(Photo by Cheryl-Anne Millsap) When Christmas comes to Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, it is wrapped in a big white tent and filled with music, food, handmade crafts and the ancient tradition of German Advent markets. Osthoff Resort General Manager Lola Roeh spent time in Nuremberg, Germany…
(Photo by R. B. Millsap) One night, on my first trip to Germany during the month of December, hungry and still a little jetlagged from the flight, I walked into a tiny restaurant in a residential district near the center of Munich. I opened the…
(Thomas Jefferson's 'Poplar Forest' retreat. Photo by Cheryl-Anne Millsap) It is easy to think we know everything there is to know about certain historical figures. Thomas Jefferson, for instance. But even great men have their domestic secrets. On a recent trip to Virginia I drove…
When I travel to a new place, one of the first activities I look for is a train ride, especially when the cars or locomotives are vintage workhorses that have been restored and put back in use. There’s no better way to sit back, relax…
Too often, when we travel to big events, the only thing we see of a town while we’re there is the crowd and the attraction. There’s no time to take the side roads and explore. But as a traveler I’ve learned it pays to make…
In the Departures section of the latest issue of AAA Western Journey Magazine, I contributed a list of my own travel tips and tools; suggested uses for items you might have at home in your own closet or medicine cabinet. One tip that didn't make…
At a rcent media event, I watched as a friend showed another woman--a professional photographer--her latest post on her Instagram feed, the mobile application that allows anyone to take photos with a smartphone camera and then manipulate them, filtering to add color, texture, vintage graininess…
Silent testimony to 11/11. WWI bunkers in Flanders Fields, Belgium.
(Photo courtesy O. Winston Link Museum, Roanoke, Virginia) Once you see one of his photographs, you never forget it. Inky darkness is frosted and silvered by pools of light. People and places, most in small towns in rural Virginia, are frozen in the moment. And…
Some places belong to our deepest memories. They are the source of the sights and sounds and experiences that define us, that make us the into people we become. Because I was born in the Southeast, less than a day’s drive from Great Smoky Mountain…
The Goo Goo Cluster is 100 years old this month. Anyone who grew up in the South or has spent any time in Nashville (and that includes the airport) will recognize the distinctive package featuring a piece of candy with a big bite missing. The…
(Photo by Kaki Smith) The house was just an ordinary little cottage in Sturgeon Bay, not one of the tall old farm houses--part of the dairy and agricultural legacy of the area--that line the roads along Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula. It was just an average family…
There are people who seem to be born with a thirst for a thrill. They take every chance to leap off bridges, tethered only by elastic Bungee cords. They jump out of planes, trusting one yank of the cord will release the parachute that will…
(Photo by Cheryl-Anne Millsap) Just today, the rattle of someone pulling a boat and trailer, bouncing over the patched pavement of the street in front of my house, was a familiar and significant sound. I know it well. And I know what it means. When…
(Photo by Cheryl-Anne Millsap) When I opened my eyes, the sun was not yet over the horizon and the weak light it cast was wrapped in the heavy mist rising from the Missouri River. I lay still, warm and bundled under a heavy layer of…
(Photo by Cheryl-Anne Millsap) The two-story mercantile, a farmhouse, the old grain elevator, a bank building and a set of abandoned railroad tracks running across the grassland are the only visible reminders of the town of Virgelle, Montana. Settled in 1912 by homesteaders who rushed…
(Photo by Cheryl-Anne Millsap) When we signed on for a small-ship journey along Alaska’s Inside Passage, we were promised the opposite of a traditional cruise. We were promised an un-cruise, to be specific. Instead of a leisurely sail past some of the most beautiful scenery…
(Photo by Cheryl-Anne Millsap) Standing under a blazing sun, on a wide, pristine, concrete runway shooting like an arrow across the high New Mexico desert, it occurred to me that so often travel is about visiting a place where something big happened in the past.…
(Photo by Cheryl-Anne Millsap) The wind had picked a bit up the night before, sweeping through the tall pine trees, taking with it loose branches and needles, dropping them to the grass below. I noticed something else in the litter on the lawn and as…
(Photo by Cheryl-Anne Millsap) An acquaintance recently asked where I'd been that had surprised me the most and I didn't hesitate to answer. Tallinn, the beautiful and ancient Estonian city on the edge of the Baltic Sea, was surprising in many ways. Virtually unknown to…
(Photo by Cheryl-Anne Millsap) My son has been on a boat out on the Pacific for weeks now and every so often a few lines arrive by email. “This has been a great trip,” he writes “The hurricane turned so the seas are not so…
(Photo by Cheryl-Anne Millsap) The little boy stood beside the table that held the mini-iceberg, the chunk of ice that had once been a part of the North Sawyer Glacier before breaking away--calving-- and falling with a splash into the Tracy Arm fjord off Alaska’s…
(Photo by Cheryl-Anne Millsap) I have friends who actually plan each meal. Not just at holidays, but all year long. Even in the summer. Even on vacation. They look through magazines and cookbooks and pick a recipe because it excites them, not because it uses…
(Photo by Cheryl-Anne Millsap) As the newspaper’s former “social” reporter, I’ve been to a lot of parties over the years. Countless times I’ve dressed in an evening gown or little black dress and found my seat at a big banquet table set for eight or…
In the jumble of odds and ends I carry around in my purse, a mix of grocery store receipts, loose change, lipgloss, hairbands and bobby pins, mints, a small leather notebook and a pen, there is an honest-to-goodness map of the world. And I don’t…
Cheryl-Anne Millsap's Home Planet column appears each week in the Wednesday "Pinch" supplement. Cheryl-Anne is a regular contributor to Spokane Public Radio and her essays can be heard on Public Radio stations across the country.
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