Travel's Tapestry

By Randy Mason

We take trips for many different reasons. Sometimes it’s to visit family and friends. Or sometimes it’s to get away from them! We look for destinations that will dazzle our senses with natural beauty, or to revel in great art and architecture.

Then there are special places where only echoes remain. And that fascinates us too.

By Randy Mason

It is amazing to discover the vast boundaries of the Navajo Nation. The largest tribe in the U.S. still occupies some 26,000 square miles sprawling across parts of three states—northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southern Utah.

By Steve Mirsky

Do you want to see the most diverse borough in New York City? Forget about it, Manhattan is where you want to go.

Hop on the No. 7 train from Grand Central terminal and you’ll know you’ve arrived in Queens as you burst out of the subway tunnel onto the elevated green iron tracks built mostly by immigrant laborers in the early 1900s. Extending seven miles from Long Island City to Flushing, lofty views of Manhattan’s skyline recede as you meander high above six neighborhoods tied together by Roosevelt Ave.—a bustling thoroughfare packed with street cart venders, restaurants, markets, and cultural landmarks representing nearly 150 different nationalities.

By Randy Mason

Creole and Cajun are terms often used interchangeably, though the cultures they describe aren’t really the same. What they share is a lineage from France, which left its mark on parts of Louisiana, especially those near the Gulf of Mexico.

Creole was coined in the 1700s to describe people of European heritage born in the New World. Over time, the term was broadened to include the inevitable mix of French, Spanish, African and other bloodlines that spread throughout the area—one that became part of the American South after 1803. Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, the first African American governor of a state, Louis Armstrong, Bryant Gumbel and Beyonce Knowles are among the list of famous Creoles.