Well, all my travel journalist colleagues seem to be doing it; so I thought it was about time for me to finally compile my own list of favorite travel destinations in 2018. I was blessed to experience such an array of edifying and diverse landscapes and cultures. Did I say diverse?

As I stood in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma I was amazed by the lushness of its greenery and sense of cosmopolitism. This was my first trip to Oklahoma, and in my naiveté, I had thought the whole state was one big Dust Bowl. Perhaps I had seen John Ford’s film adaption of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath too many times, but that image had been branded in my mind.

In the 1955 film Daddy Long Legs, the actress Leslie Caron, playing a teenage waif in an orphanage, is plucked out of her drab milieu and introduced to a posh life, where she can have just about anything. What she asks for is an "'amburger with chocolate sauce," homing in on the most tasteful delicacy she can imagine.

You can’t call it “Bland Rapids” anymore. Every fall, the most attended free public art event in the world turns Grand Rapids, Mich., — once the butt of jokes for its sleepy status as Michigan’s second city — into a hip, cutting-edge community that celebrates creativity.

And then the rains came down, blessing this magical and sacred city of 21,321,000 million inhabitants and giving them a gentle reprieve from their bustling and productive lives. It has been said that Mexico City has a perfect annual spring temperature, making it an abundant produce belt for Mexico and the rest of the world.

The “shot heard round the world” that started World War I was fired on June 28, 1914, when a student shot the archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, beginning a conflict that lasted four years, involved 32 countries and cost 41 million military and civilian casualties, including 18 million lives. By 1917, the war was not going well for …

In the real estate business, the ever-intoned mantra is location, location, location. So, it is no surprise that when people are dreaming of fleeing the frost of January and February, seeking the embrace of the sun, they are faced with demand-pricing for lodging (not to mention inflated air fares) during those winter months — because everyone wants to be in …

STUTTGART, Germany Stuttgart, birthplace of the automobile, is a city of contrasts, a combination of the old and new. It’s an industrial city with a rich cultural heritage. Badly bombed during World War II, the city still has some of its old buildings intact, or restored, and while it has neither the graceful charm of Munich nor the vibrant energy of Berlin, it …