Dave Seminara

On a suffocatingly humid Friday morning in August, I sat in a rental car parked outside the home of Thom Robb, the leader of the Ku Klux Klan, wondering if I should knock on his door. A shirtless, muscle-bound, heavily tattooed carpenter who lived down the road – and swore he wasn’t racist or a Klansman – said Robb was “a really nice guy” who wouldn’t mind my turning up at his house without an appointment. Klansmen, I reckon, aren’t “nice” guys by definition, and as Robb’s mean-sounding dog barked at me from the other side of his fence, I feared the neighbor was setting me up to get my head blown off.

Give me a golf cart on an obscure small island and I am ecstatic. That’s how I felt on Christmas Eve rumbling around North Bimini, one of thirty inhabited islands in the Bahamas, with my wife and teenage sons on a balmy day full of benign clouds and serendipitous discoveries. I’m a traveler who is blessed and cursed with hyper-curiosity. Places with too much to see frustrate me because no matter how long I stay, I’m inevitably nagged by a sense that I missed something. I love cruises but port days are a particular tease because you’re always racing against the clock to get back to the ship. So for me, Bimini, with zero stop lights, no fast food and nearly as many golf carts as its 2,000 inhabitants is almost perfect.

On Black Friday, I attended a Friendsgiving party where I watched the Chiefs-Raiders game with a friend who is a die-hard Chiefs fan. I’m a Bills fan, and I detest the Chiefs and their legions of bandwagon fans with every fiber of my being. Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes endorses seemingly every product in America, and I do my best to boycott them all. Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and his insufferable girlfriend, Taylor Swift, are just as unavoidable, and being forced to watch her gleeful celebrations of Chiefs touchdowns is arguably even more unpleasant than listening to her favorite politician, Kamala Harris, wax poetic about the passage of time.

When I was sixteen, my dad took me along to a conference he attended in Calgary just days after the city hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics. By this time, the Eddie the Eagle and Jamaican bobsled T-shirts were all half-price, but everyone was still talking about the joke athletes that were the talk of the games. The International Olympic Committee wasn’t happy about it, though, and created what came to be known as the “Eddie the Eagle rule,” making it much harder for athletes to qualify for the Games. Since then, the number of ridiculously bad athletes competing in the Olympics has declined, but there are still dreadful performances to be found, and the Paris Games have been no exception.

Fans of the NFL’s thirty-two teams don’t agree on much. You’ll get a broad range of opinions on who the best and worst teams are, who should be the league MVP, who should be the first pick in the next draft and a host of other football questions. But there is broad agreement on one thing: NFL officiating stinks worse than maggot-infested roadkill and the league has no plan to fix it. PolitiFact might brand me a conspiracy theorist for this opinion, but, like many other football fans who think their teams never get the pivotal calls, I’m pretty sure the league is committed to preventing my beloved Buffalo Bills from ever winning the Super Bowl. Take one game we played against the Eagles this year, for example.

Who could resist the opportunity to visit a women’s island? Four years ago, I read an article in the New York Times travel section about an Estonian island called Kihnu, which the Times dubbed an “Isle of Women.” Its subhead asked “What would life be like without men?” and I wanted to find out, making a mental note to visit this peculiar island — “run by women” — someday, and my opportunity came last summer as part of a trip with my wife, Jen, and our teenage sons to Finland and the Baltic countries. But Kihnu, we discovered, isn’t a women’s island, or anything close to it. Before our trip, I reread the Times piece plus similar ones before combing YouTube for Kihnu videos.

Bear viewing in Finland can be a cloak-and-dagger affair. We were told to meet our guide, Pekka Veteläinen, at 5:45 on a Monday afternoon — not at a landmark, but at a set of GPS coordinates deep in the woods, fifty minutes outside a town called Kuusamo, just one kilometer short of the Russian border on logging road number 8691. Here are some of the instructions we received. Wear dark clothing. Take ready-made food with you. Bring cash because credit cards don’t work in this wilderness. We had an early dinner at a “wild food” certified restaurant in the Karelian town of Kuusamo — it’s Finland’s seventy-fifth biggest town, a distinction that means the place still has more reindeer than people.