This year marked my 17th trip to Burning Man, the enormous arts festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, but Zevin’s first. Leading up to it, I was worried whether the heat and dust would make it too...
Brittany by Boat
From Nantes, we travelled two hours north to the village of Saint-Martin-sur-Oust where we started our week-long canal boat trip. The adventure originated when our friends in Germany told us they had found a German Groupon for a discounted...
Nantes and Les Machines d’Île
From Tel Aviv, we took a five hour flight to Nantes, once the capital of Brittany in northwestern France. This once grand city had been heavily bombed in the war, so much of it is rebuilt, but all in...
Returning to Tzfat and Beit She’an
Sometime just after college, I spent six weeks backpacking around Israel on my own. I didn’t have any itinerary, and at some point found myself in Tzfat, a northern hilltop town where a number of important Kabbalistic thinkers and...
Ein Gedi, Masada and the Dead Sea
Heat was going to be our big challenge: temperatures in the area were climbing into the mid-90’s by late morning, and that was more than Zevin could tolerate, even had he not been recuperating from being sick. Fortunately, we...
Kibbutz Ein Gedi
Early Tuesday morning, we picked up our Budget rent-a-car and waved goodbye to the Holy City of Jerusalem, making our way east and south down to Ein Gedi, an oasis on the shore of the Dead Sea. We arrived...
All Humans Made It to Israel
Zevin played hookie from his last day of fourth-grade so we could make it to our flight to Israel on Wednesday, kicking off a three-and-a-half week trip that will include some time on the canals of Brittany and a...
Rogue Camping Tips
We’re not much for KOA-type paid campgrounds when we travel. Our camper van has everything we need: a sink, stove, refrigerator, bed, even a toilet. So why pay $50 / night to park the car and go to sleep?...