Features

by Rita Berman, Chapel Hill, NC

In April ’06 I visited Lewes, an attractive historic town on the banks of the River Ouse in the south of England. Only 30 minutes by train from Gatwick airport or an hour’s train journey from London, the town is home to numerous antique shops and bookstores and many historical sites, including Lewes Castle, Anne of Cleves House & Museum and Bull House, formerly known as the Old Bull Inn, where Thomas Paine once lived.

I booked a room in the White Hart Inn Hotel (High Street, Lewes; phone 01273 476694, www.whitehartlewes.co.uk), a 16th-...

by Yvonne Horn, Santa Rosa, CA

Nothingness stretched seemingly forever as viewed from my window seat aboard the Ethiopian Airlines Fokker 500 turboprop en route to Bahir Dar from the country’s capital city of Addis Ababa. Nothingness, that is, if one discounts the ferocious landscape of deep canyons and jagged tumbled mountains unfolding below and the now-and-then-glimpsed handful of tiny communities of tukuls, circular dwellings perched precariously on barren plateaus. No roads — only occasional barely discernible trails as thin as pencil marks indicated the comings and goings of...

by Richard Reid, Clarkston, WA

Since the mid-18th century, Scottish immigrants have contributed to the growth of the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere. For those wishing to discover their Scottish heritage, there is no better way than to go to the country from which those immigrants originated.

What usually is discovered, however, is that these ancestors came from small, isolated villages or towns. With that being the situation, the best approach is to develop your own itinerary and work with an in-country tour operator.

My own journey of...