If you are looking for a special experience to share with your girlfriends, know this: Properties are wooing women with attractive packages.

Living in Southern California makes for a schizophrenic existence: at once you live in a perpetual, sun-drenched here and now where Tuesday looks like Saturday, April looks like October, and even 1988 is hard to distinguish from 2011. I have always joked that without hardly noticing, one goes from holding a tennis racket or golf club to grasping a cane or a walker, that the days slip away here without reminders from nature how fleetly our little lives are scampering towards oblivion.

Sitting at my desk isn't the same as traveling the world and seeing the great sites for myself. But every once in a while I'll comb the world by computer, looking for the most interesting, important, and occasionally inane travel stories that will make you a smarter globetrotter. Here's what I've been reading today.

1. China's Silk Road