I was born on June 7, 1952 in Easton, PA, and grew up across the river in Phillipsburg, NJ. After graduating from Phillipsburg High School, I attended Villanova University, returning home for the summers to work on the free bridges over the Delaware (from Belvedere to Frenchtown). My last summer of college I flew to London and found a job in a food hall selling Bath buns and scones.
        With my BA in English I moved to Washington, DC, and got a job editing engineering reports for the Department of the Navy. In my free time I learned to type and play tennis. In the fall of 1975, thinking I wanted to be a travel writer, I sailed on the Queen Elizabeth 2 to France, where I spent the winter studying French in Aix-en-Provence and the summer working on a farm in Kutzenhausen, Alsace. In London to catch my ship home - I had booked passage on the Mikhail Lermontov - I met a young Polish woman named Hania.
       Back in New Jersey, with my farm experience, I landed a job as a feature writer for the Trenton Times. After a year and a half I quit and moved to Warsaw, where, with my newspaper experience, I found a job teaching English. When my six-month visa was about to expire I went for an interview to request an extension and was asked to become an informer. I declined (didn't feel I had the experience) and three days later left the country on a train bound for Budapest. I kept going south until I reached Greece, where I eventually found a job teaching English to children in the northern city of Arta.
        I returned to Poland in the fall of 1980, a few weeks after the start of the Solidarity movement, and regained my job at the English Language College. In October, Hania and I were married in Warsaw's Old Town. I taught, freelanced, and kept a diary which expanded with the imposition of martial law at the end of 1981. In August of the following year I walked on the pilgrimage to Czestochowa, and in October sailed home on the Stefan Batory.
       When Hania joined me a few months later we moved to Philadelphia, where I worked as a feature writer for the Observer, a publication of the American College of Physicians. In my spare time, I wrote about Poland. In 1987 I got a job as an editorial writer for the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. Two years later the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale hired me as the travel editor.
       My book Unquiet Days: At Home in Poland was published in 1991 and got a brief review in The New Yorker. A collection of my travel stories, A Way to See the World: From Texas to Transylvania with a Maverick Traveler, appeared in 2003. Unquiet Days was translated and published in Poland in 2006.
        In the summer of 2008 I was laid off from the Sun-Sentinel and became a full-time writer. My essays and stories appeared in The Wilson Quarterly, Oxford American, American Scholar, Missouri Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Smithsonian, National Geographic Traveler, Longreads, and Literary Hub. My third book, The Joys of Travel: And Stories That Illuminate Them, came out in 2016. My memoir, Falling into Place: A Story of Love, Poland, and the Making of a Travel Writer, will be published in November. It describes, among many other things, the struggles and rewards of the freelance life.
        Hania and I still live in Fort Lauderdale, where in my free time I play tennis, draw cartoons, and take photographs. Our condo faces the New River, a setting that feeds my love of rivers and – when the Jungle Queen passes – my love of ships.