Published Essays | Online
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The commotion outside our apartment highlighted the quiet within. Unspoken words poked at the cracks in our marriage, picking them apart, unravelling their edges. They were becoming harder to ignore.
I was in Dhaka, Bangladesh for the summer, spending time with my husband and our fourteen-year-old daughter. He was Bangladeshi American and working on a project here.…
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My daughter is an only child, so our relationship is supremely precious to me. Admittedly, I helicoptered my way through the first 18 years of her life, likely inserting myself a little too much at times. Now that she's in college, I'm shifting the parenting balance to honor her independence. In the three years since she's gone away to school, I've learned new ways to support her at this stage of life.
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My husband of nearly 20 years dumped me unceremoniously on an otherwise unremarkable Friday evening in January. We'd spent the day together, running errands and sharing fries at lunch. Sitting down to dinner in our dining room, I'd asked whether he was OK. He'd been distant lately, but I hadn't seen this coming.
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At 56, I'm a member of the "sandwich generation," the aptly named in-between time when family ties are both fleeting and consuming. My parents recently moved into a retirement community and in a few months, my daughter will graduate from college and…
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The Thanksgiving after my 20-year marriage imploded, I flew solo to Brussels. I'd never traveled alone, but the thought of facing the holiday without my family gutted me, so I booked a plane ticket. The trip was transformative. Since then, I've traveled solo to…
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For decades, solo travel never really crossed my mind. Really, it didn't have to: I had a built-in travel partner in my husband and we'd spent 20 years exploring the world together. Then, he left. Although I was afraid to travel alone, I decided to continue planning trips once I was single. Fortunately, navigating many challenging parts of solo travel has been easier than I'd imagined.
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My 20-year marriage imploded over dinner on an ordinary Friday night. I hadn't seen it coming.
When the dust settled, I knew I wanted to travel, but I'd never done it alone. So, I began with familiar destinations, expanding into more challenging locales as my travel muscle grew. Now, I've been to 21 countries alone and tackling the world on my own terms has become my favorite way to travel.
Here are some of the best places I've visited as a solo traveler and why I enjoyed them so much.
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My daughter's college graduation hit me profoundly.
I was proud of her, of course, but this graduation, unlike the previous ones (kindergarten, middle school and high school), signaled a change: she's all grown up.
Even though she's moving back home, she's now a 22 year old adult who's been living on her own for the past four years. She's used to roommates — I'm not. This is how we're navigating our new living arrangements…
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Dusk at Kathmandu’s Pashupatinath Temple is monkeys. Settling into the November chill, succumbing to the dark vignette of the horizon, this time is theirs.
The monkeys don’t care about doorways marked “Hindus only.” Spirituality is a privilege. They choose their doorways, whichever they please, whichever they need, amongst the myriad…
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Editors’ Choice Articles
Solas Awards Gold Winner | Adventure Travel
The night is black. I can’t read your features, but I know you’re scowling. We’ve been held captive behind your blockade for the past six hours and we’ve found a way around it. You threw rocks at the car that came to rescue us and now I’m running to it, through the frigid Bolivian desert, clinging to my suitcase. We don’t speak a word to each other–I don’t speak Spanish, and you don’t speak…
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Editors’ Choice Articles
Solas Awards Gold Winner | Women’s Travel
I hear them before I enter the Kora. Flapping and cooing, they feast on corn offerings from red plastic bowls. I know this because I’ve been here before, in what feels like a different life. I watch a woman crouch down in a position not available to me since I was five, hands busily tying a piece of brown straw around the base of a small piece of bok choy. Finished, she tosses it neatly into a pile…
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‘Who is she?’ I ask in a hesitant whisper, simultaneously dreading the answer and needing to know.
Our bedroom is dark, though it’s only 7PM. The January cold seeps through the windowpane of our New Jersey home and I shiver. I’m twenty-four hours into the hell he dropped me into last night when he ended our twenty-year marriage over...
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When Lisa’s life took a detour and she found herself facing divorce, the future suddenly felt uncertain. But she knew one thing for sure: when it came to the division of assets, she was getting the family trip to Southeast Asia.
The year my marriage fell apart, I flew to Hanoi. Twelve months prior, our family of three had calendared the next year’s trips, each choosing a destination. My husband chose Spain, our 15-year-old daughter, Sophie, chose Italy and I chose Vietnam and Cambodia.
We’d travelled to Spain, eating crisp-skinned suckling pig in the shadow of the Alhambra. We’d travelled to Italy, bathing in the scent of lemon blossoms on the Amalfi Coast. Then, over dinner one January night, seemingly out of nowhere, my husband said ‘My soul is deeply unhappy. I want a divorce.’ …
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As Lisa VanderVeen’s dad underwent an operation back home, she found friendship and flexibility from her local leader and group in Armenia.
‘Love you’, I told my dad back home in the States, not wanting our FaceTime call from my hotel room in Yerevan, Armenia, to end. As I hung up, the tears came. I’d known when I left for this trip that he would be having an atherectomy – a procedure to clear plaque from the arteries around his heart – while I was away. But I’d chosen to go anyway.
He’s always encouraged me to follow my heart, even when his betrayed him, so I’d compartmentalised the hospital visit ahead of the trip – a distant date on the calendar. But now the day was here and I wished I was home. What if this was the last time I talked to him?…
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Her undulating tongue moved wet and slippery against my hand as her trunk pressed the unpeeled bananas into her mouth. I wore a blue canvas bag, laden with sugarcane and bananas, and I was surrounded by elephants.
It was my last day in Thailand after making the painful decision to abort my trip 10 days early. I was homesick and missing my 15-year-old daughter, Sophie, who was in Bangladesh with my soon-to-be ex-husband. It was our first summer holiday apart since the January night six months prior when he’d informed me that our 20-year marriage was over…
Writing awards.
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Solas Awards, Best Travel Writing
2025 Silver, Family Travel
2025 Silver, Travel and Healing
2024 Gold, Adventure Travel
2024 Gold, Women’s Travel
2024 Silver, Bad Trip
2023 Bronze, Animal Encounters