Corbin had only recently learned to walk.
He wandered between fallen logs and picnic tables, alternating between crawling and taking a few careful steps before dropping back onto his hands. Dry leaves crunched beneath his feet.
The entrance to the cave barely announced itself.…
The next morning, my brother and I pushed our way through New Delhi Railway Station.
Fluorescent lights blazed overhead.
The smells of chai and diesel floated over the tracks.
A vendor shouted over a portable loudspeaker.
Boxes of live chickens were stacked along the platform.…
We reached Ueno Zoo an hour before it opened.
It felt like we were already late.
A line—mostly of older women—stretched from the entrance and wrapped through a maze of green safety cones.
Staff members kept extending the switchbacks as more people arrived.…
Varanasi’s airport had three gates. None had jet bridges.
Instead, passengers reached the tarmac through a large set of double doors at the back of the building.
Chains and padlocks held them together, leaving a two-inch gap between the doors.
Outside, a storm of locusts gathered against the glass beneath the setting sun.…
The museum opened with a room-sized panorama of Hiroshima in 1942, followed by another taken from the same vantage point three years later.
Before and after in stark comparison.
My son noticed it at once.
“It’s all broken.”
~
A model of Hiroshima sat in the middle of the second room.…
We’d been traveling for twelve hours: a trolley to Hiroshima Station, a bullet train to Tokyo, then a subway toward the airport.
We arrived in Tokyo just one minute late.
A single minute.
The conductor apologized.
~
Tokyo Station seemed to stretch for blocks beneath the city.…
The subway had left us at the edge of the Royal Castle Park.
We followed the other people along a path, then stopped at the first opening.
“Is this the way?”
Dani checked the map on her phone.
“No.”
We walked farther.…
A sign beside the toy shop door listed its hours.
Open 16:00–18:00 Wednesday and Friday.
It was Sunday. The town was quiet, and every other shop we passed was dark.
Then Dani stopped.
Someone was inside.
Through the window, we could see the owner hunched over a workbench among shelves of wooden toys. …
We arrived at the panda reserve just after it opened.
The paths were nearly empty.
Without a map, we picked a trail at random and disappeared into the bamboo.
The first panda sat alone beneath a tree.
It didn’t acknowledge us.…
The horse seemed impossibly large.
Even through the rain, the monument dominated the point where the Rhine and Moselle met, a mountain of dark stone with an emperor on horseback balanced above it.
Corbin wanted nothing to do with it.
The broad staircase climbing the pedestal was soaked by freezing rain, each stone step polished smooth by more than a century of feet.…
Avery rolled out of bed in the middle of the night.
The crash woke me, followed by the soft cry of startlement.
I scooped him into my arms, pulling him into bed with me.
He settled against my chest almost immediately.…
We followed our map to what should have been the next museum.
Instead, we reached a tunnel through the fortress wall.
Dani pushed. The doors wouldn’t open.
We continued to the water—shadow turning to white.
The wind coming off the bay drove us back.…
I logged on.
The train’s website froze.
Then I logged on again.
Five hours. That ought to be enough.
The voices of my friends and roommates filtered through my bedroom walls.
I made my selection, bought my tickets, and went downstairs.…
The airport line didn’t move.
Clothes hung from open office windows, lifting and falling like flags in the air conditioning.
A booth opened.
Then closed.
A coworker stopped to talk to the attendant.
A vendor walked through the line carrying a pot of chai.…
The hotel looked grander than I remembered.
Chandeliers hung from the ceiling. Red carpets muffled our footsteps. Even the restroom urinals were motion-activated waterfalls.
Outside, snow whipped across the inky Baltic.
Near the restaurant entrance, a framed menu advertised the seasonal buffet.…
My stride was sure. The grass was wet.
The kids were back at the apartment watching a movie.
Dani was asleep.
I had promised her forty-five minutes.
Then I slipped out the door.
~
The vineyards climbed the hillside in five enormous terraces, each held in place by a stone retaining wall nearly six feet high.…
The street toward the temple was packed.
Cars pushed through gaps between pedestrians while storefront speakers blasted the same electronic beat. Vendors stepped into the crowd holding up wool hats, silk scarves, and imitation electronics.
“Hello! Look!”
“Good price!”
“Come see!”…
An hour into our walk, the park narrowed against a freeway.
The snow had returned despite the forecast. Cross-country skiers glided between the trees while traffic hissed somewhere ahead.
I knew our ferry terminal sat beyond the highway, somewhere along the harbor, but I couldn’t see a way through.…
We came to Roskilde for the Viking Ship Museum.
The cathedral next door changed our plans.
Its brick towers rose above the square, drawing us closer until we found ourselves standing before a heavy bronze door covered in runes and royal symbols.…
The subway carried us back into Chengdu.
We passed beneath a carved wooden gate and into a narrow alley where scooters threaded between pedestrians and women sat beside buckets of turtles. They lifted them toward us as we passed.
Dani blushed and waived her hand away.…
For hours, we’d been driving past barren landscapes of brown dirt separated from the highway with barbed wire and chain-link.
Soldiers and army vehicles rolled by in the distance.
Signs every few miles warned:
NO STOPPING.
NO PHOTOS.
We kept going.…
A sea of photographers stood atop Jingshan Hill, tripods planted against the wind.
They faced south.
Waiting.
Someone beside me checked the time.
Another adjusted a neutral-density filter.
Nobody spoke much.
We all looked down toward the Forbidden City, waiting for sunset—waiting for the palace lights to come on.…
We reached Boris and Gleb just as the sun touched the horizon.
The church was nearly nine hundred years old.
A single room. One display. Interiors already growing dark in the falling light.
We spent less than ten minutes there.
The attendant had already put on her coat and gloves by the time we were ready to leave.…
Everywhere we went in Kraków, Dani looked for pierogi.
On our first afternoon, she spotted a milk bar and stopped at the door.
“Pierogi. We have to go inside.”
Inside, the room was narrow and bright, with Formica tables and a counter running along one wall.…
Most visitors turned back after the beach nearest the gate.
A narrower trail disappeared into the forest, and with every bend the voices faded until only insects and surf remained.
The crowds had stopped within a mile of the park’s entrance.…
