Every morning, as I watch the sun come up over the mountains I never thought I’d live in again, I give thanks for everything in my life that brought me to this moment. Especially that diagnosis. It taught me that I had no time to waste. It taught me how much I love life — rough, bumpy and hard as it often is. It taught me how much more I wanted to do. And now I’m doing it. I was two years out from a divorce after an unhappy marriage that I had long wanted to escape but had been afraid to leave.

The travel and tourism industry is increasingly joining the fight against human trafficking, a $32 billion industry that enslaves an estimated 27 million people worldwide, according to data from the U.S. State Department and the International Labour Organization. One big reason? Travel and tourism can easily become an unwitting accomplice in the human trafficking infrastructure: Planes transport perpetrators and their victims; traffickers with groups of children pass through international checkpoints; hotels house pimps and their victims and provide a venue for exploitation.

Two surfing moondoggies with MBAs are putting Liberia’s stunning coastline back on the map by translating their love of sport into a tool for social good. But just as they were launching their sustainable tourism initiative, the Ebola epidemic hit. That didn't stop these intrepid entrepreneurs.

It's a familiar scene for couples today. The kids are in bed; it should be you-and-me time. But instead of relaxing with each other, both parents go to work. It could be job related — e-mails, phone calls, a project. It could be family business — bills, housekeeping, phone calls for school or sports events. All of a sudden, it's 10:30 or 11 p.m. He looks at her. She looks at him. Both are tired — it's already been a long day. Add in the personality and gender differences that accompany expectations for romance and sex, and it might seem easier to just say, "Good night, honey," and pin hopes on the weekend.

I am a mother. And that makes me, in the eyes of my teenager, inherently, irrevocably and irredeemably uncool. But for one halcyon moment last summer, I wasn’t. What was my vehicle to momentary redemption? A red Mustang convertible, top down, its Sirius satellite radio blasting, as we drove, wind whipping our hair, into summer.

Does your significant other seem a little inattentive? Are your teenagers making you feel particularly incompetent and obsolete? Perhaps one of those milestone birthdays is approaching (and trust me, they get tougher every decade). Well, honey, gather your girlfriends! It's time for a little vintage Vegas, getting to the core of Sin City and tapping into your inner naughty selves.

In 1996, a shaggy-haired Microsoft project manager spoke at a meeting in Toronto of the Hotel Electronic Distribution Network Association. The manager, Erik Blachford, who ultimately became president of Expedia, told attendees that Microsoft was going into the travel business.

Has technology helped blur the distinction between your work and personal life? Are office e-mails, texts and calls woven into your time at home? If so, your home life may be the worse for it. But a recent study finds that things don't have to be that way. The study found a new type of worker it calls "dual-centric": someone who puts equal focus on work and home and is less stressed, healthier, feeling happier at home, and more successful at work than work-centric colleagues.

Nowhere on earth do people get as much pleasure making money--or trying to--than in Hong Kong. The latest updates on hand-helds send clerks and secretaries rushing to order as soon as the boss's back is turned. Meanwhile, their grandmothers are at the local bank, speculating in foreign currency. And as hundreds file onto the picturesque Star Ferry, the Hang Seng numbers flash over their heads.

Just as a few travel companies and major online retailers had begun accepting Bitcoin for payment, a major Japan-based Bitcoin exchange collapsed this week, adding to widespread wariness about the virtual currency. In many ways, Bitcoin, a form of nonphysical money not tied to any country or its currency, would seem ideal tender for the global travel industry.

If you like soap operas, you’ll love watching the battles between the major U.S. airlines and their creations, the GDSs. If the airlines and the GDSs were families, you wouldn’t want to spend Thanksgiving with them – unless you had a large bottle of Jim Beam to get you through the meal. As is often the case in battling families, it’s a fight about money.

Tragedy has sex appeal--look at Camille--and Berlin had it like no place else. This fallen imperial capital of a nation with fatally flawed ambitions symbolized both the Cold War and the threat of Armageddon. It was a city on the edge, where Prussian monuments crumbled in the shadow of communist monoliths next to a glittering--and heavily subsidized--Western showcase. The Wall is now history. No more spies traded in the mists of dawn on the Glienicker Bridge. No more goose-stepping changing of the guard in front of the Neue Wacht Memorial to Victims of Fascism. No more Western guards guarding Russian guards guarding the Soviet monument next to the Wall.