Laurie's light travel travel tips

As I exited the Hell's Kitchen studio to the Bay City Rollers song , I crumpled. "I'd wanted to tell Trevor ... My brother is in Hawaii, I haven't seen him in four years (sniff sniff), and he said he'll (sniff sniff) just miss having Trevor make sense of the news every night." "Oh, I know," the blonde female staffer consoled. Why was I choking back tears? Somehow, missing my brother dovetailed with the stark realization that the moment was precious, that I had twice witnessed a rare star here in Trump's and now Let's-Hope-Not-Again-Trump's-America. His last show will be December 8. How to sum up lightning in a bottle? The obvious: He is humble, funny, dimpled, penetrating and engaging. The not-so-obvious: he needs time off to rest, connect with himself and family, to revisit or return to his roots ... and this is why he is so loved. Thirty-eight-year-old Trevor Noah was born when I was completing my undergraduate coursework at San Fran...

A drive from San Antonio into the tiny towns of South Texas means passing miles and miles of stark, stuck-in-time landscape, replete with tumbleweeds and cacti. Dead armadillos are a given. Ditto deer heads at your local rest stop. My late mother was a fifth-grade teacher from Alice, Texas, about 45 minutes west of Corpus, two and a half hours southwest of San Antonio. Although I know the names Violet, Three Rivers, Robstown and Kingsville intimately, I had not heard the name Uvalde until the tragedy the other day. But that didn’t stop me from living the experience as I would have in Alice, when as an eight year-old I was ruminating in a summer school math class, miserable, missing my dad; or when I was a four year-old running from bats on Northwood Street or being pulled in the red wagon by next-door neighbor Mickey Hans. I had also lived with my grandparents Mama Sue and Pop, and "Unkie" Norman for the summer I turned one, while my parents visited my paternal relativ...