Features

by Paula Prindle, Orient, OH

It was raining at Auschwitz — not a hard rain, just a dreary drizzle — fitting, I thought, for a concentration camp.

The term “concentration camp” has always puzzled me. Why such a bland, neutral phrase to describe a place that was anything but? These were work camps, prison camps and, yes, death camps, so why were they known as concentration camps? Perhaps because when human beings are concentrated in one place, they are easier to control; they...

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by Judith Anshin, Contributing Editor

I have been to the Caribbean only once. It wasn’t a destination I usually thought of when planning a short trip, but that has changed now.

As a Contributing Editor for ITN, I attended the 17th Annual Florida Caribbean Cruise Association conference in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in late October 2010. I joined a group of nine other travel writers for a jam-packed five days that left me wanting to return, especially to Santo Domingo’s...

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Rumors of strikes, riots in the streets and a collapsed economy did not deter us from planning our October ’10 journey to Greece. As my wife, Judy, and I had done several times before on trips abroad, we enjoyed meeting the challenges of independent travel and did our best to protect ourselves from the anticipated glitches that were bound to arise.
What is a sense of place, and how might I capture it in the photographs I take on a trip? These questions were uppermost in my mind on a trip to Morocco with Insight Vacations, June 3-12, 2010. Finding a sense of place through my camera lens was more difficult than I imagined. Nevertheless, I think I succeeded in ultimately creating my own very personal visual record of the trip with my small digital camera.
We were certainly enjoying our June 2010 cruise up the Danube on Uniworld’s River Countess. The food was wonderful, the sites visited were interesting, and life aboard was relaxing. However, on our fifth day on the river, we were wondering why the captain had suddenly called a special meeting. We soon found out why: our cruise would be over the next day, midway through our itinerary.
To join college classmates in Ecuador in October ’10, I booked a Los Angeles-to-Quito flight online with the Costa Rican airline Lacsa, one of the five airlines that make up TACA. While their telephone and Internet boarding pass systems didn’t impress me, the flights ran like clockwork.

by Bill Reed, Denton, TX

After our time in Iceland (April ’11, pg. 6), my wife, Betty, and I continued our 16-day journey with a flight from Reykjavík to the Faroe Islands on Atlantic Airways. They, apparently, have not learned how to charge their passengers for an aisle seat, extra bags or a drink or even for boarding with the first group.

The flight was a short hour and 15 minutes, and about 20 minutes into the flight they came around with a sandwich big enough for a meal,...

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Namibia may not be everyone’s idea of a safari country. It doesn’t have the variety, large herds or impressive migrations of animals one can experience in East Africa or Botswana. However, as my wife and I discovered in September ’10, Namibia impresses with spectacular scenery, wildlife that have adapted to the incredibly harsh desert environment, and the opportunity to meet native people little affected by the outside world.