Travelers' Intercom

My husband, Jim, and I thought we were smart, well-prepared travelers with our duplicate passport photos and our extra antibiotics. After all, we had traveled extensively and Jim even wrote travel articles for various newspaper travel sections and ultimately even the photography column for ITN. I guess we were in total denial about the possibility of actual death on a trip.

Unfortunately, last May Jim did indeed die suddenly as he was photographing flowers in Monet’s Garden at Giverny, France. And I was thrust into one of the most demanding, frustrating weeks of my life. I...

Enjoying opera at the Verona Arena was first on our list when my sister and I decided to visit Verona, Italy, in summer 2018.

The Arena is a Roman amphitheater built in the first century AD, about 50 years before the Colosseum was built in Rome. It's elliptically shaped, with concentric galleries, and, counting the chairs on the field and the stadium seating facing the stage, it seats about 30,000 people.

Since 1913, the Arena has been used for concerts and opera performances under the open sky. The ticket office is located behind the amphitheater, which is where my...

Did you know that Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972), usually known as M.C. Escher, was Dutch? I guess everybody has, at one time or another, seen some of Escher's fantastical works, where stairs simultaneously go up and down and where endless loops are hard to figure out with the naked eye.

In Den Haag (The Hague), my wife, Kathy, and I visited the permanent "Escher in Het Paleis" exhibition (Lange Voorhout 74; www.escherinhetpaleis.nl/?lang=en), located in Lange Voorhout Palace, on Aug. 1, 2018.

To see so many of Escher's works displayed in one place was...