Sip and sup,
Spa and stay;
See, shop and sail.
That’s the short list of my favored activities.
While the destinations vary widely, the features that I contribute to a variety of publications usually focus on some of those pleasures.

At 16, I visited Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico on a Caribbean cruise. By 20, I had attended William & Mary–and The Sorbonne–eloped, graduated from Adelphi University, (weeks after giving birth to my first daughter), and started a 30-year stint teaching French and Spanish.

Subsequently, I created a year-long Travel Project for my students and organized a plan for them to write make-believe travel stories, years before my own first-person experiential articles were published. Before instant internet access, I created slide shows and they researched information about the capital city, historic monuments, authentic food, sporting events, performances, art museums, and gift shopping in class, in the library, and on field trips to New York City.

As a working mom, I became involved in the women’s movement; then, when my colleagues started struggling with guilt as they confronted the challenge of working while mothering, I began writing a book to help make lives easier for them. “Don’t ask for help,” I advised in the early 80s, “that reinforces that the jobs belong to you. They don’t.”

While searching for an agent, I was asked if I’d ever been published. I hadn’t, but soon found a five-year gig as Dining Editor of New York Nightlife and wrote five monthly restaurant features and quarterly Looking Good pieces, about spas. “Make time for a spa day,” was my mantra in 1985; it still is. After You Can’t Do It All; ideas that work for mothers who work was published (McMillan, 1986; Berkley, 1988; FIRST, 1990), my world expanded to more than 30 markets with a book-tour and tours as the national spokesperson, first, for Ziploc Storage Bags and, later, for Contadina Pasta Ready. Staff people at the corporations involved were convinced that doing radio, TV, and cooking demonstrations were difficult; they had no idea what a cinch those occasions were, compared to teaching 8^th and 9^th graders.

Bob, my late husband, was a sailing enthusiast and active photographer whose images illustrated our boating stories; soon, we started working together on food and travel stories. We cruised, sailed, drove and flew…often on assignment; we discovered inns and hotels, cities and countries, islands and wine regions, together, and it much-enhanced our long marriage.

For samples, see my pinterest boards.

On my balcony at Byblos, the foredeck of the Arabella, a compartment on the Orient Express or a massage table at the Mandarin Oriental, in Bangkok, travel experiences enhance my life and encourage others to indulge.  ~Irvina