Arrival in Dublin was easy. We walked off the plane with our backpacks, answered a few questions at immigration, and our bus stop was just outside the airport doors. On the Dublin Express, multi-lingual chatter filled the air. Spanish, French, Russian, and Italian, for starters. When we stepped off the bus near our hotel, the wind nearly toppled me over.

It is cold and wet here in Dublin. The kind of cold that blasts through your coat with the force of the wind. The type of wet that waxes and wanes throughout the day.

Barcelona is dead quiet in the early morning darkness. Back home, the pre-dawn hours are noisy. Delivery trucks clang and clatter. Buses slide by, their hydraulics hissing at every stop. Spain has a different rhythm. Cafe owners roll up their metal security doors sometime between nine and eleven in the morning. It seems every restaurant serves the same morning menu: strong cafe con leche, perhaps paired with a croissant and a glass of zumo de naranja. Spanish days start with a yawn and a stretch, just like I do! The day shifts forward, and rush hour doesn't arrive until ten in the evening.

I'm awake at five am because my body is still adjusting. We arrived at our hotel room, drunk with sleep deprivation, after a too-long travel day. My mantra for this trip is “take it easy.” That meant checking my carry-on bag rather than fighting for overhead bin space. And while I'm not the kind of traveler who flies halfway around the world to eat at McDonalds every day, using a multilingual kiosk to order a quarter pounder and fries can be a form of self-care.

Sometimes a place grips our imagination so tightly that we can't help but dream about it. And I suppose that's what happened when Stephen King visited the historic Stanley Hotel back in the nineteen seventies. He stayed there one night, had nightmares (rumor has it), and wrote The Shining shortly afterward.

Travel is so useful for writing because it allows me to collect details like a child picking up rocks. By the end of the day, my pockets are bulging. Edinburgh's slick black paving stones live on in my mind, and so does the sensory explosion of the spices at Athenian flea markets, right down to the detail of those blue and white evil-eye charms staring at me as I walked by.

Perhaps it's strange that I enjoy Vegas as much as I do. I don't gamble, I rarely drink alcohol, and I'm not into nightclubs.

But there's something entertaining about being in proximity to wanton depravity. I'm amused by the entertainers dressed like dominatrixes taking photos with tourists for $5 a pop, mostly because I enjoy asking P, every time, “would you like a photo with her?” only to have him tell me no thanks, he has no use for such a photo, and then I suggest we could use it in the annual holiday cards, to which he will say we don't send out holiday cards, to which I respond, we could start sending holiday cards if we had a nice photo of you and the lady with the handcuffs. This is how we proceed down the strip, me making juvenile jokes and my husband refusing to take the bait. This is our well-worn schtick, 21 years and counting.