Alexandra Pecci

In the summer of 2008, I desperately needed a change of scene. If money had been no object, a Caribbean escape might have been called for, to soak my cares in rum on a sun-drenched beach.
But money was an object, so my husband and I hit the road. We drove through California, Arizona, Utah and Colorado on the cheap, snacking on beef jerky and peanut M&Ms and sleeping in low-budget motels. How low-budget? Well, one motel room rug in Moab, Utah, was so dirty the bottoms of my white socks turned ...

Interface called it Mission Zero. And the company wasn’t sure how to reach it. “I think people tend to set goals that they know they can achieve,” says Paul Hawken, author and founder of Project Drawdown, a nonprofit dedicated to researching how to reverse global warming.
But limiting oneself to achievable goals doesn’t truly achieve anything new.
“Nothing comes out of that in terms of imagination, creativity, innovation, breakthrough, because none is needed, so why would it come out?” Hawken...

The thought of visiting Tintagel Castle is enough to send shivers down any Arthurian legend-lover’s spine. But as my family prepared to visit England this past summer, we discovered two problems with a potential visit there.
Steps were the first issue. As many as 242 steps up and down, in fact, depending on the route visitors take to access the medieval cliff-top fortification on the rugged Cornwall coast. My 10-year-old daughter, Chloe, has a walking disability and gets around using forearm ...

My 10-year-old daughter, Chloe, squared her feet, raised her arm toward the dark, diamond-paned windows, and waved her wand in a triangle pattern as she shouted an incantation into the night air.
Immediately, the building’s dark windows glowed with brilliant white light, and a small crowd of people around us gasped and clapped. Chloe looked at me with a smile as bright as the magical glow she had just conjured.
“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the first installment in J.K. Rowling’s s...

Everyone loves Cape Cod. And the packed roads and high prices reflect that.
For New Englanders, going “down the cape” is shorthand for visiting Cape Cod, that storied peninsula jutting 65 miles into the Atlantic Ocean and curving upward through the sea like Massachusetts’s flexing arm. The onetime home of the Kennedys has nearly 560 miles of coastline and even boasts a namesake cocktail.
Summer on Cape Cod is a magnet for tourists who pack its soft-sanded beaches and Instagram-pretty towns su...

The wind whipped up Main Street in Stockbridge, Mass., making the rows of wooden rocking chairs lining the Red Lion Inn’s wide veranda sway gently. As I watched them, my imagination conjured another sunny afternoon 124 years earlier when the sculptor Daniel Chester French, of Lincoln Memorial fame, sat on that porch with his wife, Mary, and fell instantly and deeply under Stockbridge’s spell.
“I don’t know what you’re going to do,” Mary told her husband. “But I am going to live here.”
I had o...

Vilissa Thompson was flying to a conference when she got a terrible piece of news on her layover: Someone had forgotten to load her wheelchair onto the airplane.
Thompson, a full-time wheelchair user who was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease, was alarmed. Then she was stunned to discover that she wouldn’t get her wheelchair back until the next morning. “My wheelchair is a part of my body,” she said. “When that was missing, it was like a part of me was miss...

A blond, bespectacled boy of about 6 stands alone on a wooden staircase, his arms and legs swimming in an oversize, bright pink bunny costume, complete with long ears that stick straight up from a fuzzy hood pulled over his head. He’s looking around impassively, when . . .
“Give me a pink nightmare!” his mother calls from the foot of the stairs, her cellphone camera at the ready, and the boy immediately folds his arms against his chest and pulls his face into a petulant frown, sc...

From my home in woodsy New Hampshire, memories of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter always seem cast with a golden glow. It’s evocative and mysterious, a place where narrow, mazelike streets wind between stone buildings, and laundry and Catalan separatist flags hang from tiny balconies. Boys kick a soccer ball in an alley, and trees heavy with oranges grow next to the gothic Basilica de Santa Maria del Pi. There are ancient Roman walls, ruins of the Temple of Augustus and a Viceroy’s Palace with ivy...

Madrid’s Prado Museum, home to paintings by masters like Rafael, Titian, Rembrandt, and Velázquez, is everything you’d expect one of the world’s most important art museums to be. Or so I’ve heard.
The Prado was on our list of possible places to visit during our family vacation to Spain. But we never made it. Instead, we hopped in a taxi and spent the day with field-tripping local school kids checking out monk...

Salem. The name alone conjures specters of skeletal tree branches stretching toward a misty, moonlit Massachusetts sky, menacing black-cloaked Puritans, and witches, ghosts and ghouls lurking around every brick-paved corner. It’s true that Salem has both earned and cultivated its spooky reputation as the Halloween capital of the world. Yet in recent years, the Witch City has also become a food city, dense with creative restaurants, cafes, patisseries, breweries, a distillery and, just like an...

In the just-waking hours of a cool, misty morning, we slipped into Frankfurt, Germany, the way dreams slide between vivid reality and hazy memory: surreal and ephemeral.
A smiling woman wearing a hairnet reached over a counter, and speaking neither English nor German, offered my daughter a cold, skinny frankfurter. We sleepily wandered through meandering lanes flanked by medieval, half-timbered houses that could have been the backdrop to a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. We passed under the old ci...

Was Mother Nature playing a trick on us? The first day of April dawned blustery and cold, with wet, slushy snow falling thick and fast as my husband and I drove to Rhode Island to spend the weekend at the beautiful seaside Castle Hill Inn in Newport. I fully expected the raw, wicked weather to put a literal damper on our overnight trip.
How wrong I was. Instead, we discovered that Castle Hill Inn is...

Functioning bathrooms are taken for granted in the United States, but in many parts of the developing world, sanitation infrastructure is often patchy or nonexistent, and relieving oneself can be a matter of life and death.
“The basic problem is that all over the world there are hundreds of millions of people who don’t have access to a safe toilet,” says Rob Zimmerman, director of WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene) and sus...