As two senior females who travel extensively for six to seven months at a time around every winter, we look for our basic needs to be met: comfort, cleanliness, safety and a convenient location for either access to good public transportation or for walking.

During a 5-week visit to Kerala on India’s southwestern coast, this and much more was provided at the Aroma Home Stay (1/1469[1], Fort Kochi, 682 001, Kerala, India; phone +91 9387 856 294, www.aromahomestay.com), opposite St....

Of all the countries I’ve visited (and, as of 2014, I’ve traveled to all of them), people are most amazed to hear that I’ve been to North Korea, but visiting North Korea is not that difficult. 

The US doesn’t bar its citizens from going there, although it certainly doesn’t recommend it. And the North Korean government, though it openly denounces America, loves our dollars, desperately needs the hard currency and is happy to have us take any of the...

A couple whom we know in Sweden, Roy and Karin, invited my husband, Ray, and me to go on a road trip with them through Norway in August 2012. With much emailing, skyping and phoning, we shaped a trip that included museums, waterfalls, hiking, fjords, ferries, waterfalls, trains, ocean, churches, waterfalls and homes of artists, poets, writers and musicians.

One morning, at the top of the road coming from Oslo, we stopped to look down on the Aurlandsfjord. The town of Flåm is at the...