Karla Zimmerman

 Karla lives in Chicago, where she has been testing bar stools and cheering on the Cubs (the city's hopeless north-side baseball team) for the past 16 years. She writes travel features for newspapers, books, magazines and radio, and has contributed to National Geographic Traveler, National Public Radio, the Chicago Tribune and Time Out Chicago, among many others. It's a long way from the early days, when she wrote about gravel for a construction magazine and got to trek to places like Fredonia, Kansas.