"Santa Fe Found" exhibit explores 400 years of the city's past in the expanded New Mexico History Museum.

APIA, Samoa — The tsunami warning came a little after 3 a.m., in a phone call from my hotel's front desk. I was staying on the waterfront in Apia, but I was supposed to go to American Samoa — a different island and a separate country — on the first flight out that morning.

I've covered my share of natural disasters, but only the way they're always covered by the media: after the fact. Now a Pacific hurricane called Cyclone Pat was bearing down on the Southern Group of the Cook Islands, and the one I was staying on lay right in its path.

I'm off to a volunteer vacation on the Cook Islands — a place, according to recent news reports, that is not your normal kind of paradise.

I've been a reporter long enough to sense when somebody wants to talk. Now was one of those times, and the young soldier who had been in Iraq started to tell his private story.

KANSAS CITY, MO. — From the moment you open its heavy, bunker-like bronze doors, the National World War I Museum here is a shocking place. It needs to be.

Related: On this Veterans Day, a poem by David Hawley

This time last year, I was watching the economy crash, taking half my savings with it. If I'd been home, I'd have panicked. But I was cushioned by distance, holed up with a couple of friends in an old stone cottage in Scotland.

"Pretty'' isn't really fair to Pont-Aven. And neither are the other adjectives I keep reaching for when I tell friends about it, though "exquisite'' comes close.

I almost didn't open the email. The message field held four words, two I didn't comprehend, two in English: "something something from Nepal.'' I clicked it open, read the first line, yelped with surprise and then burst into tears. The sender was a young man I'd given up for lost years before. Worse, I was the one who'd lost him.

PARIS — The Eiffel Tower celebrated its 120th anniversary on Bastille Day by turning itself into a giant birthday cake and then exploding. Believe me, it was worth seeing. And it had nothing to do with "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.''