Actually, I prefer the never-ending day. The day when you take the long jet ride west, and it’s only a few hours later, in terms of clocks, when you arrive, than when you left — 7,000, 8,000, 9,000 miles ago. But the lost day has something to be said about it, too. It’s a sort […]

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For most of my time in Southern California, Irvine was a place you drove through on the way from Long Beach to San Diego. When I was young, we knew Irvine as a lake, not a city. Where the eighth-graders got to spend a day skylarking. To us, it was deep in the country, somewhere […]

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Yes. I know. Tales of long/delayed/strange plane rides generally are of interest only to the people who suffer through them. But this one was particularly odd and exotic. Really. Trust me. How often have you flown over Greenland? Not just the tip of Greenland, like, 500 miles of it right in the middle?

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This actually is a handy compilation of information, if you are planning to visit the United Arab Emirates sometime soon. And you probably are not planning any such thing, if you live in the States. It’s just too far. But this should be required reading for Europeans and, in particular, for Britons and Russians, who […]

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We know this for a fact: The island of  Tristan da Cunha is the most remote inhabited location on Earth. The Hawaiian Islands are more remote, collectively, but seven of them are inhabited. If you tire of one, you can hop over to the next. Can’t do that at Tristan da Cunha. The nearest humans […]

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We get this sort of story fairly often, in the UAE. Dubai has one of the world’s primary transit airports. People going from Europe or even Africa to Asia or Australia. The traveller stops and changes planes. And Abu Dhabi, a 90-minute drive south of Dubai’s airport, is not far behind in the transit race. […]

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It was on October 16, 2009, that we arrived in Abu Dhabi. Five years ago today. It seems longer. Not in a bad way. More in a “hard to remember life before” kind of way. A rule of thumb, among expats, is that if you do five years out of your home country, you never […]

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And I know a hare-brained sports scheme when I see one, having inflicted several dozen on myself over the past 30-some years. This one is crazy enough not even I would have done it in my youth. Probably not. Well, maybe not. And it involves 48 kids from the ages of 10 to 16. Check […]

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It’s a bit mind-boggling, the numbers around the Etihad Airlines nontstop flights from Abu Dhabi to Los Angeles, instituted on June 1 of this year. They fly their Boeing 777 equipment 16.5 hours without touching ground. On “one tank of gas”, that is. And cover 8,390 miles –making it the third-longest commercial nonstop route in […]

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This seemed a little bold when it was announced today. The 2014/15 edition of the Volvo Ocean Race, the nine-month, round-the-world exercise by the most intrepid and hardiest of sailors, plans to have all seven entrants sail the entire distance. As opposed to the previous Volvo race, three years ago, when the prevalence of piracy […]

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