Richard Milner

6 days ago | islands.com | Richard Milner

It's easy to forget that Italy is so much more than big-name destinations like Rome, Venice, Florence or Milan. The entire country is an exceedingly varied, locally focused panorama of regions, towns, and villages with differing histories, traditions, climates, food, dialects, architecture — you name it. Northern Italy, for instance, abuts the Alps in the north, skirts the Mediterranean along the coast, and flattens into plains in Lombardy in the middle.

6 days ago | islands.com | Richard Milner

"Top-notch cruise performance" might not be the first thing to come to mind when thinking of Norway, unless you envision ocean-faring black metal-themed music festivals. Sadly, Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) doesn't have those, nor anything else Norwegian, because it's actually an American-based cruise company registered in the Bahamas. However, it does have plenty of other live performances and unique themed experiences across its many, many different ships.

1 week ago | islands.com | Richard Milner

While diverted flights aren't very common, they do happen. Your plane's captain might interrupt your meal or movie mid-flight to tell you that you're unexpectedly landing in a completely different place for any number of reasons. Causes can range from something simple like bad weather to more extreme scenarios like bomb threats and an outbreak of war in your destination country. Thankfully, this only happened to 0.25% of passengers through all of 2024 in the United States.

1 week ago | islands.com | Richard Milner

Savvy travelers will tell you to always, always check the safety of wherever you're traveling. Even if you're traveling to a super-safe country or city, you should follow every common sense precaution: Don't flash money, keep wallets and phones in your front pockets, keep purse straps wrapped around your arms, don't face your back to crowds or passersby, and so on. But even taking all these simple precautions into account, some places are more dangerous than others — at least in certain respects.

1 week ago | islands.com | Richard Milner

Even though no one thinks that they'll be the hikers to get lost in the forest or injured, it could happen to anyone. National parks in the United States host over 300 million people per year. And while deaths are rare (about 240 per year), most of them are preventable with a bit of foresight, planning, and proper knowledge. This is where park rangers and the National Park Service's Preventive Search and Rescue (PSAR) project come into play.