I am not a professional travel writer, and don’t expect I ever will be.

I do, however, enjoy writing about travel, partly because I do so much of it; I spend a good two or three months a year on the road, generally in combination with more serious assignments.

Thus, I conceived the attached guide to The Hague, which I wrote for the Financial Times’ How To Spend It Magazine, in conjunction with my research for “The Frank Family That Survived,” most of which is sited in The Hague, where my mother’s family went into hiding from 1942 to 1945; it gave me special pleasure to write about the city that gave her succor during the Holocaust. The Hague was also the place I began my career as a foreign correspondent all the way back in 1976, when I published my first major piece, a profile of Holland, in The New York Times Magazine — not to mention a city that is oft-overlooked by travelers to Europe; in this sense, one could also say that it is an untold travel story.

Most of my travel pieces, which are often illustrated by my photography (or at least, when I am able to persuade an editor that I can actually write and photograph — not easy in the specialist-minded magazine trade), are about unsung European places. But, as the attached piece about Saratoga Springs illustrates, I quite enjoy writing about my own country as well. Though well-known in the U.S., the upstate racing resort is not as notorious internationally, which is why it also gave me pleasure to share its particular bedizenments with FT readers abroad.

Perhaps the thing about being a journalist I most enjoy is the ability to “turn” readers on to a place, and a culture, that they may not have experienced before. I like to think that I “turned” a lot of people on to The Hague and Saratoga Springs with these reasonably typical examples of my recent travel reportage.