There’s a strange fact about Costa Rican people – while they’re enormously proud of their beautiful country, they cringe when you mention the capital. “To be honest, it’s not somewhere we’re really proud of,” one tour guide told me. “If you only see San Jose, you haven’t seen our country.”…

Amsterdam’s cityscape, with its narrow houses tilting at various angles like rows of dominoes frozen mid-fall, at times looks like a scene from a Dr. Suess story. These leaning buildings, far from being architectural mistakes, represent centuries of adaptation to the unique challenges posed by building a city on swampland.…

File under “One more thing your travel advisor will be telling you about next time you visit the UK.” Beginning January 8, travelers to the United Kingdom from non-European nations, including the United States and Canada, will need to take an extra step as the new Electronic Travel Authorisation…

It’s difficult to imagine Abu Dhabi before oil was discovered in the 1960s. Once a small community known for fishing and pearl diving, Abu Dhabi now sprouts from the deserts and stretches to the sky with heights previously unrecorded by humans. The extreme wealth of this city has also brought…

Online passports have taken a step forward with the broad rollout of a Google Wallet application. Travelers now can upload a passport and just show their phones as ID at TSA checkpoints across the United States. Even Google cautions that the technology, which went into beta in September and…

Think of it this way…Endless charming towns, historic landmarks and the beauty of Europe’s waterways rolling by as you sip wine on a sunny deck. That’s what I knew I was signing up for when I was invited on a 15-day cruise from Amsterdam to Budapest with Avalon Waterways. But…

Dartmoor National Park in Devon, England, hosts a mystical and otherworldly forest. Wistman’s Wood, one of Britain’s highest-altitude oak woodlands, is what remains of the ancient wildwood that once covered much of Dartmoor’s landscape thousands of years ago. The woodland occupies a steep-sided valley near Two Bridges, situated at an…

Facing strong pushback from the travel industry in general, and the cruise lines in particular, Mexico has postponed a new $42 tourist tax on cruise passengers by six months, from January to July 1. Mexico has long taxed hotel guests but exempted cruise passengers, who sleep on their ship. But…

Rainy season. Two words that are almost sure to make you rethink your holiday plans. Like Costa Rica in soggy September, when anyone visiting this small Central American country is bound to need a raincoat. So why go to a place knowing you’re likely to get drenched, when you can…

Cabarete hardly misses a beat, even in a pouring tropical deluge.  Arrive by taxi along the main coastal road from Puerto Plata on a mid-summer day, and the route into this ever-lively resort town swiftly becomes jammed with traffic—cars, taxis, the local guaguas (mini-vans that make frequent stops), and of…

I cruised a lot with my parents from an early age. They always said it was the easiest way to travel in a wheelchair. I found out for myself when I began using a wheelchair. Aside from the obvious ability to go to different places and unpack once, a cruise…

The journey to Key West is almost as memorable as the destination itself. Driving the Overseas Highway (US Route 1) from mainland Florida feels like gliding across the ocean, with the Atlantic on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other. The 113-mile route from Miami crosses 42…