I hope this finds you well. Though we are taking a pause in extended international travels, we happily squeezed in a trip to Barbados, where we lived in a tin-roofed cottage on an old plantation away from pretty much everything except a troop of green monkeys, whose ancestors first came from Africa 350 years ago. After we dug out of our east coast snow, we took Teddy, our boston terrier, to the National Seashore at the tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Finally, it seems spring has arrived in...

I hope this finds you well. We started our tour of Uzbekistan in Tașkent, the capital city of modern Uzbekistan, which only came into being in 1991, with the breakup of the USSR, under Mihail Gorbachev. It is a city of fascinating contradictions: an extensive subway system with gorgeous, ornate stations and bullet trains linking cities that reach 125 mph, but also hotels where the government shuts off the electricity in the middle of the night. Hotels have generators that kick in, but ALL...

Cappadocia & Ephesus