Top Stories
Stories in Wander that you’ll love, handpicked by our team.
Remember
The air hangs hot and humid, reaching nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Sweat trickles beneath your clothing as you move along the pathways. Whispers of long silenced echoes lift in the occasional breeze, surrounding you with an eerie sense of something other worldly, foreboding and long lost. Dust particles stir to settle in your lungs with each breath and step you take beneath the intertwined tree limbs hanging just overhead; they provide relief - momentary shelter from the sun’s rays. Each movement, each stir of dust leads you one step closer to whatever beckons. Not knowing exactly what you will find ahead, you still obey the summons. It's that for which you traveled one hundred miles inland.
By Cindy Calder2 years ago in Wander
Golinda and Gallopatrot go to the Emerald Isle
The short days were getting longer. As the sun dipped below the horizon, the blue hour created the magic of the darkest phase of twilight. It was time to put Oliver to bed. Yaya felt the muse come alive when he asked for a story.
By Katherine D. Graham2 years ago in Wander
Unmasking the Winchester Mystery House
Hollywood loves capturing our minds and imaginations and showing us visually compelling stories. However, it's important to peel back the layers of truth on cinematic claims that boast "inspired by true events" or "based on a true story." Such is the case with the movie Winchester.
By Crystal A. Wolfe2 years ago in Wander
A telegram to Little Me
I acquired a magical souvenir; it was a realisation. By taking an impulsive trip to Thailand, I awarded myself the chance to have it. You are our own gift shop. You choose the opening times, you choose the stock. They are the very nature of wisdom, realisations. One could say we collect them and form a magnificent portfolio entitled Experience. And that's why we do the majority of things we do. But travelling is the act most generous in the offering of experience, the gift shop with the best stock. We go on the hunt for experiences, daring ourselves to be stimulated in new ways, by new flavours. To sweat, swim or shiver in the waters of new challenges. To hear new sounds, learn novel outlooks, and relish as hinges creak with unknown doors opening in our hearts and minds. This realisation and the flourishing effect it had upon me made Thailand my best trip yet. All this realisation consisted of was merely a stripped back epiphany of why we do these things. See new places, take new risks, seek refreshing distractions from all that we're tired of being familiar with.
By Michael Brennan2 years ago in Wander
A Weekend in Buxton
All my life, I’ve been English in an emotional, mental, and social way, but never a physical one until the Spring of 2022 when all my Anglophile dreams came true. I was finally able to visit my soul country, meet my wonderful online friends in person, and confirm my belief that it was where I belonged.
By Emily Albers2 years ago in Wander
Touching the Sky
Back in 2020 (yes, THAT 2020), I took my very first steps towards becoming an international traveler. I was 25 years old, and up to this point, the furthest I'd ever traveled alone from my home state of New Jersey without my family was to West Virginia.
By Emily Marie Concannon2 years ago in Wander
Gay your life must be
“My Dad’s got itchy feet” I would say. I don’t know where I first heard this phrase, but I parroted it often as a child, a vague but sufficient explanation for the fragmented answers I offered to “where did you….” questions. The assumption was that we were a military family. When I went to Sixth Form College and completed the full two years without moving, I set a personal record for time spent at any one educational institution. But we were not a military family. We were a family governed by a restless soul, for better and worse, and now, well into my adulthood, I am the restless governor of a home loving family.
By Hannah Moore2 years ago in Wander
Standing Still
There are very few moments in life where time truly stands still. When your breath is taken from your chest and your body hangs weightless in that moment. Just long enough for it to stay with you from that day onwards. Deep in the red sands of the Australian Outback, I found that moment and clung to it forever.
By Kevin McLaughlin2 years ago in Wander
Can You Drive a Ford Fiesta Through a Desert?
I’m flying down the B1 highway from Windhoek to Keetmanshoop with a map and a boot full of camping gear. I’m excited for the first stop of my Namibian road trip: the Quiver Tree Forest. I spot the sign and turn onto the C17, off the tarmac and onto the gravel. I’ll be there soon; it’s only ten miles or so. I am unprepared for what comes next. The car slides and slips across the road. I am not fully in control anymore. I slow to a crawl. The car judders and shudders, the noise deafening, the vibrations rattling the teeth in my skull. It takes me around an hour to drive the ten miles. I arrive at the campsite relieved to be in one piece, even if it feels like all my bones have been shaken slightly out of place. I will later learn that this is what happens when the gravel road becomes “corrugated”, and that the roads authority goes round once a week to “grade” them. Seems I arrived about 6 days after the grader had last been round.
By Jenifer Nim2 years ago in Wander
Sitting in DNA Soup
I am sitting in “DNA soup”- actually, a Jacuzzi at the Melia Hotel in Nassau, Bahamas. It might as well be a soup though, from the amount of people sitting in it. I’d wager that if you were to take a ladle from that hot tub and send it to a DNA testing facility, you’d have genetics from every corner of the planet.
By Kelley Zherzhi2 years ago in Wander
