Places I Remember with Lea Lane
On this monthly award-winning travel podcast, host Lea Lane shares travel memories and travel tips with passionate travelers, travel experts, and savvy locals around the world. Lea has traveled to over 100 countries, is the author of nine books, a blogger at forbes.com, and a contributor to dozens of guidebooks. Smart. Fun! Over 100 episodes!
Places I Remember with Lea Lane
Favorite Travel Bits From The Past Year!
Year’s end is the perfect time to chase moments that help us fall in love with travel. We stitch together a lively route from New York's Erie Canal’s quiet power to Namibia’s Etosha, where elephants, zebra, and predators converge around water in an arid dreamscape.
Along the way, we meet a winemaker who steers us into Spain's Alicante desert for a paella cooked over grapevines—one fire, one broth, no second chances—and learn why constraint can turn a meal into a memory that lasts.
Our path bends to Sorrento, a flat and beautiful Italian base that opens to Capri, Ischia, and the Amalfi Coast. We talk walkable alleys, lemon groves that become limoncello, and sunset cocktails on cliffside terraces. We ride rails through Canada at sunrise and across Switzerland where a simple coffee sparks a love story.
In Mexico City, lucha libre proves that travel joy can be loud, communal, and gloriously acrobatic, while Barcelona Spain lifts the spirit with castellers human towers, Sant Jordi’s books and roses, and music festivals that sweep from legends to up-and-comers.
We step into sacred time in Assisi in Italy's Umbrian region, to see Giotto’s frescoes and St. Francis’s world, then cross to India's Agra Fort where Shah Jahan arranged his bed and even a small mirror to keep the Taj Mahal always in view.
Add a few delightful detours—a red-clay miniature golf course in Normandy, train-station romance in Belgium, a harmonica gifted to a child in a Ugandan forest (and a musical moment)!
If these stories spark your curiosity, hit follow, and share with a friend who needs new trip ideas, Then dig into our archive of over 120 episodes to plan where your next unforgettable moment will begin.
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Our guests this past year are a mix of travel pros and travel enthusiasts -- and all of them have insightful tips and stories to tell.
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Podcast host Lea Lane has traveled to over 100 countries, and has written nine books, including the award-winning Places I Remember (Kirkus Reviews star rating, and 'one of the top 100 Indie books of the year'). She has contributed to dozens of guidebooks and has written thousands of travel articles. Contact her at placesirememberlealane.com
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Our award-winning travel podcast, Places I Remember with Lea Lane, has produced over 120 travel episodes! New episodes drop on the first Tuesday of the month, on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Travel vlogs of featured podcasts-- with video and graphics -- now also drop on YouTube. Please subscribe, like, and comment.
On this special edition, our annual year-end episode, I hope we inspire you to listen or re-listen to the episodes that have interested you in 2025. And don't forget, you can always dig deep into our archive of over 120 episodes all about travel. But right now, let's listen to some favorite bits of this past year's episodes.
Lea Lane:In episode 113, we talk about the watery pleasures of upstate New York, including the famous Erie Canal. East-west between the Hudson River and Lake Erie is 339 miles long from Albany to Buffalo. Completed in 1825, the canal was the first navigable waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, and it vastly reduced the costs of transporting people and goods across the Appalachians for about a century until the railroads and the highways took over. The capital district where the canal begins is in and around Albany, New York. Besides the impressive government buildings, the area still has many architectural and historical reminders that it was first settled by the Dutch in the early 17th century and came under English control in 1664. Here's an interesting fact: almost every major city in New York falls along the trade route established by the Hudson River and along the Erie Canal from New York City to Albany to Schenectady, Utica, and Syracuse to Rochester and Buffalo. And nearly 80% of upstate New York's population lives within 25 miles of the Erie Canal. You can find out more about the canal in Syracuse. There's a building called the Waylock Building dating from 1850, and there's lots of information there to give you a real heads up on this wonderful American creation.
Lea Lane:**
Lea Lane:In episode 114, Dr. Lori Marker, founder of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, shares her favorite sites in Namibia, Africa, where she lives. The most famous national park, Atosha, is in northwestern Namibia, one of the largest national parks in Africa. And it was proclaimed a game reserve in 1907. What animals will you find at Atosha?
Speaker 11:Oh, Atosha is just so beautiful. Again, it's a very arid landscape, and so the animals are covering very vast areas, but we have huge herds of elephants. Our elephants also go into areas near the coast, which are called desert elephants. So again, we've got some very specialized species. Within the park, you can see rhinos and giraffes, all the wildlife species from oryx and hardebees, springbok everywhere that are bouncing everywhere. Lions, of course, hyena, very few cheetahs. (Two kinds of zebra, I )read. The mountain zebra and there are plain zebras. Most people see the plain zebra. The mountain zebra are much more rare and they're also very shy in many areas that are not necessarily open to the public, and but they're mountainous. Atosha is just incredible for the amount of wildlife. You go to these water points, it's a very arid land, and so the water points, the wildlife congregates in. It's amazing. The kinds of species, the numbers of species all living there it together. And then the predators, and of course, everybody likes those as well.
Lea Lane:Right. Uh there are many other attractions to visit. I I would just include two that I think are special. Fish River Canyon. It's the largest canyon in Africa and the world's second largest canyon. It's about 60 million years old. It was formed when South America and Africa separated. It's a hundred miles long. A challenging hike. Have you done it? I have not done it.
Speaker 11:I've been to the rim and I've looked over. It's a very challenging hike, actually. It is very challenging. People who have that kind of adventure definitely.
Lea Lane:Good for them. Then there's Coleman Scope Ghost Town. And this ghost town is different from what you usually think of because it's filled with sand. The desert has taken it over since about 1956 when it was abandoned as a former diamond mining town. Have you been there?
Speaker 11:I've been there. And you know what? There's a lot of hyenas that like to live in and out of there too. And jackals. They're more nocturnal, but it is, it's just an amazing place to take pictures. Of course, when you come to Namibia, bring your camera. But Namibia is a huge country. An area that you've missed, and I'm not sure if you've been there, has been Domraland. Yeah. Where the rock etchings are. Triflefontein, one of my favorite places in the entire world. It's a World Heritage Site. So it's been developed with walkways, fortunately, to protect these amazing rock etchings that are at least 5,000 years old, but they're etched in. And within there, there's also areas where there are rock paintings. But this area is etched and they are just incredible from ostriches and elephants and rhinos and giraffe and cheetah, kudu, antelope. They're all on these rocks that are amazing. It's like going to a wildlife church, I'm going to say. Outdoor, incredible art that's there.
Lea Lane:In episode 115, Thatcher Baker Briggs, founder of Thatcher's Wine in LA, talks of a meal he can't forget near one of the Spanish vineyards in Europe.
Speaker 12:Four or five years ago, when when we were starting this import company, there was one particular producer that I had tasted the wines of and fell in love with. And uh we were talking for years and years and years, and he had an importer in the US already. So unfortunately, we we couldn't work together. Years later, some things changed. And the reason why on this trip we ended up in Alicante was for this producer, as I mentioned. So we got a call from him, and we're in Champagne. We have a flight booked out of Paris. We're supposed to leave. He says, Oh, you know, I decided to make a change, and okay, so we're like, all right, we'll be there tomorrow. It turns out I left my wallet at the hotel and we were rushing and didn't know how to get there, and so we had to ship my wallet, and then it got missed, and so it we kept getting pushed, and we ended up somehow driving super fast, made it to the airport in Paris, flew to Spain, went to go see him, and it was this really amazing experience where we were all together, and he says to us, Hey, do you want to go eat the best rice in the world? And I said, Of course. After this crazy travel period and tasting a bunch of wine, we jump in his little car, and it's like a winery car, it's very small, and we're driving down this road, and we're driving for probably an hour and a half into the desert, and we have no idea where we're going. We get to this tiny restaurant in the middle of nowhere, and we walk in, and he's like, This is the place, and it's this absolutely incredible restaurant. The chef learned from this master of paella, if you will. They cook everything over the vines of grapes, which is really incredible. And they do the traditional alacante style, which is uh rabbit and snails, which is a type of uh paella that I've never heard of before. And we're sitting there and they bring us into the kitchen, and it's this really special thing because they add just the perfect amount of vines of grapes into the fire. And once you add the vines and you add the broth, if you will, to your rice, you can never add more fire and you can never add more liquid. So you basically have this one shot, this one chance. There's no scales, there's no recipes, it's just the feeling of the chef. And so we're sitting there and we're like, wow, we've been traveling for 20 days. We rushed, we drove about 200 kilometers an hour to make it to the airport. Now all of a sudden, we're sitting here in this kitchen in the middle of nowhere with a winemaker that I've been wanting to spend time with for years and years and years. And then we eat this paella, and it's it was really one of the greatest foods that I've ever eaten in my life. And so if you ever find yourself in um in Alicante, there's a restaurant called Restaurant Ilias, E-L-I-A-S, and I highly recommend it. It's worth any journey as somebody that traveled about a thousand kilometers.
Lea Lane:Sarah Thompson, the founder of Luxema Travel, shares her personal experiences and expert knowledge of Sorrento near the gorgeous Amalfi coast in Italy in episode 116.
Speaker 1:Sorrento is absolutely beautiful. I think it's one of the best gems, even though it's technically not the Amalfi Coast, it is the Sorrento Coast, but it's absolutely lovely because there is the historical town of Sorrento, it has all these beautiful alleyways. It's very easy to navigate, very centralized too, in between Naples, the city, Capri, the island, and then of course the Amalfi Coast. It's really accessible and it's so beautiful. Of course, Sorrento is super, super famous for its lemons. There's amazing lemon gardens in the area and in neighboring towns like Meta, Santanielo, Piano di Sorrento, and that whole peninsula is really, really beautiful.
Lea Lane:And lemons become limoncello, which is also famous, the magnificent after dinner drink, which you find all around. I loved walking in Sorrento because it was flat. And when you are in The Amalfi Coast you're not going to have a lot of flat. So it's a perfect place to stroll. People shop in the evening. All the craftsmen are out and doing wood inlay, and it's just lovely. And the villas there that are along the cliffs are gorgeous. Many of them hotels now.
Speaker 1:Many of them are hotels, yeah. And they have their own beach clubs there. They're so beautiful, really relaxing. Some of the historical hotels there as well. What you mentioned about Sorrento being flat is because it's so accessible, great town to kind of centralize yourself in. And there's even an elevator to take you down to the port.
Lea Lane:Absolutely. You go down there and you can go to Capri and the other islands of Prochida and Ischia. They're gorgeous. You can go from many areas along the Amalfi coast, and that's Sorrento is one of them. It's a lovely port there. I think it's an underrated place. I think when everyone goes to the Amalfi Coast, Sorrento is really the gateway. So try to include that. And again, you can just walk along the hotels and go in the lobbies and look at these grand old hotels. It's a wonderful thing to do there.
Speaker 1:One of my favorite things to do, actually, if you're not staying at those beautiful five-star luxury hotels along the cliffside, you can actually go inside them and just mention you're going to the terrace bar. They have all these beautiful terraces, terrazza with usually a cocktail bar, which you can grab an aperative to watch the sunset, which is stunning because from Sorrento Coast, you see the full sunset over the horizon, while the Amalfi coast you don't.
Lea Lane:Excellent. In episode 117, Frank Marini and Gareth Jones, executives at Rail Bookers, talk about personal memories of train travels. Well, the name of the podcast is Places I Remember. So would you please each share a personal memory of your train travels? I think you probably had some of the best anywhere. Who wants to go first? Frank?
Speaker 3:There's been so many of them. I've been very lucky. Last year, my wife and I got a chance to do the Canadian from Vancouver right to Toronto. And that a fortnight, four-day trip on the train. And we were lucky enough to go into prestige class. But the thing that really surprised us both, and we've been on a number of different trains, the amount of wildlife we saw along the way.
Speaker 9:What did you see? I'm curious.
Speaker 3:We saw everything from buffalo, bald eagles, uh wild goats. I mean, all along the way, the amount of wildlife, and then the terrain completely different. So coming out of Vancouver to the mountains of the Rockies, to the plains of Saskatchewan, to coming into Ontario and the beautiful forest coming through in the deer. We were just blown away how beautiful. And it's just something very special on you know, we're early morning risers having coffee in the observation car while seeing all the wildlife with the sunrise. Oddly enough, it went by very fast.
Lea Lane:Did you say it's some of those fabulous lodges that were built so long ago?
Speaker 3:I have in the past, and on both ends, we stayed in the Fairmont. Unbelievable.
Lea Lane:Nice to hear. Closer to home for some listeners. It sounds great. Uh, what about you, Gareth?
Speaker 4:I think I would be in trouble if I didn't say the Bonina Express in Switzerland. So 16 years ago, it's the train journey that I met my wife on board. It's got a special place in my heart. I can't say it's an experience that everyone's going to have on the train. So she'd ordered a coffee and she was sat over for a meet, but then she'd realised she didn't have any money to pay for the coffee. So I stepped in and bought her a coffee. But there we go. So we enjoyed coming over the Landasa Viaduct, but always have a place in my heart.
Lea Lane:In episode 118, Arturo Sanchez, head concierge of Andes, Mexico City, Condesa Hotel, shares his perspective on his magnificent city and talks about one of his favorite pastimes, Mexican wrestling.
Speaker 7:It's one of the shows I had two daughters, and I tried to go with the Mexican wrestling as many times as we can because they love it right there. You had to scream, you had to make noise, you had to clap, because it's the place to enjoy with the family, with the friends, and I don't know why, in the arena, next to our guests. And what's really fun because that was just like a biggest family enjoying that. After that, okay, let's go to eat some tacos to share the experience, and that is really, really good.
Lea Lane:That was great. When you say it's acrobatic, how how much more acrobatic is it than what I would think of wrestling? Do they dance around or do flips or what?
Speaker 7:Like a circus. Acrobatic, the people flying next to the roads and next to the ring right there. Because right here in Mexican wrestling, you we have like a the good side and the bad side that we call the rudos and the técnicos. Choose your side, doesn't matter. You have to choose your side, and right there, everybody's gonna make noise and support the team.
Lea Lane:In episode 119, Angela Caratanuto, founder of Live Tours, shares his love of the great Catalan city of Barcelona on the Spanish Mediterranean. Here he talks about some of the city's festivals.
Speaker 2:Barcelona is a big party city in general. Traveling for the festivals is definitely a must-do. It can be very, very crowded. And the biggest events are in the September festival, which is about a week long, and it's concerts, it's parades. The highlight of it, which happens in the middle of the Gothic quarter, is what what the Carolinians call the Castelares, which is these human-built towers. I'm sure people have seen pictures of challenge where people start climbing on each other and try and build the tallest human tower in the square. The entire festival is called Columbia, and it happens in September. Another one, which is in honor of the patron saint of Barcelona, is St. George's Day, which happens in April. It's sort of like the Catalonian versions of Valentine's Day. But the the difference really is that instead of taking out somebody or your your second half, your better half, or gifting something, you generally exchange books and roses. All the shops sell you a version of the other. It's really unique. Then there's various music festivals. Two that I would recommend are the Primavera Sound and the Sonar Festival. Huge international uh music festivals, big names if you're interested in just like Rolling Stones and kind of thing, or up and coming artists. So, really, you're gonna have four or five festivals to choose.
Lea Lane:In episode 120, Tanno and Nicole, founders of Bono Events International, guide us through the gorgeous Italian heartland of Tuscany and Umbria, where they live, and focus about the hilltop town of Assisi in Umbria.
Speaker 6:Assisi is such an important place for people to visit because of its religious history. St. Francis of Assisi is probably the most well-known saint in the world. The basilica is incredible with some masterpieces from the medieval period, from Giotto, among others. And the double basilica is really unique to see. And the entire town has been born out of the cult of St. Francis. It has dozens of churches, palaces, even St. Clair and all her orders are in Assisi. Even down valley, you can visit the original Portiunkola, the house that he built with his own hands, that they built this mega church on top of now. So you see this tiny little home that he built with his hands, and they built this enormous cathedral over it with this massive dome, the tower of the region. You can get lost in the woods of St. Francis where he used to walk around and allegedly speak to animals behind Assisi. Right. So it really is an enchanting place to visit. Of course, you have to be careful to make sure you're not going during a religious holiday or a Jubilee event because you could be stuck waiting for hours to move around.
Lea Lane:Bob Ekstein is a cartoonist for the New Yorker and a New York Times best-selling author. In episode 121, he shares some of his quirky interests and his travels to find out about them.
Speaker:Go to Bruges. And would you agree it's one of the most beautiful places? Yeah, I mean, I would recommend getting there by train. I think it's really romantic to go to those train stations in in Belgium. I love Brussels. And in Brussels, I was researching the snowman because there's a pivotal part of the snowman's history that takes place in that region. So I hadn't that's how I got a chance to discover Bruges for myself. I need to go back to Normandy, where there is an old-fashioned miniature golf course that is instead of uh artificial turf, the course is made up of red clay, like the French Open. And it's such a special miniature golf course. And that's a little gem to recommend.
Lea Lane:Absolutely. I've never heard of that one. You find the most interesting things. Margie Goldsmith, award-winning travel and culture writer, is the author of Becoming a Badass from Fearful to Fierce. She learned the blues harp late in life and connects her passion for music to travel. In episode 122, she plays us a musical example.
Speaker 9:I bring my harmonica every place I go, and I get in touch with Honor music and I ask them to send me 30 harmonicas. And when I'm in third world countries like Mongolia or Papua New Guinea or Myanmar, I ask to be put in touch with the third or fourth grade class because that's when they're really getting into it. And I give them each a harmonica and I teach them how to blow in and blow out, and they're joyful. And once when I was in with the botwi pygmies, I'm having a blank, I'm it was somewhere in Uganda. I had given the kids the harmonicas the day before. And the next day we were leaving, and I had left my little cabin, and I was walking towards the place where you put your suitcase, and I hear this harmonica in the forest. And I followed the little path, and there's a little eight-year-old boy who's gotten a harmonica, big grin on his face, playing, and it just touched me. It was so moving because you can change a person's life by bringing music into it, and they have nothing. You know, they will play with stones the way we play with toys.
Lea Lane:Exactly. This is the perfect time for you to perhaps play us something as we end this combo. Will you riff a bit?
Speaker 9:I figured I'd do a very international song.
Speaker 5:You can do the Taj Mahal without mentioning the Agra Fort. After the fall of Shah Jahan, his own son rebelled against him and kept him under house arrest. And Shah Jahan asked him to put him in the Agra Fort because there's a beautiful view of the Taj Mahal from there. That's how much he loved his wife. The son honored his request and he put him in a room. So you could go there if you go on a guided tour, or you can find it by yourself. There is a room which has a window looking out at the Taj Mahal from there. Shah Jahan would position his bed there, he would sleep. First thing in the morning, he would look at the Taj Mahal.
Lea Lane:Wow. Lovely to go in that room and think of him doing that.
Speaker 5:Right. But it's actually even more interesting. So when he was in bed, when he went to bed and he slept, he put a broken piece of mirror. It was stuck in the wall. When he was lying in his bed, he was about to fall asleep. He would see an image of the Taj Mahal in the mirror.
Lea Lane:Wow.
Speaker 5:The tour guide bringing like a little piece of mirror. They put it at the wall, and then you could see centuries old red sandstone fortress that were once the Imperial City for a succession of Mughal rulers.
Lea Lane:Thanks to all our guests who've shared their love of travel with us this past year. And thank you, as always, for listening to and following Places I Remember. And don't forget, select podcast episodes are now on YouTube with added graphics and video. Look for these at our YouTube channel, Places I Remember, Travel Talk with Lea Lane.
