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Archive for the ‘Journeys’ Category

Travel Books: My Pick for Top 10. What Are Yours?

Posted in Journeys, Travel, tagged , , , , , , on March 5, 2011| 5 Comments »

 

This was the first travel book I read. Do you remember your first. -- Photo courtesy Wikipedia

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

Travels With Maggie

Osa Johnson wrote I Married Adventure the year after I was born. I think I was about 10 years old when I came across her book in the public library. It was the first travel book I ever read, and I was enthralled. From that moment on, I dreamed of having her kind of adventures.

It wasn’t until 2007 that I finally made it to Africa and went on a safari. Things had tremendously changed from Osa’s days, but at least I got to see wild lions and leopards and monkeys and elephants and all the other animals she wrote about in the book that captured my dreams. My great-grandchildren may not be so fortunate.

I’ve read hundreds of travel books since then. There’s always one by my bedside. Choosing just 10 to list here was difficult. I could easily have listed 10 different ones and been just as truthful. The ones I’ve chosen, however, have special meaning to me. I’ve just told you about the first. Here are the other nine – in no particular order.

Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon. It was this book that was the role model for my present-day RV travels.

If your funny bone is like mine, this will tickle it.

On the Road

by Charles Kuralt. I was an upbeat journalist with a desire to travel. How could this book not be on my list?

Road Fever by Tim Cahill. I’ve read just about everything this crazy Montanan has written. I get his sense of humor.

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. An author with a strong sense of conservation and the value of both the landscape and wildlife.

Dessert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. An irreverent writer who writes about the landscapes I’ve trod and who loves them as much as I do.

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. One person’s account of an Everest expedition in which lives were lost, one of whom I had met and interviewed. His is not the only version of events but his writing can’t be faulted. I couldn’t stop reading.

Out of Africa by Isek Dineson. Once again my adventurous spirit is touched. I visited the home, now a museum, of Karen Blixen (alias Dineson) when I was in Africa.

John Steinbeck and Charley. Maggie and I are their counterparts but we don't follow in their wheel tracks. -- Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

 Around the World in 80 Days

by Jules Verne. Does a fictional book count as   a travel book? I vote that this one does.

Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck. When I first began planning my RV travels, I reread this book after a friend said Maggie and I were the female version of Steinbeck and Charley. I even toyed with the idea of retracing this great writer’s journey, but then wisely decided I needed to find my on path on the road.

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Journeys: Tulum Ghosts Wander the Ruins With Me

Posted in Journeys, Travel, tagged , , , , , on March 4, 2011| 6 Comments »

Ruins and tourists are all that remain of Tulum, a walled town by the Caribbean Sea built by the Mayans. -- Photo by Pat Bean

 One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” — Henry Miller

About 800 or so years ago, Mayans built a walled city on the Yucatan Peninsula that today we call Tulum. The citizens of this fort-like town that stood on a scenic bluff overlooking the Caribbean Sea were decimated by European diseases after a Spanish Expedition discovered the place in 1518.

Time and the elements reduced it to the ruins that today attracts hundreds of daily tourists. I was one of them a few years ago.

This journey back in time required an hour’s ride in a passenger ferry from Cozumel, followed by another hour’s ride in a bus to access the historic site. The day I took the tour, the water was exuberantly choppy, turning several of the passengers green.

Hamming it up for the camera, and tourist dollars. -- Photo by Pat Bean

The bus ride, however, was more gentle and flavored by the anecdotes of Angel, our tour guide. He filled our ears with tall tales of the Mayans, of which he was a descendent. He was an excellent press agent for his people, both those of ancient times and their kin who still live on the Yucatan Peninsula.

As I wandered among the ruins, ghosts from the past haunted my thoughts, their spirits floating through the air and hiding inside the cracks of the rock structures they built. What were these people really like, I wondered.

Walking back to our bus parked at the market plaza, where souvenir venders were loudly hawking their exotic wares – Angel had told us to wait to spend our money at a genuine Mayan gift shop that we would stop at on the ride back to the ferry – I sorta got an answer.

While I didn’t buy any souvenirs, I did pay to take the picture of two young Mayan boys dressed up as their ancient ancestors might have looked getting ready for battle – or a celebration.

These theatrical youths had found an ingenious way to support themselves. In this they were probably not all that different from the early Mayans. Or us. We all struggle to put foot on our tables and a roof over our heads as we search for a purpose to life and the secret to happiness.

It’s merely the methods of doing so that separate us from past generations and other cultures.

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Journeys: A Tale of Two Cats

Posted in Journeys, Travel, tagged , , , , , , on March 3, 2011| 6 Comments »

 

This is Rocky. He was rescued during a typhoon when my youngest daughter lived in Guam. He's never met a lap he didn't like. -- Photo by Pat Bean

 

  

 
“Dogs have owners. Cats have staff.” Unknown.

 My dog, Maggie, must be a cat in disguise.

Travels With Maggie

We never had a cat when I was growing up, only dogs. I didn’t have anything against cats, but never really wanted one of my own. I thought them too unfriendly, a stereotype that was confirmed by the first one that came into my life.

It was a beautiful, silky black feline that adopted my then eight-year-old daughter, Deborah. She adored this creature and named it Mai Ling. The enchantment was lost on the rest of the family. Mai Ling was cleverly mean, with a heart as dark as her fur.

One of her favorite activities was to hide beneath the couch and claw the legs of unsuspecting passers-by. Even worse, were her frequent full-body tackles on innocent sleepers.

One day, just as Mai Ling had left her former home to follow my daughter home, it adopted a new family down the street. Deborah brought the cat back repeatedly, but at the first opportunity Mai Ling always escaped again.

Deborah greatly mourned the loss of her pet, but the rest of the family rejoiced.

The next cat to enter my life was an ugly, skinny, dirty-haired calico that one of my sons had rescued from some boys who were teasing her.

This is Maggie, a cat in disguise. She considers me her personal slave. -- Photo by Pat Bean

“Well, we’re going to have to feed this one for a while before we can find it a new home,” I told him. At this point, not even Deborah, wanted to adopt another cat.

Two weeks later our ugly, rescued feline had turned into a beautiful princess that had stolen all our hearts. We named her Kitterick, after a sexy, albeit a kid’s show, mascot for Houston’s KTRK-TV.

Kitterick had a long and happy life with our family, including our dog. We would often find the two of them curled up together.

The moral of this story is as old as Methuselah. And it applies to a lot more in our lives than cats, including the journeys we make. As Aldous Huxley once said: “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”

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