Lori Rackl

Sonoma County, Calif.-based travel writer Lori Rackl spent most of her adult life in sweet home(town) Chicago, where she worked for daily newspapers for more than 20 years. Her many beats included TV critic at the Chicago Sun-Times and travel editor at the Chicago Tribune.

Rackl grew up in Chicago’s western suburbs and got an undergraduate degree in political science at University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. She took advantage of the school’s study abroad program to spend her junior year at Nottingham University in England. And she took advantage of Nottingham’s trimester breaks and cheap Eurail passes to travel extensively through Europe. That’s where she caught an incurable case of wanderlust.

Her travel bylines have appeared in myriad magazines, newspapers and websites, such as the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Houston Chronicle, Toronto Star, Globe & Mail, Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times, Texas Highways, Hemispheres, Midwest Living, Nat Geo and, of course, Frommers.com.

Rackl covers all things travel-related, but she especially enjoys cruising and active travel — and insists that’s not an oxymoron.

Her story on cycling part of the Tour de France route landed her a gold award from the North American Travel Journalists Association. During her tenure as a health reporter, she won several national journalism awards for her stories on colon cancer and epilepsy, among other topics.