Jenna Schnuer

National Geographic Traveler's Intelligent Travel Blog: The Atlas of Remote IslandsOctober 6, 2010

The first five times (or so) that I paged through the Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will, I fell deeply in love with the book. But I also didn't see it for what it really is. The problem wasn't that of the early stages of romance between people: I wasn't blinded to the book's faults but, instead, I underestimated the extent of its charms. Though the elegantly-lettered first words of the preface caught my eye, "Paradise is an island. So is hell," I skipped over the text and went straight to the maps.

Read the piece.

Flyover America: New Year's Resolutions? Sort OfDecember 28, 2009

Last week I had drinks with a bunch of other travelish types. On the way there, the old nerves cropped up a bit. Get a gaggle of travel writers together and the conversation can turn competitive. Most know exactly how many countries and states and counties and tributaries they’ve visited and, yes, we do sit around discussing the oddest things we ever ate. (Mine: fried vein of cow udder in Sonora, Mexico. VERY bouncy.) I was feeling a bit off my game, hadn’t traveled all that much recently, and didn’t feel like playing what amounts to Travel Writer Risk.

Find out what I fessed up to.

American Way: Fill in the BlankJune 15, 2006

There was all this empty space. Floors. Walls. The whole shebang. After 11 years in a (very) small Manhattan apartment, I had moved out to an outer borough and was now the proud renter of about 800 square feet of space. (I know, those of you outside the five boroughs are snickering over my idea of "space.")

Then the reading began.

It started with Apartment Therapy, and then a design*sponge grabbed hold, and then Treehugger, and it just kept going from there. I had become obsessed with the ever-expanding world of design blogs. All day long--though I had to take the occasional break to get some work done--I cruised the blogs, eager to see what these design-savvy folks had found. I fell for chairs. I found artists who could fill my wall space on the cheap. I was on the hunt for the perfect end table. Design magazines started to seem so…static. They didn't deliver the goods from morning until night. I wanted a personal design shopper--and now, thanks to the bloggers, I had an army of them.