The Foreign Service lost one of its own on Saturday when a suicide bomber detonated explosives that killed 25-year-old Foreign Service Officer Anne Smedinghoff and four other Americans, three soldiers and one civilian Department of Defense employee in Afghanistan. Smedinghoff was a second-tour public diplomacy officer who was part of a convoy that was delivering donated books to a new school in Zabul Province. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, which also killed three Afghans and wounded four State Department employees. (Another American died in a separate incident and 18 Afghans, including a Taliban commander and women and children were also killed in a U.S. airstrike over the weekend.) She is the first State Department Foreign Service Officer (FSO) to be killed in Afghanistan. (A USAID FSO was killed in August in a suicide bombing.)

A devastating loss like this one reverberates throughout the Foreign Service community. I never met Anne but a former colleague who served with her at the embassy in Kabul and also taught a course she took in Washington said she was "heartbreakingly young, and a nice, lovely person."

Just last week they took part in a quiz night at the embassy with questions revolving around events that happened on or near Anne's birthday. I lived in River Forest, the beautiful town just west of Chicago where Anne grew up for three years, and after reading about her life and career, I feel certain that we lost someone who epitomized all that is good about the Foreign Service.

Tourism officials are always looking for promotional hooks, and using connections to popular TV shows has long been a common way to market a destination. In the '80s, television programs like "Miami Vice" and "Magnum P.I." boosted tourism in South Florida and Hawaii, while "The Love Boat" was a boon for the cruise industry. More recently a well-known PR firm is pushing Connecticut's "Mad Men" connection and the Albuquerque Convention & Visitors Bureau is promoting "Breaking Bad" tours, despite the fact that the show's protagonists cook meth for a living. The MTV show "Jersey Shore" boosted tourism there but officials in the Garden State were reluctant to formally promote the show given its bawdy content.

Earlier this year, MTV replaced "Jersey Shore" with a new reality show called "Buckwild" that depicts the lifestyles of hard-partying country kids from West Virginia who spend their days and nights boozing, hooking up, brawling and going "mudding" in trucks and ATV's. Even before the show aired, politicians like West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin were calling for the show to be taken off the air, arguing that it played on the public's "ugly, inaccurate stereotypes about the people of West Virginia."

Calls to take the show off the air have intensified in recent weeks after one cast member, Salma Amin, was arrested on heroin possession charges and another, Michael Buford, was charged with DUI. And then last week, the breakaway star of the show, Shain Gandee, was found dead in a sport utility vehicle along with his uncle and a friend after they were last seen leaving a bar at 3 a.m. According to the AP, autopsies indicated that they died of carbon monoxide poisoning, possibly caused by their truck's tailpipe being blocked with mud.

Janice Corbett has been a diplomat for more than 21 years. She has lived in South Korea, Spain, Ecuador, Brazil and Canada. She's on a first name basis with several heads of state and has even met the King and Queen of Spain. Her lifestyle of international travel and adventure started in Cleveland, Ohio, of all places.

After getting an M.B.A., the Washington, D.C., native landed a job as a trade specialist at the U.S. Export Assistance Center in Cleveland and that led her to a career in the Department of Commerce's Foreign Commercial Service. The United States and Foreign Commercial Service (USFCS) is one of four official Foreign Affairs Agencies employing some 1,400 trade professionals here and abroad and since we've talked to diplomats from State, USAID and USDA, plus a diplomatic courier, I thought it was high time we hear from someone at Commerce.

Janice Corbett is the Regional Director for Africa, the Near East, and South Asia (ANESA) with the U.S. and Foreign Commercial Service in Washington, with responsibility for 18 countries in a diverse region bounded by Morocco, South Africa, India, and Afghanistan. She is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, class of Counselor.

Prior to her assignment in ANESA, Janice served as the U.S. Commercial Service Liaison to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) where she assisted U.S. manufacturers to expand into new export markets. We caught up with Janice to find out about what it's like to work in the Foreign Commercial Service.

While American college kids bake in the sun, pound tequila shooters and do things they hope won't end up on YouTube in Cancun, South Padre Island and other venues for Spring Break debauchery, their younger siblings all seem to be on class or family trips to Washington, D.C. I've visited D.C. many times over the years and lived there on three separate occasions. But until this week, I've mostly managed to avoid the hordes of tourists that descend on the place during the Cherry Blossom/School Spring Break season.

I've always been an off-season or shoulder-season traveler but now that my kids are in school, I don't always have the flexibility to travel when the prices are low and the crowds are sparse. When my kids have a break from school, our choice is to: A) hire a babysitter so we can continue to get work done (expensive and hard to do for just one week), B) stay at home and go stir crazy, or C) bite the bullet and travel despite the higher prices and crowds that are inevitable during school breaks.

At the stroke of midnight, fireworks lit up the night sky on the Greek island of Naxos. In a square outside a centuries old church, at least half the island's population gathered to celebrate the occasion. Children ran around and threw firecrackers, senior citizens occupied all the choice benches and everyone was dressed to the nines and holding lit candles. An hour or so after midnight, everyone filed out of the square and retreated to their homes for a huge feast that breaks the Lenten fast. This is how Orthodox Easter is celebrated in towns and villages all over Greece.

If you've never spent Easter Sunday in a predominantly Christian country like Greece, Italy or many others in Europe and Latin America where it's the biggest holiday of the year, you're missing out on the travel experience of a lifetime. Here in the U.S., Easter isn't even a public holiday worthy of a long weekend. In many parts of the country, you can drive around and shop and not even realize that it's an important Christian holiday that celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

If Rebecca Bierman gets an urge for a Big Mac, she has at least four options to satisfy the craving.

"I can go to Pierre or Sturgis, here in South Dakota," says Bierman, a farmer and rancher who lives in Glad Valley, South Dakota. "Or I can go to Dickinson or Bismarck in North Dakota."

The McDonald's in Pierre is 142 miles from her home, the Sturgis branch is 147 miles away, and the golden arches in Dickinson and Bismarck are 146 and 159 miles away respectively. According to Stephen Von Worley, an artist and scientist from California, the area between Glad Valley and Meadow, South Dakota, is the "McFarthest" place in the country, that is, the part of America that is farthest away from a McDonald's location. But there are places to eat in the area and one establishment even has strippers and coyote hunting contests.

Stepping over a dead boa constrictor with flies buzzing around it wasn't what I had in mind when I hired a guy named Carlos to take us to see Volcán Masaya, a national park in Nicaragua where you can drive right up to the crater of an active volcano. But when we piled into his Toyota Corolla on a sizzling hot morning in late February, Carlos wanted us to see much more than just the smoldering volcano.

"I'm going to take you to a farm and then we're going to visit a mask maker, before we hit the craft market, Laguna Apoyo and the volcano," he said, before we'd even had a chance to test his air conditioning or fasten our seatbelts.

We wanted to see the craft market in Masaya, Laguna Apoyo and the volcano but I wasn't sure about the rest of it. That uncertainty grew when we pulled up in front of what seemed to be a dilapidated farm as a host of mangy looking dogs serenaded us with howls and barks. A young man in a dirty, pale-blue T-shirt led us into some caged enclosures to look at iguanas and Carlos asked me if I'd ever eaten one. I have not.

"Where are you from?"

It's the conversation starter you sometimes hear several times per day when you travel. On this occasion, the question was posed by a friendly, bearded waiter from Barcelona at the Amici Ristorante in the small beach town of Santa Teresa, on Costa Rica's lovely Nicoya Peninsula. I told him I was from Buffalo and lived in Chicago and he said, "Chicago? You have to meet Giovanni, our pizza maker, he lived in Chicago."

Giovanni was standing near the wood fire oven, tending to a slew of pizzas and I almost didn't bother to go over to meet him. At home in Chicago, I probably wouldn't be curious enough to greet the guy making our pizza, but when I travel I'm almost a different person. I am more outgoing, friendlier, more willing to take chances. And when I'm on the road, I always meet the most interesting people. So I walked over to Giovanni and introduced myself.

As a longtime Chicago resident, I've walked or driven past the Nickerson Mansion on Erie Street hundreds of times. But I never thought about going inside the place, which is now the Richard Driehaus Museum, until I read all the rave reviews of it on Trip Advisor. I had no idea that we had one of the country's finest Gilded Age mansions and resolved to see the place for myself.

It's easy to overlook historic sites in your hometown as you get caught in a routine, but every time I return home from a trip and feel a little sick about being home, I make a point of putting on my tourist cap and doing something I've never done before. On my first weekend back in Chicago after a glorious trip to warm and sunny Central America, I piled in the car with my wife and two little boys on a typically gloomy, cold March day to check out the Driehaus Museum.

Gallery: Richard H. Driehaus Museum

The moment you step foot in this opulent place and feast your eyes on the main hall, with its decadently ornate grand staircase and dimly lit foyer, you are transported to Gilded Age Chicago, when this was the finest home in the city. If you want to see how the super rich lived in 19^th Century America, look no further than the Nickerson mansion, which was called the Marble Palace in its heyday.

If I ruled the world, I would issue a decree commanding every hotel to install minibars stocked with $2 bottles of beer. But since that's never going to happen, you might have to go to Nicaragua to experience such an enlightened minibar alcohol policy.

I'm a frugal traveler – a cheapskate, if you will. And so I rarely – almost never, in fact – use the hotel minibar (unlike David Samuels of The Atlantic, who recently wrote a long and bizarre piece about how hotel minibars provide him with companionship). But last week while staying at the Hotel Plaza Colon in Granada, Nicaragua, I made liberal use of a hotel minibar for the first time in my life. The Plaza Colon is probably the most luxurious hotel in Granada and it's one of the finest places to stay in the country, but I was shocked and delighted to discover that ice-cold bottles of beer cost just $2 in my room's minibar. Bottled water cost $1, and a small bottle of rum was just $6 (or $8 if you wanted higher quality stuff).

You know you're in a delightfully cheap country when a luxury hotel prices beer in the minibar at $2 and, sure enough, Nicaragua doesn't disappoint on the value scale. Tim Leffel, author of "The World's Cheapest Destinations" considers Nicaragua to be one of the world's cheapest countries and after a recent visit there, I have to agree.