At the beginning of February 2019, my wife, Sandra, and I escaped the cold of Minneapolis for the warmer Mediterranean climate of Taormina, Sicily, traveling with Road Scholar (Boston, MA; 800/454-5768, www.roadscholar.org) on a 10-day trip titled “Cooking in Sicily.” The tour was organized around four cooking school sessions and a number of excursions around eastern Sicily, including a winery tasting and lunch.

Our group of 10 travelers would be based in Taormina, on the...

Following a late-summer 2018 land tour of some of the European countries on which the Vikings had left their mark (recounted in last month’s issue), we headed to the airport in Prague for a flight to Bergen, Norway. We had a ship to catch!

We flew SAS from Prague to Copenhagen, Denmark, and on to Bergen, arriving in the early evening. We spent the night at the Comfort Hotel Bergen Airport (nordicchoicehotels.no), which was only a 2-minute walk from the terminal.

In the...

How could anyone see the National Geographic pictures of the Goroka Festival in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and not want to go there? But, calculating the cost of a tour plus business-class airfare — around $30,000 for two — I had to say “Another time.”

However, with the discovery of gas off the coast of PNG and how that might disrupt the local culture, not to mention my approaching dotage, it seemed that “another time” had arrived.

My wife, Yuki...