It was with much regret at the beginning of the month that I had to inform my editor, the fearless and stupendous Tim Leffel, that it was time for me to leave the Perceptive Travel blog.

I have been writing for the blog for almost four years, and have had an absolutely wonderful time working with Sheila Scarborough, Liz Lewis, former contributor Steve Davey, and new wordsmith/wanderlustian Alison Stein Wellner. Tim has given all of us a free hand with subject matter and interests, and you can’t ask for more from an editor than that. It’s part of what makes the blog and its parent magazine, Perceptive Travel, so unique: an editor who trusts his writers.

With another baby due in June, my family demands are increasing while my ‘free’ time and ability to travel are shrinking. And, as I have whined to many of my friends, I’ve got several novels begging to be written, including a half-done mystery novel that’s been lurking for over two years. It’s time for me to devote my family-free moments to these other ‘children.’

I would like to thank all of our wonderful readers and followers for helping to support great writing and a community of free ideas. I hope that all of you keep reading, keep writing journals or blogs or books, keep connecting, but most of all, keep traveling. Because there is nothing more crucial to the future and open-mindedness of this planet than the humanism that our travels bring to our own minds. We all want peace and beauty and good food, even if we disagree on politics or policies. You cannot have peace if there is war in your heart, and you cannot have war in your heart if you see the world from another’s point of view.

No matter how much you’ve seen, go out right now and see something new. Hit the road!

It’s the dead of winter in upstate New York, with freezing rain and dreary skies. So what do we do? Spend the weekend with friends in Hershey, Pennsylvania, chocolate capital of America. We needed a place to meet up halfway between where we live and Washington, D.C., where they’d be coming from, and all the cute B&Bs featuring breakfasts rooted out of their own organic gardens were closed at this time of year.

It seemed like a cheesy choice, both of us a little afraid to admit we were interested in seeing The Sweetest Place on Earth. But hey, we might move away someday and then wouldn’t we wish we’d done it?

(A reason, I keep telling myself, why I should also drive up and see Niagara Falls. Even my relatives from Russia did that, for goodness’ sake.)

Since it was wintertime, Hershey’s huge amusement park was closed. The roller coaster rides snaked empty and silent over the back of the tidy, municipal looking little company town like some sort of futuristic spaceport. But Chocolate World was open, and what more could you ask for when going to Hershey?

Well, a fair bit. The streetlights, for example, really are shaped like Hershey’s Kisses, a cute little detail in a cute little town. And the Chocolate World tour wasn’t some ho-hum walk through a working factory. Instead, it was a fun and rather funny ride in big wheely carts through a fictional factory that detailed the laborious process needed to turn cocoa beans, sugar, and milk into a chocolate bar or Kiss or covering for Reese’s peanut butter cups.

The big draw? Singing cows. Now, I get my family’s milk direct from a raw milk farm, and I’ve never seen those cows sing while they were being milked. I’m going to have to tell the farmer to go to Hershey and get some pointers. Talk about happy moos!

[Many apologies for the lack of photos of said singing cows. The curse of the traveler struck, and my camera turned out to have a dead battery that day.]

The tour was in fact both educational and fun. But I was less inspired by the making of chocolate itself than I was by the background and history of the Hershey company and founder, Milton Hershey. That’s where the real meat (or cocoa nib) of the story lies. Because poor-man-makes-good Milton S. Hershey was one of those patrician company owners just chock-full of noblesse oblige. Not only did his employees enjoy relatively fair wages and good working conditions, Hershey built the entire company town to serve their welfare with schools, churches, and clean places to live (‘company town’ usually refers to mining or gold rush towns where the economy is designed to sap all wages from the workers and siphon them straight back to the controlling company through high prices and lack of competition).

He and his wife also founded a school for underprivileged young people, the Hershey Industrial School that is still going strong today (renamed the Milton Hershey School). And not only that, but, unable to have children of their own, they left their not inconsiderable fortune of 60 million dollars to that school, an institution that still enjoys a controlling share of the Hershey company.

Now, I might not like Hershey chocolate that much (except, of course, Reese’s peanut butter cups; there’s something special about them), but knowing what’s behind the company, and seeing the model town that functions around it, I’m much more inclined to buy their products. Milton Hershey is someone I can admire, which I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t gone there.

Even at a dead time of year, a party that included 2 pregnant chicks, their spouses, and a 2 1/2-year-old boy found plenty to do. Perhaps more enticing than Chocolate World was the Harrisburg Science Museum (Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts). Although it’s small, it’s packed with the kind of hands-on experiential displays that have made science museums so popular across the country. You can try to build a working dam and see how long it holds together, or construct a building with mini bricks and sticks and then see how earthquake-proof it is, and of course see an electricity show. That’s all aside from the actual Kidspace section, which includes a water play area where kids can experiment with rearranging dams, locks, pipes, and the flow of an entire watercourse.

Popping over to Hershey for the weekend reminded me once again that sometimes the destinations outside your own back door are just as rewarding as the ones requiring a plane ticket, passport, crash language course, and inoculations. Next time, though, I bet we’ll aim for the roller coasters.

My copy of The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey quotes the Washington Post’s review on its back cover: “There are far too many books in which a travel writer follows in the footsteps of his or her hero—and there are far too few books like this, in which an author who has spent time and energy ferreting out material from archival sources weaves it into a gripping tale.”

As much as I’m inclined to defend those footstep-following travel writers, an actual reading of The River of Doubt bears out that reviewer. A narrative that depends on the writer’s own observations and experiences, with flashbacks and notes regarding those whose footsteps they’re following, no matter how well written, cannot give readers the visceral experience promised by a narrative relying solely on the original explorers’ writing.

Author Candice Millard delivers the kind of heart-in-mouth, exquisitely detailed tale you’d expect from a former writer and editor for National Geographic. The River of Doubt is a careful and riveting story of the journey that former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt took after his depressing failure to win a third presidential term in office.

In 1912 Roosevelt corralled a naturalist, a famous Brazilian explorer, and his own son Kermit into an expedition to chart one of the Amazon’s unmapped, jungle-choked tributary rivers. The river had so thoroughly defeated previous attempts at exploration that it was dubbed the River of Doubt.

The expedition was poorly equipped, having relied on a supplier whose previous journey into the Arctic had ended in disaster, and a priest, a close friend of Roosevelt’s, who had little idea of the true physical hardships an Amazonian exploration would entail.

Millard is a master storyteller here, telescoping in to a tight focus on experiences from first-hand journal entries from the expedition’s commanders, including Roosevelt’s, then out briefly to a modern understanding of the Amazon jungle’s ecology and the native Indian tribes who inhabited it at the time, and back in again to the expedition’s heartbreaking and often deadly trials.

The book is fascinating on so many levels. There is the journey itself, the kind of knowledge-or-death scientific endeavor of that era we can’t seem to get enough of. There is the everyday drama of near-starvation, a constant battle with malaria and dysentery, the haunting survival-of-the-fittest ethic of the Amazon ecosystem, losing essential canoes and supplies to the River of Doubt’s many rapids, murder among the ranks, a drowning, and Roosevelt’s own near-suicide when he becomes so injured and ill that he fears costing others’ lives through his inability to function.

There is the tension surrounding this great man, who, although he had served two terms as president and would become one of the country’s most remembered leaders, felt that he hadn’t done anything of significance in his life. Millard skillfully weaves in his own restless energy, his fears for his son, the punishing and self-reliant way he’d raised his children, his essential if unacknowledged humanism, his lonely wife, and his bullish and bullheaded beliefs about America’s place in the world.

But what caught my attention more than any other detail of this incredible book was the way Millard dealt with class, and with it, racial tension.

As with any expedition of the time, the high-class (usually white) leaders got the credit and glory, while their adventure was made possible only by the underpaid, backbreaking, life-threatening labor of many unknown local men. The River of Doubt is one of the few books I’ve ever read that handles this issue without either turning it into a classist manifesto (that is, railing against Roosevelt and others who have cost countless lives through their desire for adventure), yet without ignoring the contribution that the expedition’s camaradas made to its—and indeed Roosevelt’s and his son’s—survival.

In other words, Millard balances respect and acknowledgment of all contributions (including the role a local Indian tribe played by choosing not to murder the entire expedition—a decision the expedition members were never aware of) without ever letting myriad issues cloud the story she is telling.

And what a story it is. It’s been a long time since I read a travel book that was as well put together, where not only the quotes chosen but the words used showed the hand of a craftsperson who didn’t let her own ego get in the way of the narrative.

I came away from The River of Doubt with a renewed respect for the Amazon jungle and its incredible ecosystem, but also with renewed respect for Theodore Roosevelt. In this book Millard has given us a new understanding of what drove the man through his life, and the dual thrills of adventure and scientific discovery he craved at its peak.

The morning sounds of the Sportivnaya station’s rush hour rained through my concentration. They were Russian sounds—no music, no chatter, no shouting. The clanging of change and murmur of voices as people bought metro cards. I missed the plastic green tokens they used to use. The escalator’s muffled rattle and rhythmic squeak. The trip-trip, trip-trip as the people on the left side of the escalator jogged down the steps. Those on the right stood silent. The trains rumbled into the station with an almost underwater echo.

The escalator rattled away beneath me. It descended through a tunnel lit by wan lights. The globe-like bulbs marched downwards, reflecting off the tops of heads as people vanished through the bottom.

The train’s doors slid open with a slippery bang. The crowd crushed back and forth as the train emptied, then filled, and tight-lipped, mostly unwashed Muscovites pushed one another to fight for just one more space on the train. This time of day, there was never enough room. But there was a train every thirty seconds. I’d catch the next one.

I straightened the sheepskin coat that my father’s wife had given me. Dark brown, with a fashionable suede look, it was my most useful piece of clothing in my efforts to appear Russian. I removed my old black fleece hat and stuffed it into my pocket. The metro was so much warmer than the knife-edge cold outside that I started sweating as I descended on the escalator. I wiggled my still-frozen toes inside my boots.

I slid into the metro car, just another tired-faced woman trying to look pretty and pulled-together. I slipped through to the back and squeezed into a space near the door separating the cars. I stood sideways and loosened my knees, ready to sway with the jerky movements of the train. With no bar within reaching distance, I was held up by the men and women pressed against me. A little of their dandruff shook onto my shoulders. The electronic female voice said, “Be careful, the doors are closing. Next stop, Verobyovi Gori.” I suppressed a shiver of happiness. That voice reached back into my memory, fifteen years of loving this place.

Every one of us probably has a foreign city we’ve learned to call home: Moscow, Berlin, Bangkok, Santiago, San Francisco, Fez. It’s a tramping ground we return to again and again, plumbing the depths of what it means to have a home away from home.

There is no tourist attraction, no museum, no scenic overlook that can give the traveler the same experience as feeling part of a place. To slip into the daily rhythm of residents and commuters—there’s nothing better.

Me, I have a love affair with the Moscow metro that some of my up-and-coming Muscovite friends deplore. My earliest Russian impressions always include the rush and tumble of the underground trains. And when I get tired of looking at its award-winning architecture and Soviet-era art, I take the train out to the home of Russian Orthodoxy in Sergiev Posod, or a bus to the sprawling former estate and toy churches of Arkhangelskoe.

Like most major cities, Moscow is packed with sights. You must see Red Square. It’s shiny and absurd and windswept and cold and unnervingly more like Disney than any place with such a bloody history has any right to be. But if you see it, I’ve learned the hard way, try to be a local. Dress to blend in. Walk confidently out of the metro station. Attach eyes to all sides of your head. Keep your camera out of sight. Why? Because you want to be on the lookout not for pickpockets, but for the police, who constantly scour the influx of photo-snapping tourists in order to charge fines (that is, bribes) for improper paperwork. Come to think of it, not so unlike pickpockets after all. In the Russia I know, theft happens out in the open. My father was once stopped pointlessly by a traffic cop, who matter-of-factly requested a bribe. When my exasperated father refused, the policeman said, waving my father’s driving license and residency documents, “Think about it this way. This is a product. How much are you willing to pay for it?”

With every step, every visit, I hook in to the internal compass that Russia has become for me. And each time I return, I try to share the wealth of that decades-long relationship. As writers, bloggers, photographers, or enthusiastic neighbors sharing vacation snaps, we try hard to impart this feeling to those around us. We want to share the beauty and complexity of the places we feel we know, and the places we feel we can never truly know.

Like snow and rain, winds have developed their own vocabularies. Their personalities evolve in the geography that nurtures them: the damp Chinook that signals the end of a Rocky Mountain winter, the soft zephyrs that cool a hot beach, the bone-gnawing barbers of a Saskatchewan January, and the Harmattan desert breezes that scrape sand over every particle of exposed skin.

And then there is the wind that lingers after a New England Nor’easter, the kind of wind that rips your hair right out of your head, the nameless wind that feels like a beating, and all you want to do is curl up in a corner and wait for it to pass.

This wind attached itself to the three-hour whale-watching catamaran out of Boston Harbor when my in-laws were visiting from England. It bore down upon us with the force of an iron door being slammed until Liz, my mother-in-law, shrank to about half her size. But I couldn’t shrink, much less curl up in a corner. I was crouched on the bucking deck, pissed off and terrified, trying to hang onto a leaking sick bag that flapped over the side of the boat.

“Don’t litter,” they’d told us as the boat moved out of the dock near the New England Aquarium. Don’t throw anything over the side; don’t leave things on the deck to be picked up by the breeze. “It’ll be a little rough today,” they added as an afterthought. I fiddled nervously with a thumb. My earliest memory is of a canoeing accident when I was two that nearly drowned my family. I ignored Liz’s mention of her tendency to seasickness, and thought instead about the water phobia that grabs my ankles on occasion. Before I could suggest sitting inside—where the water couldn’t threaten me—the crew powered up the jet cat and smashed their way to the whales, plunging up and down the leftover waves of yesterday’s storm.

That was when Liz went very, very silent. “Don’t talk to me,” she said to our husbands, her clipped British accent still unfailingly polite, her uncreased linen clothes rippling in the wind. She turned pale and gripped an empty Starbucks bag whose contents were soon returned to it. Boston Harbor whizzed by.

I eyed each wave as if it held the grinding teeth of a sea monster. I think I whimpered. Above us, someone narrated the passing of islands and lighthouses. Liz did not turn to look at them, but kept her eyes fixed on a horizon that the bow, most unfortunately, interrupted every few seconds. I tried to ask my husband Ian why on earth he’d sat up front, but the wind forced the words right back down my throat.

The little paper Starbucks bag was insufficient. Ian staggered inside for a stock of plastic-lined sick bags. We huddled in our seats as Liz, and then her husband Tony, filled one, two, three, four of them. I pressed my fingers around the tops to keep the bags from being whipped to sea. Didn’t want to mess up lunch for the fish.

Some time later, Ian lifted his head, sniffing, then mouthed something at me as his mother retched into a fresh bag. I shook my head, wanting only for the boat to stop, not caring about the prospect of seeing whales, definitely not caring to hear a witty comment from him about the healthfulness of fresh air. He brought his mouth to my ear and bellowed into it.

“The bags. Are leaking.” A forefinger pointed to the trail of puke glistening its way across the deck.

Well, damn. I thought about racing at a crawl back to the trash bags inside. I thought many unkind things about the teenaged crew members who’d sold Liz the acupressure motion sickness bracelets when we boarded. “Yes, they really work,” the girl had told me. A wave lifted me from my seat, scattering more drops of vomit around, and I thought nastily about bringing the bracelets back inside, dripping bags in tow, to ask for a refund.

There was no way to make it to a trash can without leaving evidence of that morning’s breakfast all over the boat. I couldn’t even stand up without falling over, and the wind, egalitarian in its direction, made sure anything in remotely liquid form got everywhere.

I slunk from the seat to the starboard rail, where I hung on, petrified, as the bags leaked their contents into the sea. I hung on tighter, gulping back tears of anger at the weather and the stench, and at uncontrollable terror of the dark water. My fingers grew numb around the bags. The wind fingered the holes (all along the seams—who makes these things?), widened them, and gleefully ripped the bags to shreds.

At times like this, exposed to Mother Nature and helpless before her, some people like to think that they are getting back to their roots as human beings, planting themselves in the earth from which cities and air conditioning so often separate us. Full engagement of life, rather than fear of death, becomes their focus. It’s a nice thought, one I’ve indulged in on occasion. But this time, faced with a deep-water phobia and the demon wind drilling into my eardrums, I found myself commiserating more with merchant sailors and fishermen who have fought with nature over the millennia: dropping my litter into the sea, I cursed the nameless wind.

After two hours the invisible navigator enthusiastically announced that whales had been spotted and we raced to the site. When the boat halted a young woman came up from the back of the boat to view the three humpbacks. Her flat, bright green shoes reflected sunlight off their suede and gold embroidery.

“You might want,” I coughed, waggling my fingers at her feet, “you might want to move back. The sick bags leaked.” She looked down at her jeans dragging above the film of sludge, and jumped.

“Oh!” She ran back to the cabin, pausing only to flick a glare at us.

Even the most brutal wind cannot erase the reek of bile. My in-laws’ misery ensured we had the entire front deck to ourselves. Liz and Tony trembled their way to the railing. Three humpback whales cavorted in the sea.

“Oh,” whispered Liz in an entirely different tone of voice from the young woman, “oh, it’s wonderful. Fantastic!” she said a little louder as two whales exposed their tails in a dive. Inhaling stench along with the fierce fresh air, I looked at her, standing there in her now-creased linen, her face pale, thinking what a wimp I was compared to my determined, delighted mother-in-law. She wiped her watering eyes to peer through the sparkling waves at the whales, and laughed as another tail splashed down.

“Worth it, mum?” Ian asked her.

“Oh, yes,” she said, blinking. “Look at ‘im!” A flipper flapped the water. The boat rocked gently. Liz handed her camera to Tony. “I think I’ll sit down now, luv.” Tony handed the camera to Ian.

“I think I’ll sit down, too.” They shuddered against each other on a bench in the sunshine. Ian took pictures and I double-bagged several sick bags for the trip back. The wind, in one last slap, stole one out of my pocket and littered it into the sea.

Some days later, while researching ancient mythologies, I decided on a name for this malicious wind: I call it the Tiamat, named for a Babylonian goddess whose province included war, despair, and destruction. It couldn’t be coincidence that she was also the goddess of salt water.