Travel writing by Rudy Owens, MA, MPH
As a writer and photographer, one of my greatest pleasures is sharing stories and images about travel, history, culture, and destinations I have been fortunate to visit. Many of my stories have come and then gone as I have updated my websites over the last quarter century. I continue to make some of these stories available because the issues and truths that I found still matter, even if the content has aged with time.
Many decades before I was born, Mark Twain wrote that “nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people.” I have found his insight to be true in my own country or abroad. The act of engaging something new is the reward, along with the people one meets. Every time I have traveled somewhere new, with clear intentions to grow and learn, I met new people and expanded my knowledge of the world. Every interaction has enriched me and taught me about the human condition, in all of its beautiful, wonderful, tragic, and terrible forms.
Some of my stories below are formatted as PDF documents, but most are still live on my photography blog.
- Connecting with my Finnish roots, one sauna at a time (April 13, 2024)
- Finnish Nordic skiing, accessible for all (March 25, 2024)
- Blood is thicker than water: Meeting my kin in Finland (long-form story: 9,000+ words) (Nov. 5, 2023)
- Looking for waves, the past, and a legend in Waikiki (Nov. 5, 2022)
- The Methow Valley, as white as the winter snow (Feb. 2, 2022)
- Iditarod memories (March 3, 2019)
- A year of exploration and surfing on the Oregon coast (Sept. 17, 2017)
- North St. Louis, a gentrification-free zone (June 19, 2016)
- Detroit public schools, abandoned and left to the scrappers (Oct. 2, 2015)
- An Armenian journey (first published January 2002)
- A trip to the camps (first published August 2000)
To see all of my currently published travel essays, from journeys taken throughout North America and the world, visit my photography blog. For my travel-themed photos essays, organized by location, please visit my photography website.
And no story is complete without feedback from readers and viewers. Please drop me a line and let me know what you think. All comments are always welcome.
(Last updated: April 13, 2023)