Men Who Like to Travel - David Latt

With the summer travel season approaching, now is a good time to look through the credit cards in your wallet. Every week unsolicited credit card offers arrive in the mail.  I don't need any more credit cards, but it's good to check out the offers. Are the terms as good as the credit card offers you're receiving in the mail?  Maybe it's time to switch. NOT ALL CREDIT CARDS ARE CREATED EQUAL Not all credit cards have benefits. Many are just "credit" cards.  In the simplest terms, with these cards, the bank advances you money. You are expected to repay what you borrowed at the end of the month. If you don't repay all the money you borrowed, you pay interest on the balance. That's pretty straight forward. But since there are credit cards out there that not only loan you money but also give you a goodie bag of benefits, why not use those cards?  Banks want your business. That means you can have credit and goodies too.  And that is a very good thing. ...

The road to  John Andrews Restaurant  (224 Hillsdale Road, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, 413/528-3469) twists and turns through woods and farmlands. We arrived at dusk while there was enough light to sit outside on the wooden deck that backed up against a grassy hill. What looks like the decayed remnant of a hundred year old shed leans perilously to one side. Inside, the restaurant has the cozy feeling of an English road house. The floor to ceiling windows in the dining room open out onto the deck and hill in back. In the summer, visitors come to the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts to escape the heat and congestion of the city.  Offering opportunities to relax and catch up on your reading, a string of small towns with B&Bs cuts through the expanses of woods and farmlands. With music at  Tanglewood  and dance at  Jacob's Pillow , historical sites like Edith Wharton's home,  the Mount ,  the   Berkshire Botanical G...

Summer's almost here and it's time to think about planning vacation travel. Wanting to ease some of the difficulty traveling, I applied for and received a  Global Entry  pass so at many airports I breeze through domestic security (thank you  TSA Pre ) as well as international points of entry. I would definitely recommend Global Entry to everyone who travels more than a few times a year. The cost is minimal ($100 for 5 years) and the online paper work isn't too time consuming. Email me and I will give you all the details. Last fall I took a trip to Morocco on a press trip with half a dozen other journalists. We traveled from Fez in the east to Marrakech and the High Atlas Mountains in the west and then to Essaouira on the coast. In the High Atlas Mountains, we arranged for a cooking lesson in the kitchen of a local cook. To get to her home on the grounds of a remote boutique hotel, we walked underneath walnut trees up  a steep dirt switch-back trail we...

You'd think part of the fun of posting online is hearing back from readers. The whole internet-is-great-for-community-building notion seems like such a good idea. The reality is kind of different. For articles I wrote for NY TImes Dining and Huffington Post, some people would contribute thoughtful responses. But there were always those people who clearly had a pent up need to vent and my article gave them the opportunity to rant and rave anonymously. Reading those comments was no fun. The other sort of weirdness that comes from writing on the web are the spam-comments, sent for nefarious purposes (if you click on the link will your computer become infected and turn into one of the digital zombie hordes enlisted for god-knows-what-purposes?) or to do I-don't-know-what. And how did the individuals or the bots behind their comments choose my web site and the specific articles? Why did   Easy-to-Make Rotisserie Chicken and Roasted Vegetables   attract so many spam-com...

To get a good photograph of Casablanca's  Mosque Hassan II  took a lot of backing up and avoiding the crowds of international tourists who had come to visit one of the world's largest mosques. The building is not only about size, but details. The mosque invites visitors to appreciate the scale of nature and the intricacies of life as represented by the exquisite metal and tile work. As if it were the land's sentinel protecting man from the violence of the world, the Mosque stands on the edge of the North African continent, on the edge of a palisade overlooking the turbulent Atlantic Ocean. A trip to Morocco often begins in Casablanca and frequently tour guides make the Mosque one of the first stops. After the majesty of the Mosque, we traveled north-east toward Fez, stopping in Mouly Idriss, a historically important hill city where we had lunch at Restaurant Alaambra with an open air-patio and grill. The Mosque and Restaurant Alaambra were two good tent pol...

Taking a cooking class is a great way to learn about another culture. In Morocco recently we had a cooking class in a very unlikely spot--a mountain top in the High Atlas Mountains. At the trekking hotel, Kasbah Toubkal , adventurers head off by foot and donkey on trails that go deep into the mountains for all-day and all-week trips. Berber villages cling to the sides of the mountains, accessed only by dirt trails littered with donkey poop and walnut shells from the orchards along the path. For our cooking class, in a clean and organized kitchen, straight out of the 1960s, our group sat on low stools around tables covered with whole chickens, large chunks of bone-in lamb shoulder, fresh tomatoes, turnips, carrots, onions, garlic, zucchini and a jumble of herbs and spices. Haja Rkia ben Houari ("Haja" because Rkia had completed a pilgrimage to Mecca) had invited us into her kitchen to show us how to make a traditional Moroccan meal of couscous, tagine , freshly...