Editor's Note: May/June 2024

I lived the first five years of my life on the edge of East Boston, less than five miles from Logan Airport. My first word was “plane.” When I was a baby, my parents would plop me down on a checkered blanket on the sand of Revere Beach and we’d watch the planes take off and land above the cold, blue Atlantic. This is how I learned to identify every imaginable airline, from the bold red font of TWA to the sky-blue globe of Pan Am. On Sunday mornings, to get me to nap, my parents would push me in my stroller around the now defunct Eastern Airlines terminal. They’d drink coffee and Tab and stare out the windows at planes taxiing on the runway. It was in these formative moments an insatiable, unrelenting wanderlust took root.

A childhood of travel followed–to Miami, San Francisco, to Toronto to visit cousins. I went to Israel on a school trip and to Great Britain with my grandparents. Then, in 1996, TWA Flight 800 exploded off the coast of Long Island. I knew one of the passengers, a teenage boy with whom I had waitressed at a restaurant during graduate school. It wrecked me. I was now terrified of flying. And yet, the ache to travel never left. Dreams of far-flung locales still consumed me. Today, I hate to fly, but–with sedatives and sometimes a stiff cocktail–I do it anyway, whenever possible.

In this issue of Pasadena, we celebrate the spirit of travel, from musings on a solo journey to Hawaii (see Alone-ha! my account of a long weekend at the Four Seasons on the remote island of Lana’i) to Jenelle Riley’s review of her stay at Mexico’s Thompson Zihuantanejo beach resort. Los Angeles magazine deputy editor and native Brooklynite Jasmin Rosemberg takes us on a whirlwind tour of Manhattan, and acclaimed author Elisa Albert (After Birth, Human Blues) pens a war zone food diary chronicling her recent trip to Israel. We have stories about Catalina, Santa Cruz, and Palm Springs. On the culinary side, we spotlight pesto and its origins in Genoa, Italy.

Most exciting: our cover story on Duran Duran, the iconic glam rock band from one of my favorite countries to visit–England. As the band readies to headline Cruel World Fest on May 11 at Pasadena’s Brookside Park, we caught up with founding member and keyboardist Nick Rhodes. Rhodes told me, “Being around for over four decades now and still being able to touch a nerve with people of different generations is, I think for us, a very proud achievement.”

The same can be said of this very special issue of Pasadena.

Thank you for reading! We hope you enjoy!