Reflecting on the past few years means reckoning with a life spent in perpetual motion. It started with a berth aboard Cunard’s smaller vessels in the early 1980s — a young waiter and food manager with salt in his hair and no inkling that two working years at sea would ignite a lifelong obsession. Fast-forward four decades: 102 countries stamped, 44 vacation voyages logged, and a top-tier Ambassador status with NCL earned the hard way.
The Question Everyone Asks
“What was your favorite destination?” It’s the perennial cocktail-party query, and the honest answer is: it depends on what you’re hungry for.
Antarctica: Earth’s Last Frontier
Untouched. Incomparable. If those words mean anything to you, Antarctica is calling. Alaska has its glacial glory — no argument there —, but the moment polar ice shelves fill your entire field of vision, stretching endlessly toward the horizon, every other landscape suddenly feels tame. And the Falkland Islands? An unexpected gem that quietly stole the show, becoming the greatest penguin spectacle I’ve ever witnessed. Forget “scenery.” What you find here is the Earth in its original form — unapologetic and magnificent.
Europe: The World in a Week
Europe remains the crown jewel for sheer density of discovery. A single 7-day itinerary can sweep you through multiple sovereign nations, each a distinct tapestry of landscape, language, and legacy. The rugged mystique of the British Isles — the Orkneys, Shetlands, Faroes, and Kirkwall — gives way to the Baltic corridor: Norway’s fjords, Sweden’s archipelagos, Finland’s silence, and the historic port cities of Estonia, Lithuania, Germany, and Poland. And yes, the loss of St. Petersburg — where three extraordinary days were spent in 2016 — remains a genuine geopolitical casualty for any serious voyager.
The Mediterranean: Where Civilization Was Born
Southern Europe — Italy, Croatia, Turkey, Montenegro, Greece — operates on a different temporal scale entirely. These are the cradles of Western civilization, and they wear their millennia openly: in crumbling amphitheaters, marble sculptures, and the kind of layered history that makes modern life feel fleeting. No museum recreates what standing in these ruins actually feels like.
Asia: A Continent of Controlled Contrasts
Asia rewards the curious and humbles the assumptions. Japan’s meticulous precision, Vietnam’s kinetic energy, Cambodia’s spiritual gravity, Indonesia’s volcanic drama, and the mercantile sophistication of Singapore — each nation is a world unto itself, yet bound by shared threads of ancient culture, extraordinary cuisine, and religious traditions that run far deeper than any Western parallel. The landscapes, particularly in the archipelagos, border on the surreal.
Africa: The Grand Coastal Expedition
Last year’s 45-day back-to-back voyage along the African coastline was the most transformative chapter yet. Kenyan safaris at dawn. Madagascar’s otherworldly lemurs. South African big-game encounters, Cape fur seals, and — improbably — jackass penguins on a sun-bleached beach. Rounding Cape Agulhas — the true southernmost tip of Africa — before heading north along the Atlantic seaboard: Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, Senegal’s vibrant Dakar, the Ivory Coast’s coastal hustle, all the way to the volcanic silhouette of the Canary Islands. Even seen only from the water’s edge, Africa commands reverence.
North America: Two Wheels, Three Countries, 250,000 Miles
Not all exploration happens at sea. Across North America, the preferred vessel is a BMW motorcycle, and 250,000 miles have been logged across the United States, Canada, and Mexico — from the wild Atlantic shores of Newfoundland to the sun-bleached marina of Cabo San Lucas to the laid-back southern terminus of Key West. The same spirit carried a serious riding crew through the Alps and Dolomites — Germany, Italy, Austria, Switzerland — cresting the legendary Passo dello Stelvio, one of the great mountain passes in motorcycling history.
South America-West and East Coasts
There are places you visit, and there are places that visit you — that reach inside and rearrange something permanent. Machu Picchu is the second kind. I arrived by ship, stepped off onto Peruvian soil for the first time, and felt the altitude before I felt anything else. The air was thinner, the sky impossibly blue, and somewhere up in those Andean peaks, an Incan city had been waiting for me for 600 years.
The journey up to the citadel winds through cloud forest, the bus hairpinning up switchbacks that would make your palms sweat even without the altitude. And then suddenly — there it is. Stone terraces cascading down a ridge. Temples aligned to the solstice sun. Llamas grazing with total indifference to the wonder all around them. Nothing prepares you for the scale of it, or the silence, or the strange feeling that this place is still very much alive.
Years passed. South America called again — this time from the east. Three cities, each a world unto itself, each changing me in a different way.
Buenos Aires seduced me slowly. It’s a city of long dinners, late nights, and the kind of beauty that improves the longer you look at it. The wide boulevards of Palermo, the colorful houses of La Boca, the milongas where couples tango with a gravity and grace that makes you feel you’ve stumbled into something sacred — Buenos Aires doesn’t perform its culture for tourists. It simply lives it, and if you’re lucky, it lets you in.
Rio de Janeiro hits you the moment you arrive. The city doesn’t ease you in — it overwhelms you with beauty from every angle. Sugarloaf Mountain rises from the bay. Christ the Redeemer with arms open above the rooftops. Copacabana stretches golden into the Atlantic. Rio is a city that insists on joy, and it’s nearly impossible to resist.
And then came Iguazu Falls — and every superlative I’d ever heard about a natural wonder finally made sense. Eleanor Roosevelt, upon first seeing it, reportedly turned to her companion and said, “Poor Niagara.” She was right. Standing on the walkway above the Devil’s Throat — the great horseshoe of falls that sends 13 million liters of water plummeting every second — you don’t think in complete sentences. You just feel. The roar, the spray, the sheer improbable scale of it. This is nature making no apologies.
New Zealand and Australia
On the other side of the world — and absolutely worth every mile — my cruise from Auckland to Sydney was nothing short of spectacular! Port after port delivered new wonders, but Tasmania? Pure magic. Kangaroos! Wallabies! Wombats! Penguins! And the one and only Tasmanian Devil — as wild and feisty as advertised. These places don’t just leave an impression — they leave a permanent mark on your soul.
What 100 Countries Actually Means
Reaching over 100 countries and Ambassador status isn’t about ticking boxes. It’s about accumulating a library of moments that no algorithm can recommend, and no itinerary can guarantee. The pressure has lifted. The goals have been met. Whatever comes next will be a bonus — and that, for a goal-oriented traveler, might be the most liberating feeling of all.
Go now and check out my specific blogs for each of these places; you will be amazed!
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