About Judith Babcock Wylie
Judith Babcock Wylie has longed to travel ever since she rode a big yellow school bus to school through the farmlands of Ohio and wished every day that the bus would veer off on a great adventure. After graduate school, followed by many years of administrative work in universities, she took the leap into full-time travel writing fifteen years ago, and has not looked back.
Since then she has eaten bird's nest soup in Hong Kong, sailed to Bali, rounded up cattle with a ranch family in California, trekked to see parrots in Jamaica's cockpit country, gawked at the temples in Mandalay, and swum with penguins in the Galapagos. She is an editor with Romantic Traveling, which can also be seen on the Web site "Thrive," a joint effort on America Online and Time, Inc.; writes a weekly column, "Travel Help: On Line and In Print," and writes travel features that have appeared in many publications, including Travel & Leisure, New Woman, TWA Ambassador, Modern Maturity, Honeymoons and Romantic Destinations, and newspapers such as the Miami Herald, the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, and the Atlanta Constitution.
She has contributed essays for a number of Travelers' Tales volumes and Fodor's Los Angeles Guidebook, is coauthor of The Spa Book and The Romance Emporium, and has won a Big Island of Hawaii Journalism Award. She regularly teaches travel writing workshops at New York University and the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Cruz.
Judy and her husband Frank live on an organic farm in Santa Cruz, California, with their cat Fearless, assorted deer, bobcat, and coyote and 300 apple and pear trees. She writes in a cabin office at the edge of an orchard overlooking the Pacific Ocean.