Leffel projects

Maybe it’s not fair, but some some places have to be budget-busters for shoestring travelers. A new article of mine is up on Transitions Abroad – Man vs. Man: Saving the Galapagos. It’s about all the behind-the-scenes efforts that a lot of dedicated people have been taking for years to roll back some of the …

I just wrapped up my journey biking down the Katy Trail in Missouri, a converted rail line that is the longest (and in some ways the easiest) of its type. It goes most of the way across the state, but I only did a 105-mile stretch of it over a few days, based on where …

This was our fourth full year of publishing Perceptive Travel and we continued on the mission of putting out the best travel stories on the internet, all written by published book authors. We won more awards, got more stories into anthologies, and hopefully made a lot of readers happy by avoiding the fluff and taking …

When most people hear the phrase “travel writer,” they get a mental picture of someone lounging around on a beach or sitting in Paris cafe meeting with beautiful people and drinking Bordeaux for hours. Reality tends to be a little less glamorous. I am currently typing this from a Staybridge Suites hotel in Oak Ridge, …

I piled the wife, kid, and luggage in the car for a four-day weekend to the unexplored lands of…Huntsville, Alabama? I get interviewed a lot in the media about how families can take a vacation without spending a fortune. It doesn’t matter for them how dirt cheap Guatemala or Thailand is right now because they …