On Location
The best itineraries, trips, travel tips and more from around the world.
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Creative Wanderlust Adventure: Favorite Holiday Foods
What are your favorite foods to bake, cook, or more importantly EAT at the holidays? We do have some family food traditions we love to make around the holidays. Cracked Dungeness crab is always a favorite. Served with San Francisco sourdough bread and a big salad… it’s definitely a crowd pleaser. Another San Francisco dish we often make around this time of year is the American/Italian fisherman’s stew, Cioppino. This stew is also very tasty with a sourdough baguette. It’s the perfect tool to to mop up the soup! On the sweeter side, I always love my mom’s steamed persimmon pudding. It’s served warm and drizzled with either cream or a side of vanilla ice cream. Delicious!…
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Creative Wanderlust Adventure: Sign Poetry
Beware of a one way road.Keep pushing your belief,Worldwide…To yield an amazingOdyssey On my walk the other day I started taking pictures of signs I saw. Anything from things written on the road, to signs in peoples’ yards. My goal… to write some sign poetry! The walk soon became an adventure. I was definitely on a word hunt. What words would hold a lot of meaning? What words could be used in different contexts to relay different things? What words could be truncated? In the end, I had roughly 20 photos and I was ready to don my poetry cap and start writing. Here are two sign poems I created,…
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Wanderlust Inspiration: Old Books at Trinity College Library
The smell of old books and intriguing tales wafted through the quiet room. Some where and at some time, every page had been turned. For any book lover, a visit to Trinity College Library in Dublin, Ireland is a pilgrimage. The iconic Long Room in the Old Library, completed in 1732 represents the ultimate in book sanctuaries. This exceptionally long space (213 feet/65 meters) is laid out in rows of nooks, each filled with stacks of shelves lined with tightly packed old books. Some of the nooks have ladders to reach the upper shelves, and some have a beautiful iron spiral staircase leading to the second level. At the entrance…
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Creative Wanderlust Adventure: Finding Stories Everywhere
Los Angeles is the city of stories. At any given moment, one has to wonder how many writers are working away crafting the next television show or movie plot. On a recent trip to LA, I too was inspired by stories. When I put my mind to it, I could start seeing them everywhere. A person would be walking in front of me down Fairfax… what was their story? I would pass a building on Sunset… what happened there? I would over hear a snippet of a conversation in Beverly Hills… what was on their minds? I soon latched on to my perfect character, in the perfect setting, with a…
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Wanderlust Los Angeles Book Launch Party!
Join me in celebrating the launch of my new book, Wanderlust Los Angeles! This is the third book in a series of Creative Guides to various cities (Wanderlust San Francisco and Wanderlust Seattle are both available as well.) Enjoy a signature Wanderlust Los Angeles cocktail (or mocktail) and dabble in a small creative endeavor inspired by the City of Angels while toasting to the new book! Click the image above, or email me to get more information about the event. I’d love to see you there!
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Travel Journal: A Day at Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia
I’ll never forget our perfect day hanging out on famed Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. It was winter time, yet the sunny, mid-seventy degree (fahrenheit) weather would suggest otherwise. We took a metro train from the Circular Quay to a bus and wandered our way to the beach through various neighborhoods and suburbs.* When we arrived I felt like we had been transported far from the CBD, and had landed in beach heaven! It was hard to believe that Sydney’s relaxed, laid back vibe could get any cooler, but in Bondi, it definitely did! After grabbing a bite to eat, we hung out on the beach and dipped our legs…
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Inspired by the Cotswolds, England
I still remember visiting the Cotswolds, England like it was yesterday. We stayed in the most charming hotel in Lower Slaughter, called The Slaughters Country Inn (formerly Washbourne Court Hotel after the family who owned it in 1470.) We stayed in a two story, two bedroom part of the manor that couldn’t have been more delightful with a small living room, dormer windows and plush beds. The first day, we stayed in the small town and wandered through the meadows, the churchyard, and along the streams, soaking in the scene. The low stone fences, the picturesque window boxes and gardens, the sheep grazing in the pastures, it couldn’t have been…
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Wanderlust Patterns: Exotic India Collection
I dream of traveling to India one day to soak up the colors, landmarks, symbols, and motifs of this culturally rich and diverse country. From the Pink City of Jaipur to the Taj Mahal in Agra, the visual feast of patterns is incredible. Inspired by stories I’ve heard, I created this Exotic India collection to celebrate this beautiful place in the world. If you are interested in licensing my illustrations or patterns in this collection, please contact me for details. For more licensing information, feel free to browse my portfolio.
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Creative Travel: Capturing the Look of a Neighborhood – A Walk Down Grand Ave, South San Francisco (incl Free Printable Coloring Page)
Trying to capture a neighborhood or location with a few simple drawings can sometimes feel like a daunting task! Take any given neighborhood, from residential to downtown and it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the many things to see; different building styles, different colors, different types of nature, etc. In a recent online class I hosted with South San Francisco Library, I boiled down this problem and created a simple recipe to help you capture your own neighborhood! Recipe to Capture a Neighborhood = Common Elements + Nature + Unique Elements + Oddities Using this recipe, I headed to downtown South San Francisco’s Grand Avenue to see what I could…
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Travel Story – Cabins of Lake Tahoe
One of my favorite things to do when I’m in Tahoe is to take long walks. Walks along the lakeside are amazing, but I also love to wander in and out of the neighborhoods on the North Shore and up into the mountains. My favorite part of wandering in the neighborhoods is playing the childhood game of “I Spy” and finding the sweet old cabins that once filled these neighborhoods. Many of them were built as summer cabins, with very little in the way of insulation (fine for summer in Tahoe), yet completely ill equipped for living in during the snowy winters. Trust me, I lived in one through two…