by Gigi Ragland In June of 2004, the Tour de France occupied much of my thoughts. The race—on its ninety-first anniversary—marked Lance Armstrong’s bid for a record-breaking sixth consecutive win. That same year, I was training for a cycling tour of my own. Yet whereas the Tour de France consists of twenty stages of grueling…
by Gigi Ragland Undaunted Courage, by Stephen Ambrose, chronicles the heroic overland expedition of Lewis and Clark. These adventurous men and their thirty-one member party, dubbed the Corps of Discovery, journeyed westward from St. Louis in search of an all-water route to the Pacific. Of particular interest to me was the Corp’s encounter with the…
by Gigi Ragland Before I left for Thailand, friends advised me to visit Wat Po, the oldest and largest temple in Bangkok. They recommended Wat Po not because of the temple’s overwhelmingly stunning physical attributes, or because it holds Thailand’s largest reclining Buddha, but because it is home to the first Open University in Thailand,…