Author: Sarah Jenkins

Sarah Jenkins caught the travel bug early in life, and has traveled in Asia, Europe, North America, and Africa, in addition to living in France, Austria, and Tunisia. When she's not writing, reading, or drinking tea, she can be found teaching English Language Development to middle and high school students in Denver, Colorado. With students from around the world, Sarah is lucky enough to be able to “travel” everyday.

Only a few months ago, I found myself in Costa Rica. I was staying with a friend at an all-inclusive resort. Lounging next to the pool with an umbrella in my tropical drink, I found myself thinking about how these all-inclusive resorts are known in French as “colonie de vacances.” Literally translated, this means “vacation colony,” like a little settlement established on some distant planet, or a late 19th century bastion of the …

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Though we seldom stop to think about it, traveling and reading are intimately linked activities. Those of us with wanderlust in our souls delight in learning about new places through travel blogs, articles, magazines, guidebooks—the list is endless. Oftentimes, reading substitutes for traveling, and helps us scratch the travel itch when jobs or families make wandering off difficult.

St. Augustine wrote that “The world is a great book…they who never stir from home read only …

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Many travel experiences are limited to a single location: the Great Pyramids of Egypt, the Roman Coliseum, et cetera. Volcanoes, however, are a destination you can visit all over the world, in a voyage that is more psychological than anything else.

Volcanoes have held a place of deadly fascination for centuries, managing to occupy a space of destructive link between the heavenly heights and subterranean depths. Conjure up the images in your mind: frozen victims …

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When you hear this phrase, the “bread basket” of the Roman Empire, a panorama of beautiful travel photos may spring to mind, from Greece, Turkey, Spain…

Surprisingly, these are the wrong postcards. The “bread basket” of the Roman Empire was their provinces in North Africa, covering vast swatches of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. While today’s Sahara desert is rapidly expanding, there are still areas of these countries where you can get an idea of …

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When Marcus Aurelius founded Vienna (then Vindobona), he did so with the sharp foresight of a realtor — location, location, location!

While Vienna itself has an incredible offering of tourist attractions, it is beautifully located in close proximity to a number of different sites. These new and exciting locations give you respite from the hustle-and-bustle tourism of Vienna, and all are convenient day trips away from the Gateway to the East. Four day-trip locales stand …

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Now what, you may ask, is the interest of learning a small measure of French? Those of you who have traveled to France can relate to the frustration of waiting years to use your high school French knowledge, only to be rebuffed with English by a smug crêpe seller. Moreover, they only speak French in that one European country — Paris, or something. Mandarin Chinese is much more practical.

French, the language of love and …

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In recent years, since the Twilight series debuted, the vampire has enjoyed a fantastic popular renaissance. Vampires, to put it mildly, are really cool right now. For those seeking to combine their vampiric interest with their passion for traveling, what better place to go than Transylvania, where the movement first began?

While myths about blood-sucking monsters have abounded the world over for centuries, Dracula was the world’s first “pop culture”
vampire. Dracula, of course, was …

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