“What are the chances you’d ever meet someone like that, he wondered. Someone you could love forever, someone who would forever love you back? And what did you do when that person was born half a world away?” These are the thoughts of Park, one of two central characters in Rainbow Rowell’s beautiful book about…
If you’ve read my post about Travel Plans and Dreams for 2015, you’ll know that I’m on a mission to complete the ‘Take 12 Trips Challenge’ this year, with the goal of exploring at least one new place, near or far, each month. Along with the challenge, I’ve decided to start a monthly round-up of…
A statue of Abraham Lincoln sits outside the Gettysburg Museum and Visitor Centre. The site of the Battle of Gettysburg, on the edge of the Pennsylvanian town of the same name, is one of America’s most-visited destinations, attracting 1.2 million visitors every year, and home to summer scenes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. How can you avoid…
Mao Zedong claimed that a man is not a real man until he has conquered the Great Wall of China. Disney must have heard the news, as “I’ll Make A Man Out of You” was one of the main sing-a-long songs in their 1998 movie Mulan. One of the modern wonders of the world, the Great Wall has…
Brunch is something of an institution in New York City. It’s to New York what the Sunday roast is to Britain: an excuse to be lazy with loved ones while feasting on good food. On a Saturday or Sunday morning (and well into the afternoon), New Yorkers, adopted and native, will almost certainly find themselves…
Seeking out street art in NYC’s Soho. As many of you know, I’ve recently relocated from Scotland to the States, leaving the sandy shores of the Hebrides for the skyscraper-lined banks of the Hudson River. While there are many things I love about my newly adopted country – the positivity of the people, the…
Look at a map of the Western Isles, and you’ll be able to spot the little bit of land on the east coast of Lewis that juts out into the sea, a ‘thumbs up’ from the island to the Scottish mainland. This is Point, also known as the Eye Peninsula (or An Rubha in Gaelic),…
Happy New Year from Stories My Suitcase Could Tell! After an adventure-filled 2014, I’m now looking ahead and plotting potential suitcase stories for 2015. They’re goals rather than resolutions: activities I’d love to experience and places I’m intrigued to explore. The Take 12 Trips Challenge has been making the rounds on social media and travel…
Christmas is over, and New Year (or Hogmanay, if you’re in Scotland) is fast approaching. It’s that time of year when seemingly everyone is exclaiming about the swift passage of time, and looking back fondly and thankfully over the past twelve months. I’m no different – I really can’t believe that 2015 is just around…
For those of us who’ve watched movies like Miracle on 34th Street or Home Alone, there is something fairytale-esque about New York City at Christmas time. With its streets and yellow cabs immortalised in these festive films, New York has something special in the air during the ‘holidays’, as Christmas is called on this side…
Rumour has it there are more bikes than people in the Netherlands, and after spending 36 hours in Amsterdam recently, I can easily believe it. The bikes were the first thing I noticed: in fact, the first thing that happened to me after stepping out of my hotel was a collision with a cyclist. It…
A big part of Stories My Suitcase Could Tell is encouraging ‘local travel’, the idea that if you treat your hometown like a tourist for a day, you’ll likely find there’s more to it than meets the eye. I did that for the last few years, on the island in the Outer Hebrides where I…
