A Summer Worth Celebrating: My New England Road Trip
Join me on a summer road trip through New England — from the Berkshires to Acadia National Park — with photos, stories, and hidden gems.
In Plain Sight: A Border Wall Photo Project
From Mexicali to Calexico, Tijuana to San Diego, this project witnesses how the border wall reshapes daily life, families, and landscapes—an act of testimony to both human resilience and systemic inequality.
A Halloween walking tour through a San Diego historic neighborhood
My favorite season to enjoy the North Park Dryden Historic District, which boasts several blocks of California bungalows and Spanish colonial revival homes, is Halloween.
The Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge
Editor’s note: This column is written by my father, Rich Ryan, who I’ve invited to be a frequent contributor to Gracefully Global as “Dad’s Guest Blog,” as he calls it. He’s a retired professor, and he keeps himself busy with frequent traveling and writing a column in the local newspaper of my hometown, the Imperial Valley Press. This particular adventure we shared together along with my stepmom, Estela. This is the second post in the…
Vlog: Country Mountain Getaway in Callicoon, NY
As I continue on with my late-summer East Coast travels – which will soon turn into my early-fall Italy travels – I’m barreling on with my vlog production, hoping to bring at least one of these to you per week. This particular vlog is near and dear to my heart: it documents a special weekend trip to a family mountain home in the Catskills that has been an annual occasion for more than…
Experiments in Vlogging: Northampton, MA
I feel like I have nine lives on WordPress: I disappear for a while, but I always manage to make it back. While some of my favorite alone time is spent reading blogs on WordPress, I’ve jumped into the world of education travel coordination with CISabroad, and coordinating faculty-led university student tours of Italy takes every last bit of energy out of me and leaves no time for blogging. That…
Happy Mother’s Day to my mother, the artist
My mom sometimes worries – as many moms do – that she hasn’t been the best mom. But “best” in this case, as in every case, is just relative. Who in this case would be the definitive judge of all moms in terms of being “the best?” Donna Reed? Michelle Obama? Angelina Jolie? The idea of a “best mom contest” is kind of hilarious, maybe because it is such a…
Visiting Las Vegas on a budget
As a Southern California native and a frequent visitor to Las Vegas, I have a love/hate relationship with the city. Expensive, commercial, hot, and crowded, it is also a destination laden with treasures and beauty that you don’t find everyday. A fellow blogger put together this fabulous Vegas guide, and I am reblogging this post because it is so rich with information regarding finding those treasures in Vegas but not…
The passion behind our favorite places, and the story of a great man named Brooks Gremmels
The Hidden Stories Behind Famous Landmarks What if Gustave Eiffel’s controversial design for the Eiffel Tower had never survived? Or New York’s merchants and landowners had never proposed their idea for Central Park to the city of New York? Going on vacation typically means relaxing, so we often don’t think too hard about the “why” and “if” behind the treasures we visit. But without knowing the specific history of our…
“Ben Revived” in Ben Wheeler
I just spent two weeks in Ben Wheeler, TX. Population unknown because, well, there are no city lines. But according to Wikipedia, the knower of everything — even the unknown — the population is 425. An evening at the Fish Fry. Photo by Peggy Ryan Where Is Ben Wheeler, Anyway? When my mom first saw Ben Wheeler on my summer itinerary she asked me why I hadn’t told her I…
The Elusive Ojai “Pink Moment”
Do you ever find yourself on vacation, overwhelmed by the beauty that you’ve walked into, and in a momentary moment of emotional clarity, wonder what you ever did to deserve experiencing this beauty? The first occurrence of that moment on my trip to Ojai, California, came to me during this sunset, with the blue mountains crisply running across the horizon and soft pink light illuminating from behind them as if…
Reloving America Summer 2013: On the Hudson River
This is my summer of re-love. I have returned to the United States for a mere two months, as I have done each summer since I relocated to Bologna, Italy three years ago. And I have been gifted a unique opportunity to be a tourist in my own country in the places that I once took for granted – places that I visited often for my whole life, and places…