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Rwanda to Uganda: a cross-border quest

The shelves of my father’s study-cum-Tottenham Hotspur shrine, stacked with leatherbound match day programs and soccer players’ autobiographies, belie his life’s true obsession: gorillas. The clues are there, though. A small bronze statue of a silverback makes a heavy bookend. A wooden walking stick, its handle carved into the shape of an ape, is propped in the corner. Remove them — and our hazy memories of tracking black, fluffy balls of muscle through lush African forest could be chalked up to a fever dream. But we really did it. After a decade of idle talk, Dad and I devised our mission: we’d research gorillas in Rwanda and realize his life goal of tracking them in Uganda.

Estella Shardlow

The vision behind Woolsery

At first glance, it looks like any other sleepy village in southwest England. A medieval church and manor house face a fish ’n’ chip shop and post office across the green. There’s the obligatory pub, the Farmers Arms, where log fires crackle and ale-taps gleam beneath oak-beamed ceilings. Along the narrow lanes, whitewashed cottages peter out into rolling Devonshire hills. In true UK style, the place even has an obscure tongue-twister of a name: Woolfardisworthy. Population 1,123. Look closer, however, and you’ll realize this isn’t your standard British backwater. For every pint of cider being poured in the pub, there’s a craft cocktail infused with foraged botanicals and homemade cordials — think a crabapple cider margarita or a sea buckthorn gin sour.

Orson Fry

Falling in love with Montana

"You have a big mountain to climb!" is not the sort of text you eagerly await from your girlfriend’s father. But Billy, a true Southern gent, meant no ambiguity. As dawn cracked the alarms sounded in our Airbnb and six of us bundled into the back of the Dodge. A cool mist hung in the valley as “Baba O’Riley (Teenage Wasteland)” started up on the radio and got the blood running. At 6:15 a.m. we entered the shadow of Emigrant Peak, which at 10,921 feet, commands Montana’s Paradise Valley. Emigrant owes its name to Thomas Curry, a pioneer who struck gold in a creek on the east side of the mountain in 1863.

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