I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to some incredible places, and I’ve been unfortunate enough to throw up at every single one. The Great Barrier Reef, the Great Rift Valley, the mountains of New Zealand, the chateaus of the Loire Valley—my stomach is indiscriminate, and easily provoked.

“Every time I see a local ripping off a tourist for some ‘authentic’ experience, I think, ‘Who the hell is going to fall for that?’” Dylan, my ex-roommate, remarked a few months ago over breakfast. “And then I think, ‘Oh wait. There’s you.’”

The night before I enter Iran, a sliver of a moon hangs suspended opposite the cloud-shrouded peak of Mount Ararat, barely illuminating the Turkish border town of Dogubeyazit.

Two weeks ago, a heroic doctor delivered a baby while 30,000 feet in the air, on a flight from Taiwan to Los Angeles. This week, reports say that the Taiwanese woman whose labor diverted the plane to Alaska may be on the hook for $33,000. That’s because she may have planned to give birth in American airspace in order…

We were deep in the woods of Humboldt County at Katie Azevedo’s family ranch, gathered around the table for breakfast. It was a comfortable scene, but six weeks ago Katie was dirty and dusty, in the midst of a transformative experience: She and her mother, Linda—along with their horse, Sedona—were riding the Pony…

Some 13 million Americans purport to be part of the Mile High Club. Sound like a lot of people? Not when you consider that it only accounts for 4 percent of the American population. What’s more, these Mile High Club members are mostly men.

“I could tell you 100 stories and it wouldn’t cover what the people I’ve met have to say,” Sindy writes to me, shortly before 1 a.m. her time. She has spent the past year in Kurdistan, where she works with individuals who have escaped the horrors of ISIS.

Dr. Angelica Zen was on her way home from her honeymoon in Bali when her vacation took a last-minute swerve: she ended up delivering a baby on the airplane, thousands of feet in the air.

You don’t have to look too hard to find stories about airplane passengers being removed from airplanes—seriously, just the stories just fall from the sky (no pun intended) like acid rain—but rarely are they so confusing and absurd as this one.

The traditional study abroad experience is changing; no longer are students invariably heading to Europe to drunkenly piss on the streets of Florence or Sevilla. They’re heading to Africa, too—and it turns out that the students most interested in studying there are overwhelmingly women.

There’s an abundance of information about traveling internationally with dogs. If you’re moving abroad, obviously you’re bringing Fido. But traveling with cats? We don’t seem to talk about that a whole lot. And why is this? Are cats unworthy of traveling around the world? I think not!

From the check-in counter to the cockpit, the tarmac to the cabin, airline employees work hard. These jobs are pretty thankless, but this lack of consistent, warm-n-fuzzy emotional fulfillment is not grounds for failing to carry out one’s responsibilities. Especially if those responsibilities involve bodily fluids.

The traditional backpacking uniform involves convertible zip-off cargo pants and Keen sandals that resemble medical devices. It’s not chic. Of course, you want to leave your heels and lacy dresses at home when you’re wandering dusty streets and trails somewhere: backpacking for seven months changed my style completely…

Long-distance travels are a drain on both your time and money. The fact that such journeys can also seriously mess with your sleep and energy schedule—leaving your brain feeling like a moldy marshmallow—is insult added to injury. But with science, discipline, and math, the biological injustice of jet lag can be tamed.

I noticed something weird in the invitation to my Canadian cousin’s upcoming wedding in Mexico. As I read through the details, I saw that he was directing everyone to book their accommodations through...his travel agent.

Are you one of those people who white-knuckles your way through a 30-minute flight, afraid that if you stopped thinking about keeping the plane in the air for even a minute that it would immediately drop out of the sky like a useless aluminum can? If so, we’ve got some sexy news for you.

Attention driver’s license holders from the great lands of New York, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and American Samoa: The Department of Homeland Security has no love for you. [Update: Let’s add Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Oregon,…

A little known and surprising fact about the nightmarish hoops one must jump through at the behest of the TSA: You can get through airport security and board your flight without an official ID. It’s pretty chill.