a 27-minute feature on Anne Frank, the German-Jewish girl in Holland who wanted more than anything to be a writer and, strangely, became just that after her diary was published sometime after she succumbed […]

We’re in the air again, my family and me and today’s newspaper. This time it’s the Daily Telegraph, dominated on Page 14 by a large ad for the latest iPad. Beside it, a smaller story on how one in four U.K. teachers wouldn’t send their own kids to the schools they teach in. And below, a brief about a Pediatrics Journal study that shows obese youth don’t think so well.

SANTA FE, N.M. I’m in America’s oldest state capital, in Café Olé, with a sandwich and drink and new hope to never become a moron. Here for some postgrad studies, I’m also enjoying a recent copy of America’s satirical news tabloid, The Onion. “Nation’s Morons March on Washington State,” is its banner headline. Thousands of morons, the Onion reports, recently marched in Washington State thinking they were actually in Washington, D.C.

LONDON — The world is getting faster. And stranger. Have you noticed? This is what I know. I think. I mean, sometimes it’s hard to know what we know. Take Joseph Kony. He’s someone who, thanks to social media, you likely know. I’m betting you know Kony is that Ugandan warlord with a strangely genteel face, that he’s abducted thousands of Ugandan boys and stole their souls when he made them into so-called soldiers.

Continents apart, generations and circumstance between them, hands always tell the stories.

Your mother is dead. Divorce knocks. Your son is lost. It’s cancer. You’re laid off. You’ve broken up. The car crash. You can’t stomach it all. Trust?

I think of what Saint Augustine said: “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”

In Berlin, both presidents had watershed moments, and both are revered.

It's not the Glacier Express climbing through the Swiss Alps. It's not Vietnam's Reunification Express winding into the more exotic jungles of the world. And it's certainly not the Orient Express, that legendary locomotive of opulence and intrigue immortalized by Agatha Christie.

Nowadays you just gotta love the skin you re in no matter what it s made of.

SALZBURG, AUSTRIA ✦ I love my daughter, all 15 months of her, for many reasons. One is that she’s more like her mother than me. Especially while flying. My wife Jean and I continue to be aid workers in the Middle East and Africa, so this is often. In fact, diaper-clad Elizabeth Katherine has already been on more than dozen flights and four continents. The Squirt knows one word. Just one. It’s “hello.” But words can be powerful things.

Today, Jean and I, with our bright-eyed bambino, Elizabeth, are on a jet plane flying back to Yemen. Our condo in Ancaster is again a speck that has disappeared over the horizon.

(The Hamilton Spectator - Friday, June 20, 2003) Nobody knew. Prior to the birth of our first child, two weeks ago today at St. Joseph’s Hospital here in Hamilton, Jean and I kept her name, Elizabeth top-secret from absolutely everyone. “It’s from the Bible and it’s not Dorcas,” is all I would reveal, before adding, “If and when we have a boy, we have a biblical name for him too. And it’s not Nimrod.” So imagine the confirmation we felt when, prior to our return to Canada for the delivery, some western friends in Yemen said good-bye to us by reading the biblical story of Elizabeth.