Travel | Pat Bean's blog

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

A Bug Named Chigger

Posted in aging, Dogs, journalism, Journeys, road trip, Travel, Writing, tagged driving, VW Bugs on April 22, 2024| 2 Comments »

In 2014, I bought this red car and named her Cayenne. She is not as shiny today, but driving her this morning felt empowering. Pepper, whom I’m holding, spent the last eight months with me during my RVing days before going to doggie heaven a few years after I moved to Tucson.

Aging My Way

I got behind the wheel of my car for the first time in over six weeks this morning. It was just a short drive, but after a knee replacement and three stents put into my heart, it was extremely empowering.

While most people I know, find driving, especially in rush-hour conditions, annoying and frustrating, the activity has long been my happy place. I think it began back in 1967 when I bought a 1963 red VW Bug shortly after I went to work for a small local newspaper.

At first, I used it just to get back and forth to work, but then I was promoted from dark-room flunky to reporter, a life-changing milestone that begin my 37-year journalism career.

Over the next four years, I drove that Bug over 100,000 miles to get to and from assignments all over Texas Gulf Coast’s Brazoria County. With five children at home, a lazy husband, and a demanding editor to please, driving in that car was the only alone time I had. Enclosed and sitting behind its wheel, I felt serene and at peace, about the only time I did during that period of my life.

***This is a 1963 VW Bug, like the one I put 100,000 miles on between 1967-71. Amazingly you can still find them on the road.***

When I moved to Northern Utah, I drove between there and Texas to visit family often, heady with each opportunity to find a different route for the journey. And when I finally retired, I spent nine years driving a small RV, with just a canine companion, all over America. I loved every moment of the 150,000 miles I drove exploring this awesome country. I found beauty everywhere I looked.

At 85, and with poor vision in the dark, I gave up night driving several years back. And I know there is going to come a time when I will have to relinquish my car keys because of my age. But thankfully, that time hasn’t arrived yet.

Oh, and by the way, I paid $600 for that Bug I called Chigger – and sold it for $900 four years later. It’s the best bargain I’ve ever experienced.

Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, an enthusiastic birder, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.

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Life’s Landscapes

Posted in aging, Journeys, Travel, Writing, tagged Bluebonnets on April 17, 2024| 8 Comments »

***When I was traveling, I always tried to be in Texas for bluebonnet season. — Photo by Pat Bean***

Aging My Way

One of my blog followers wrote yesterday that although we had never met, she had been following me so long that she felt I was an old friend. I don’t think there could have been anything nicer than that said to a writer. And comments like hers make me happy to be blogging again after my short sabbatical.

I’ve been blogging here on Word Press since 2010, the year I turned 71 and when I was still traveling around the country with my canine companion Maggie. The view then was ever changing.

***It’s cactus-blooming*** season in Tucson. One of the many things I learned while traveling is that beauty is everywhere. You just have to look. — Photo by Pat Bean.

Meanwhile, this will be my 1,588^th blog, and tomorrow I turn 85. A splendid view of the Catalina Mountains from my small Tucson apartment greets me each day, and my canine companion is named Scamp.

I wake up each morning with gratitude in my heart — for what I had in the past, and what I now have. I’m content.

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Faulty Little Gray Cells

Posted in aging, Books, Journeys, Travel, Writing, tagged Rick Steves, Steve Reeves, Travel writing on December 8, 2023| 1 Comment »

***One of Rick Steves many travel books about European countries.***

Aging My Way

Reading and Googling go hand in hand for me these days. It’s one of the good things about the internet. No longer do I have to wait to go to the library to find answers to my questions, all I have to do is type them into a search engine.

It helps, however, if you know the right questions to ask.

This morning I was reading an essay in Best American Travel Writing of 2020 about Rick Steves. The author didn’t immediately identify Steves except by name, and so I Googled him. Only from the short time I went from the page to my phone screen I goofed and typed in Steve Reeves.

That was a blast to my past. During my younger days, I had watched Reeves, a bodybuilder and actor, portray such characters as Hercules in movies many times. But I quickly realized he probably wasn’t the person I was looking for and a quick glance back at the book informed me of my mistake.

Googling the correct name, I discovered Rick Steves is a popular American travel writer famous for his European travel guides. I guess. because I’ve never visited Europe, is why I had never heard of Steves, even though the article by Sam Anderson described him as an amazing person and writer.

Meanwhile, I’m still wondering how my little gray cells jumped from Rick Steves to Steve Reeves. My guess is that at 84, and always being insatiably curious, those cells of mine are densely crowded, allowing wires to easily get crossed. At least I hope that’s all it is.

I wonder if the internet has something to say about that.

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One Is Not Like the Other

Posted in aging, Birds, Books, Journeys, Travel, tagged Petra, Susan Orlean on November 13, 2023| 1 Comment »

***The Monastery in Petra, a place that has fascinated me ever since I got a sneak peek at it in an Indiana Jones movie. Photo by Diego Delso***

Aging My Way

I do a lot of armchair traveling these days, looking at photos of and reading about places, which at 84, I know I will probably never be able to visit in person. It’s an enjoyable hobby that continues to feed my insatiable curiosity about the world and the people who live in it.

What’s lacking, however, is the feeling of accomplishment one gets from actually walking through an unknown cityscape, standing atop a mountain you’ve just climbed, or learning to communicate with a local whose language you do not understand. There is value in sweat and effort.

Susan Orlean pointed this out in a story about the remains of Petra, the cave-like capital of 4^th century Nabateans, being made into a virtual reality model. Wrote Susan: “Technology makes it easier to see the world almost as it is, but sometimes the hardest parts are what make travel memorable.”

As I read Susan’s words in The Best Women’s Travel Writing: Volume 12, I thought about my recent bird-watching walk around a small lake here in Tucson. It was a flat trail, just a half-mile in length, and I had to use my rollator as a steading hand and a place to sit every once in a while, but the feeling of accomplishment I felt at the end was significant – so much better than watching bird cams, which is also something I do regularly.

One is not like the other.

Which is why, because I can’t physically do all the things I want to do, or financially afford to travel to all the places I still want to see, I’m thankful for modern-age technology. If nothing else, the years have taught me to be flexible. It’s one of the ways I can continue to experience life zestfully, if not gracefully.

Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, an enthusiastic birder, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.

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Travel Books: Inspiration and Memory

Posted in aging, Books, Journeys, Travel, Writing, tagged Freya Stark, Nellie Bly, Tioga Pass, travel books, travel writers on November 1, 2023| 2 Comments »

***Tioga Pass view from top of Tioga Peak***

Aging My Way

I’ve been reading books in the travel genre since I’ve been a kid, and have oft quoted Dr. Seuss saying “Oh! The places you’ll go and the things you’ll see!” – And I did, from exploring the neighborhood on my bike as a kid to watching wild elephants and hippos on an African safari.

The first travel book I read was I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson, published in 1940, just a year after I was born. I was 10 years old at the time, and having escaped the children’s side of the library had migrated to the dangerous adult side, where the lions Osa and her husband were filming resided.

By the time I hit my 50s, any list of the Best Travel Books I came across found me having read most of them. And the ones I hadn’t read, well they went on my to-read list. And what I read made my bucket list get longer and longer.

I’ve pretty much read everything written by Jan Morris, Bill Bryson (whose A Walk in the Woods inspired by own years of hiking), Paul Theroux, Robert Louis Stevenson, Peter Matthiessen, William Least Heat Moon (His Blue Highways inspired my own travels in a small RV around North America for nine years) John Steinbeck (whose Travels with Charley inspired the title of my own travel book Travels with Maggie), and my all-time favorite adventurer Tim Cahill.

And then there are these three travel writers who were writing travel books long before I was born, and during a time when respectful women didn’t travel alone, as they so successfully did.

My own favorite, perhaps because we share a journalistic background, is Nellie Bly who in 1888 went around the world in 72 days – and wrote about it 15 years after Jule Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days was published.

Then there is Isabella Bird, who wrote A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains that was published in 1879. It was her fourth, but my favorite of her books. I found it at a national parks’ visitor center, which is an ideal location to find obscure travel books.

And finally, for this blog but not for the list of great women travel writers, there is Freya Stark, who wrote more than two dozen books about her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Of her impressive writings, Valley of the Assassins, published in 1834 is my favorite.

While at 84, my traveling days are mostly over, I’m still reading travel books. The current one is Vagabonding in the USA by Ed Buryn.

It was first published in 1980, so is not too useful as an actual travel guide. But it is, I’m discovering, chockfull of advice that transcends travel. And, like many travel books for me these days, a catalyst for bringing back awesome memories of places I have already visited.

The passage below, for example, let me relive the delight I had in my own cresting of Tioga Pass, where I got out of the car, stretched, felt the breeze blowing my hair about, took in the magnificent view and simply felt glad to be alive.

Wrote Buryn: “I am … driving down from Tioga Pass where California 120 tops the Sierra Nevada and heads east. It is dusk. In the clear mountain/desert air, the alpenglow to the east over Nevada seems almost phosphorescent. Mono Lake shimmers in the darkening distance, with barren ranges endlessly beyond it. … It is the first sundown of another road adventure…”

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Wrong Turns, Maybe Not

Posted in aging, Dogs, Favorite Places, Journeys, road trip, Travel on September 29, 2023| 1 Comment »

Cumbres Pass on an autumn day. — Photo by Pat Bean

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.” — Douglas Adams

Aging My Way

Some of my best travel moments have been the result of a wrong turn. One example is the day I did just that in Chama, New Mexico. By the time this directionless-nitwit figured it out, I was driving through a scenic landscape that kept me going forward with no intention of turning back.

Facebook, with its post and photos from the past, brought back all the good memories of that 2009 day, which had me driving through the 10,000-foot Cumbres Pass in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. It was a colorful autumn day, traffic was almost non-existent, and my then canine companion Maggie and I took a walk and breathed it all in.

Of course, I was driving and living in a small RV at that time, and had no daily deadline to meet.

In a way, that’s kind of how I’m still living my life in retirement — although without an RV. And by the way, I cuss out myself often for selling it, especially since a recent road trip had me realizing how much I loved traveling.

But the bonus of that trip was I came home energized, ready to get this arthritic old body out into the world more, something I was actually still doing until Covid hit and isolation and staying home became a habit.

It’s time to get on the road again, even if it’s just day trips around Tucson. To misquote Dr. Seuss, I have brains in my head, shoes on my feet — and I should know where to go. Maybe I’ll even be lucky and take a wrong turn.

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The Snake and the Chinaberry Tree

Posted in aging, Journeys, Travel, tagged chinaberry tree, snakes, storms, trees on August 2, 2023| 2 Comments »

***As a kid, I gathered up these berries as ammunition for the neighborhood kid wars. Today I wonder why kids engage in war games?*** ***What does it say of the human species?***

“Courage is knowing what not to fear.” — Plato

Every time I pass the chinaberry tree that grows in a neighbor’s yard, it takes me back in time to when I was a young girl joyfully climbing the one that grew in my grandmother’s backyard. The tree was located in a fenced area behind the house where my grandmother raised chickens, rabbits and pigs that eventually found their way to the dinner table.

Beyond this area stood a wild blackberry field that stretched for several football fields down to train tracks. It was in this tree that I often watched the Texas Zypher fly past. The sight of that silver streak may have been the beginning of my lifelong wanderlust, as I always wondered where that train had been and wished I had been there.

And as the zypher passed, I always waved at the engineer, imagining that the whistle that blew in response was just for me. Adulthood eventually inflicted me and I realized that the whistle was blown because of the nearby railroad crossing and not for me. It’s not easy growing up.

Anyway, one day when I went out to climb that chinaberry tree – and to collect its hard green berries for a neighborhood kid’s fight – there was a huge rattlesnake sunning itself on the large rock I used to reach the first limb. I screamed and ran back into the house and never climbed that tree again.

But, without nary another thought about snakes, I continued collecting blackberries, my child’s mind not connecting the fact that field was where that big rattlesnake surely had come from, and had relatives as well.

Instead, I continued enjoying those blackberries with a little sugar and milk

in a bowl, and in the blackberry pies or cobbler my grandmother baked.

It’s kind of funny thinking about that now, which I did during the big monsoon storm that shook up Tucson this past week. There is nowhere Mother Nature, with her hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, avalanches, hail storms, floods, deadly winds or just a lightning bolt out of the blue, can’t get at you.

I eventually overcame my fear of snakes, although I still keep my distance, and I learned not to let fear of what might happen keep me from living a full life. Growing up is not all bad.

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Forest Gump Point

Posted in aging, Favorite Places, Journeys, road trip, Travel, tagged Forest Gump Point, Monument Valley on January 31, 2023| 1 Comment »

“There is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.” — Josephine Hart

You know how you see something, and your mind gets stuck on it, and then you keep seeing the same thing over and over again.

That happened to me this past month. It started when I read an Atlas Obscura story about Forest Gump Point. The story was accompanied by a photo which showed a scene I had passed by at least a dozen times and had even stopped to explore a few of those times.

The Point, illustrated in the article, is the view one gets when traveling the 64 miles of Scenic Highway163 through Arizona and Utah, 44 miles of which goes through Navajo Nation land and Monument Valley. I purposely took this route many times — simple because the magnificence of the views awed me.

The red-rock mesas, buttes and spires are the remnants of rock formations that were over 25-million years in the making, according to geologists. Some of these wonders can be seen in the background where Forest Gump stopped running.

But long before Tom Hanks portrayed Forest Gump in the 1994 movie, Monument Valley was a favorite of movie directors. Probably the most famous use of the spectacular scenery was in the 1939 film Stagecoach starring John Wayne. It can also be seen in movies like The Searchers, The Eiger Sanction and Easy Rider and has even been featured in the popular television series Dr. Who.

In recent weeks, I’ve seen images of the scenic valley more than half a dozen times. Each time made me want to take a road trip – enough so that I looked at a map and discovered that it’s only 462 miles away from my home in Tucson.

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Don’t Wait – Dive In

Posted in aging, Journeys, Travel on September 10, 2022| 1 Comment »

**Passing scenery while floating down the Black River in Jamaica, just one of the many places my wanderlust has taken me. — Photo by Pat Bean**

The older I get the more I realize that it’s not the big events in one’s life that give meaning to our lives, but the small ones. Hugs from a great-grandchild can be as precious as a pay raise at work, or getting down on one’s knees and closely observing draba blossoms that sparkle in the morning dew as delightful as floating unscathed through a Colorado River roaring rapid at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

That’s not to say I would have wanted to miss a pay raise, or those Grand Canyon rapids, but those things are not everyday occurrences and their excitement wanes, especially when you’re 83, the milestone birthday I passed this year.

I came across a quote this morning that got me thinking. It was: “Don’t wait for your ship to come in, swim out to it.” With a bit of online research, I learned the quote could most likely be attributed to the prolific English author Kathy Hopkins, but then I also learned there is also a book by Gary Wood with the title Don’t Wait for Your Ship to Come In … Swim out to Meet it.”

When I went back in my own memory, the quote reminded me of what my grandmother would tell me when I expressed a want for something. “Well, I guess you’ll just have to wait for your ship to come in because we don’t have the money for that foolishness,” she would say.

Of course, that never sat well with me. Perhaps that is why, when I suddenly found myself in a new place where I knew nobody, and nobody knew me, I decided I wouldn’t wait for the world to come to my door.

What I truly wanted was to be doing exciting things in the outdoors. But activities like that, well at least the way I was brought up, were always associated with having a male partner by your side. That was also the way it was in one of my favorite books, I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson, which I read when I was only 10, and which was the start of my lifelong wanderlust.

One of the biggest steps in my life was buying a canoe –, something I considered a man toy — and then inviting others to go canoeing with me.

From that simple step, I then bought a raft, a sailboat and a few other man-toys, and there were always people excited to join me in my outings, especially women who admitted they would never have gotten out on their own.

I think swimming out to meet your ship is a very good idea.

Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is a wondering-wanderer, avid reader, enthusiastic birder, Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder, Story Circle Network board member, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining

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Possum Tribute

Posted in aging, Books, Dogs, Journeys, Lonely Planet Pathfinder, Travel, tagged Florida, Opossums, Possums, Wausau on March 12, 2022| 1 Comment »

***The Possum Monument in Wausau, Florida, the Possum Capital of the world.***

Quite Tasty

These days I often scratch the itch of my wanderlust soul from the comfort of my living room recliner, but it’s large enough so that my canine companion Scamp — who thinks 45 pounds is the perfect size to be a lap dog — can curl up with me.

From this seat, books and the internet take me all over the world. This morning it was to Wausau, Florida, a small town of only 400 where possums supposedly outnumber humans, and which is home to the Possum Monument.

Erected in 1982, the monument’s inscription reads: “…in grateful recognition of the role the North American possum — to be technical correct possums only live in Australia, America has the opossum — played in furnishing both food and fur for early settlers and their successors.

Possums were also a great source of protein for residents during the Great Depression, the article said.

On reading that, I remembered the time in the early 1940s when my dad went hunting and brought home a possum for dinner. My grandmother cooked it with sweet potatoes, and as I recall the meal was pretty tasty.

If you want to taste for yourself, you should visit Wausau on the first Saturday in August, which is the day the Florida Legislature designated as Florida Possum Day when possum and sweet potatoes will be on the menu.

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