CIAO! Home
I’m Kate Crawford.
I travel with attitude. I started writing for CIAO!
Travel with Attitude in 1998 and am today its owner, sole contributor and
photographer. I
stay at every hotel, eat every meal, take every tour and even—quite valiantly,
I think—submit to every spa treatment I write about. If it’s in CIAO!
Travel with Attitude, I recommend it. The ho-hum, hackneyed and
horrific don’t make the cut.
Here’s my story so you can decide if you care what I think:
When I was six, I was not a city child and I did not live at the Plaza. But Eloise did—on the tippy top floor with her Nanny, her pug dog and pet turtle. Independent and saucy, Eloise was rawther more interesting than Dick, Jane or even Nancy Drew. When I was eight, here’s what I leaned from Kay Thompson’s book: Eloise was naughty. She got away with it. Hotels were more fun than Oz. Someday I would live in one.
And I did. Granted, I had to marry the Inn at Sunapee, renovate it and run it in order to live there. Here’s what I learned: it was rawther less fun than Oz. I divorced the Inn and went back to traveling. But I still turn over plates, check sheets and slather on toiletries to check if they measure up.
It was my good fortune that my mother loved to travel and my father did not. Leaving Dad to fish, Mom and I became world travelers. We traipsed from Bangkok to Beijing—in 1973, 12 months after Nixon’s visit—and from Machu Picchu to Rio.
Independent and saucy like my childhood hero, Eloise, I’ve traveled for work and for fun popping into 53 countries and all 50 states. I happily return from my travels to a small house on an apple orchard in Sebastopol, California which I share with my dog and not-pet spiders.
My other stories appear in The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe and the upcoming The Best Travel Writing 2011. I won a Travelers' Tales 2011 Gold Solas Award for best Animal Encounter story and have work in Travelers’ Tales anthologies, guidebooks and wedding guides. My in-progress memoir is titled Living Large—In the Slow Lane: Travels of a Burned-Out Boomer.