James T. Yenckel

Jim Yenckel was a writer and editor for the Washington Post for 33 years. For 16 years, he was The Post’s chief travel reporter, writing a weekly advice column distributed over the Los Angeles Times/Washington Post News Service wire. Subsequently, he has appeared in Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel magazine, Newsweek, Preservation, Washingtonian Magazine, and NARFE, a magazine for federal employees. He also has written for the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Denver Post, Hartford Courant, and other newspapers. He currently writes a weekly travel column for the Washington Examiner and the Baltimore Examiner, and he can be heard monthly on WAMU-FM, a National Public Radio outlet in Washington. He received the Traveler’s Advocate Award of the American Society of Travel Agents and a Silver Lowell Thomas Award from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation. His guidebook to the Mid-Atlantic Region earned him the Travel Writer of the Year Award from the State of Maryland. Born in Omaha, he attended school in Nebraska and California. He is a graduate in Spanish American history from the University of California at Berkeley, where he served a term as editorin-chief of the Daily Californian, the student newspaper. After college, he received a fellowship from the Inter-American Press Association for a year’s study at the University of Chile in Santiago. While in Santiago, he served as managing editor of the South Pacific Mail, a weekly English-language newspaper. He has traveled in more than 80 countries and all 50 states. After an assignment as The Post’s night foreign editor, he obtained a year’s leave of absence in 1972 and backpacked solo around the world mostly by bus and train, visiting 30 countries in Europe and Asia. Earlier in his career, he circled the United States on a 99-day/$99 Greyhound Bus pass. His most recent adventure, to celebrate the conclusion of this guide, was to hike the rigorous 21-mile rim-to-rim trail in Grand Canyon National Park. He lives in Washington with his wife Sandy, who is also an avid traveler.