34 trips across 22 states and regions — 31 visited and 3 on the calendar, in the order they happened.
July 1, 2007
Cusco · Lima, Peru · Cuzco · Machu Picchu · Lima
Peru was the heart of the Inca Empire — the largest state in the pre-Columbian Americas — and before that of civilizations going back thousands of years. The Spanish conquest of 15…
February 1, 2008
San Salvador, El Salvador · San Salvador · the Maya ruins
El Salvador is the smallest and most densely populated country in Central America — the "Land of Volcanoes," a Pacific coast of surf beaches and coffee-covered highlands with a dee…
June 15, 2010
Baja California Sur, Mexico · Cabo San Lucas
After Katia and I married in 2010, we ran away to the sun in Cabo San Lucas for our honeymoon — pools, sunsets, lunches by the sea, and each other. One of the happiest weeks of my…
September 1, 2010
Nevada, USA · Black Rock City
Burning Man is an annual gathering in the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada — part art festival, part social experiment, part temporary civilization. Begun on a San Francisco be…
30 July – 6 August 2016
Florida, USA · South Beach · Key Biscayne · Little Havana
Miami is where America meets the Caribbean and Latin America — a subtropical city of turquoise water and pastel Art Deco, built on tourism, trade, and waves of Cuban and Latin migr…
April 14, 2018· 4× visited
California, USA · Livermore Valley · Arroyo Road
The Livermore Valley is the wine country you can reach before the fog burns off. It runs east to west — rare in the Coast Ranges — so afternoon air off San Francisco Bay pours stra…
June 18, 2022
Nevada, USA · Downtown & the Truckee River
Reno sits in a high desert valley at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, just over the hill from Lake Tahoe — "The Biggest Little City in the World." It grew up on the railroad and, in…
29 July – 2 August 2022
Australia, Australia · Sydney · Wollongong
Australia is a continent unto itself, ancient and isolated, with wildlife found nowhere else and the world's oldest living culture. We spent time around Sydney — the Opera House an…
18–21 August 2022
Noord-Brabant · Amsterdam, Netherlands · Amsterdam · the Brabant castles
The Netherlands is flat, watery, and astonishingly dense with history — reclaimed from the sea, laced with canals and cycle paths, and home to the Golden-Age art of Rembrandt and V…
14–20 March 2023
Spain, Spain · Barcelona
Spain sits at the crossroads of Europe and Africa — Roman Hispania, then nearly eight centuries of Moorish rule, then the Reconquista and the 1492 voyage that opened the Americas.…
31 March – 4 April 2023· 2× visited
France, France · Paris · Versailles · Loire Valley
France has shaped the Western world out of all proportion to its size — its revolution gave the modern age its ideals of liberty and equality, and its art, food, and fashion still…
July 2, 2023· 3× visited
California, USA · Jamestown · Sonora · Columbia
California's Gold Country is the Sierra foothills where the 1848 discovery at Sutter's Mill set off the Gold Rush that made the state — a string of Highway 49 towns named for the '…
9–13 August 2023
Maine, USA · Acadia · the Mid-Coast
Maine is the wild, rockbound corner of New England — a coast of granite headlands, spruce forest, lighthouses, and lobster boats, with more coastline than California once you count…
2–5 November 2023
Guanajuato, Mexico · León
This was a trip to León, in the central-Mexican highlands of Guanajuato, with my martial arts team — not the beaches, but the real working heart of the country. León is Mexico's le…
28 March – 7 April 2024
Honshū, Japan · Kyoto · Tokyo · Nikko
Japan is an archipelago off the Pacific coast of Asia and one of the world's oldest continuous cultures, fusing ancient temples and tea ceremony with bullet trains and neon megacit…
23–26 May 2024
Southwest, USA · Sedona · Grand Canyon
The American Southwest holds the most spectacular geology on the continent — the Grand Canyon, the red rocks of Sedona, and the canyon country of southern Utah: Zion, Bryce, Arches…
22–29 November 2024· 4× visited
Hawaii, USA · Maui · Molokai · Oahu
The Hawaiian Islands are the most remote major island chain on Earth, born of volcanoes in the middle of the Pacific and settled by Polynesian voyagers over a thousand years ago. W…
23–27 April 2025· 5× visited
Italy, Italy · Rome · Venice · Milan
Italy is where so much of the Western world was invented — Rome's empire, Latin, Roman law and roads, and a thousand years later the Renaissance that remade art and science. A unif…
1–8 June 2025· 3× visited
Alaska, USA · Denali · Talkeetna · Anchorage
Alaska is America on a scale hard to take in — a fifth the size of the Lower 48, with the continent's highest mountains and biggest glaciers, and fewer people than a mid-sized city…
8–11 November 2025· 3× visited
Illinois, USA · The Loop & lakefront
Chicago is the great city of the American interior — the third-largest in the country, built where the Great Lakes meet the prairie. After the Great Fire of 1871 leveled it, the ci…
8–11 April 2026· 8× visited
California, USA · Furnace Creek · Badwater · the ghost towns
Death Valley is the largest national park in the Lower 48 and a land of superlatives — the lowest, hottest, and driest place in North America, where summer temperatures top 130°F a…
18–20 May 2026· 6× visited
California, USA · Anaheim · Disneyland Park & California Adventure
Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955, on 160 acres of Anaheim orange grove, and the opening day was a disaster — counterfeit tickets, a heat wave that softened the fresh asphalt, dri…
May 20, 2026· 11× visited
California, USA · Los Angeles · Orange County · Palm Springs
Southern California is sun, sprawl, and a hundred worlds in one — Los Angeles and Hollywood, the beaches and Balboa Park of San Diego, the theme parks of Anaheim, the desert resort…
30–31 May 2026· 12× visited
California, USA · Monterey · Carmel
California's Central Coast is the fog-wrapped stretch between the Bay Area and Santa Barbara — Monterey and its world-class aquarium, storybook Carmel-by-the-Sea, the surf town of…
5–11 June 2026
Massachusetts, USA · Boston · the Freedom Trail · Salem · Cape Cod
Boston is where America began — the powder keg of the Revolution, and still the most walkable window onto the founding. Teddy and I spent early June 2023 tracing it: the Freedom Tr…
30 June – 6 July 2026· 30× visited
California / Nevada, USA · South Shore · Emerald Bay · the East Shore
Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America and the second-deepest lake in the United States — so deep it never freezes, fed by snowmelt and famous for water clarity tha…
30 July – 2 August 2026· 8× visited
Nevada, USA · The Strip · Fremont Street · Hoover Dam
Las Vegas rose from the Mojave Desert in the 20th century into the entertainment capital of the world — neon, casinos, world-class shows, and now the Sphere. But the real draw is o…
6–9 August 2026
California, USA · Pine Mountain Lake · Highway 120
Groveland is the quiet way into Yosemite — a one-street Gold Rush town on Highway 120 that never quite died after the gold did, thirty minutes short of the Big Oak Flat entrance. T…
14–17 August 2026
Missouri, USA · Downtown · the riverfront · Clayton
St. Louis was founded in 1764 by French fur traders on the west bank of the Mississippi, just below its meeting with the Missouri — the last supply post before a thousand miles of…
August 22, 2026· 13× visited
California, USA · Napa Valley · Carneros · Sonoma
An hour north of San Ramon the ground changes. Napa Valley is a thirty-mile trench between two mountain ranges — the Mayacamas on the west, the Vaca on the east — with the valley f…
September 5, 2026· 3× visited
California, USA · Golden Gate Park
Back in San Francisco, this time for Golden Gate Park rather than a restaurant counter. The park itself is a piece of 19th-century engineering as much as a garden — three-quarters…
November 21, 2026
Illinois, USA · The Loop & lakefront
Chicago is the great city of the American interior — the third-largest in the country, built where the Great Lakes meet the prairie and the rivers that carried commerce west. After…
December 28, 2026
California / Nevada, USA · Lake Tahoe
Ringing in the new year up in the Sierra — five nights at the lake from December 28 through January 2. Tahoe in winter is a different place from the summer lake: the surrounding pe…
April 10, 2027
District of Columbia, USA · The National Mall
Washington, D.C. was purpose-built to be a capital — a diamond of land ceded by Maryland and Virginia in 1790, laid out on a grand plan of diagonal avenues and open vistas by the F…