My husband, Phil, and I are proud 30-plus-year ITN subscribers and ITN Quarto Mondo award recipients, having now been to well over one quarter of the world’s nations. While traveling, our primary interests are ancient cultures, architecture, art and religions, and we used to plan all our own trips, including arranging our own transportation.

Due to our advancing age, however, we’ve become fans of cruising as a means of accessing destinations of special interest to us. We...

Like you, I love to travel (though I’m still a bit of a novice by some ITN readers’ standards, having visited only six continents and 60-plus countries). I’ve always viewed travel as a combination of entertainment and education, but my trip to Israel in November 2018 far exceeded my expectations and has had two lasting impacts that I didn’t expect.

The tour

My tour, “The Holy Land: Past, Present, and Future,” was offered by National...

Even before leaving for a Southern Africa safari in September 2019, my two friends, Cynthia and Jim Lyon, and I had already booked a trip to East Africa for September 2020. All three of us love to travel, and nothing nourishes our souls more than a wildlife trip. Who knew that a global pandemic would ground us for most of 2020?

As spring wound into summer, our hopes of traveling to Kenya were quickly dimming, but we still fanned a little flame of optimism. In early July 2020, it was...