Switzerland when I was 10 months old doesn’t really count, so I was 7 the first time I saw Real Snow. We’d driven 862 miles — from Brisbane, Queensland, to the Kosciuszko National Park in New South Wales — to see it, and the fact that we called it…

Ten years ago in Paris, in my other life as a letterpress print shop owner, I bought a stunning vintage Adana tabletop machine. It’s hand-run, small and reliable and pretty, with perfect ruby red rubber rollers for inking. Those rollers — two…

I’d really like an Easter Bilby.Some of the things I miss from home — Tim Tams, chicken salt, Vegemite (I don't want your opinion) — I’ve learned to track down here. But no one here is selling Easter Bilbies, so I think it’s a concept America should…

In Strasbourg, on the edge of France, there’s a coffee shop that’s been there since 1884. High on the wall above all the baristas is the lettering: “Mon Grand-père était torréfacteur.” My grandfather was a coffee roaster. That was in the early days…

The first time I did the Incline, I had a large baby on my back. Don’t yell at me. I didn’t know any better. I was new to Colorado Springs, I had a natural tendency to tackle big things without examining them first, and the Incline was newly legal…

I wasn’t kidding when I called my last column “Drag me up the Incline” — two years of neglecting Manitou’s meanest attraction had really gone too far. Happily, quite a lot of people took me very seriously. I got enough emails and arm-twisting, offers…

When I was 20ish and living between two Australian cities, my clever general practitioner realized all the weird stuff happening to me meant I might have cancer. She didn’t say so; she referred me to a specialist and a whole five days after her…

If you dig deep enough in my sent emails (for your own safety, please don’t) you’ll find an email I sent to my family and close friends on April 30, 2017, from our 8-year-old son’s ICU bedside in Children’s Hospital, Denver. I didn’t even do the…

From left: Two of my brothers, me, my sister on a rock, somewhere in New South Wales. Back: the 1923 Packard (I mean, most of one?) that we drove 1,257 miles from Brisbane to Adelaide to collect, in mid-Australian-summer heat in a Citroen DS (right)…

I woke up in the slightly-dark before my alarm this morning, because my best friend in Australia texted me this picture — then another then another then another then another. This is a photo of a photo, so the quality is dodgy, and it was taken in…

So here we are, wedged between Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black History Month: in lip-service land. Here’s where people who deny white privilege post black-and-white pictures of Dr. King on social media to bask in his glow, cherrypick…

Bernie Sanders puts it bluntly: “Question: What does it say about a political party that has to repeatedly gerrymander districts to continue to hold power, that has to make it harder for people of color and for poor people to vote?" “Answer: It says…

I was in Wild Goose the other day when I heard another Australian. I wasn’t sure at first — the longer I’m gone from home, the longer it takes me to distinguish between a real Australian accent and my own wishful thinking. But a few words in I…