My husband Ron and I fly to Australia every winter to visit family and friends. Our first stop is always Woolla, a five thousand acre cattle property a long way from anywhere, owned by Ron’s best mate Peter.

It took us a long time to figure out what was going on. It took even longer to realize there was anything to figure out.

“Pretty” has never been a big word in my vocabulary. Not that I’m an eyesore or anything, just that I’m not and never will be “beautiful.” So Egypt came as a complete surprise.

We started the adventure kayaking on the Sea of Cortez, known for the greatest concentration of Marine mammals in the world. The kayaking was fine, but the wildlife was a total bust.

Our Baja holiday ended with three days watching whales in Magdalena Bay. After no luck in the Sea of Cortez, I was desperate to see some wildlife. Happily, the bay was wall-to-wall gray whales, many with infants in tow.

In July of 2014 my daughter Jess and I spent a week in the Bahamas swimming with wild spotted dolphins. She’d gone on a shark dive in March and discovered that a charter captain who took divers to the sharks all winter took swimmers to the dolphins all summer. She sent me to the website, and I signed us up straightaway.

One of my life’s ambitions has been to go to Africa on safari, and I fully expected my husband to come along. After all, I went to rugby matches, didn’t I?

Our first morning in camp, the guide asked if we’d heard the lions roaring before sunrise. I asked him to wake me if lions roared again. That night he scratched on the flap of our tent and whispered “Come right away.” A scruffy male lion was walking through the camp.

We’ve just come back from a weekend on Cape Cod that had a lot of firsts: It was our first mini-vacation with our grown daughter; our first visit to Wellfleet on the outer Cape; our first foray into AirBnb, and our first little holiday with our dogs, Tilly and Luther.

Standing at my kitchen counter to write this story, all I hear are clichés, trite sayings telling me to get my shit together. “Well begun is half done,” and “Begin as you mean to go on.” That kind of thing.

When we moved back to the U.S. from Australia, Tom came, too. People are surprised that we flew him back, but you don’t leave family behind.

Tom was an amazing horse. The only time I ever saw him afraid was in a town parade with the bagpipes playing right behind him. Otherwise, his reaction to scary things happening was to sigh. Deeply.

November in Australia’s Blue Mountains, 1994. Stinking hot. Bushfire weather.

Tom the Wonder Horse was nineteen. He was probably the oldest gelding ever to cross the Pacific, but leaving him in Australia was unthinkable. In fact, if we couldn’t take Tom, I wasn’t going either.

Diana and I were waiting for Frappuccinos at our local Starbucks when I saw this ad stapled to the bulletin board: Charlie Granite, 10 y.o. registered quarter horse, 15.1 hh, chestnut w flaxen mane and tail.

Early summer in the Berkshires, with hay ready to cut and the smell of meadowsweet in the air. It was the perfect day for a carriage drive.

My black pony Cricket certainly loves a challenge. He’s very smart and has always been somewhat underemployed.

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. What about an old horse?

He was smart. He was funny. He wanted to move in.

Muffin had pizzazz. She could take charge of a situation better than any dog I’ve ever known, and she was always on her game. Consider, for instance, how she adopted us.

An article in USA Today talks about a 2-pound dog in Nebraska dialing 911 by scratching at her owner’s cell phone. It goes to show that even teacup dogs can sometimes do big things.

I grew up in the country, in a part of Westchester County that hadn’t yet been developed, but I don’t recall much about skunks. I have a hazy recollection of our Standard Poodle getting sprayed, but I wasn’t the one who had to deal with the stink.