Travel Archives – Page 22 of 31

August 21, 2019August 28, 2019

Road Trip Redux

Note: This is one of my favorite early essays from 2016, reconstituted and updated.

“Kathy”, I said,
As we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh,
“Michigan seems like a dream to me now.
It took me four days
To hitch-hike from Saginaw.
I’ve come to look for America.”
–Simon & Garfunkel, America

I-whatever, photo by responsecrafting.com

The sun is lower in the horizon now, stabbing through the late afternoon windows when we drive westward home. My baseball team is starting to lose all hope of catching the division leaders. Even pet stores have back-to-school sales. It must be mid-August. It must be time for the End-of-Summer Road Trip.

Everybody’s had these. Maybe when you were a kid, and your parents loaded the station wagon/minivan/SUV with odds and ends and headed off to the Grand Canyon or the Smokies or the Adirondacks or Yosemite. Or, in college, when you and some friends just crammed into someone’s old beater and took off for somebody’s friend’s place where you could crash. Road Trips usually take place at the beginning or end of summer, or at the beginning or end of Something. They are part demarcation, part vision quest, like the mythic journeys where the heroes and heroines go into the underworld or across the sea.

Road Trips allow for a lot of staring out the window and contemplation as well as for Seeing Something New, possibly Interesting. Possibly Just Something. Let’s load the car. Personal epiphanies and experience, coming right up.

May 13, 2019July 2, 2019

The Real Macbeth

When the hurly-burly’s done,
when the battle’s lost and won…

–Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act I: Sc 1: Line 3

Macbeth was a real guy. King of Scotland. Lived in a Castle near Inverness. Defeated Duncan and succeeded by Malcolm. Many things that Shakespeare used in his play were factually accurate. However, most of the characterizations of king Macbeth were historical gaffes.

Those of us who had to read Macbeth in high school, who had to diagram Shakespeare’s five act opening-climax-denouement cycle and to write papers about how Macbeth’s tragic flaw, his obsession with ambition, led to his downfall, were given the wrong impression. Macbeth the real King of Scotland (1040-1057), was not a murdering madman, but a far more complex, elusive, and interesting person whose true ambition may have been to unite Scotland.

Cawdor Castle, formerly home to Macbeth, currently home to the Campbell’s.
Photo by kajmeister.

May 1, 2019May 12, 2019

Come Out to the Coast, Have a Good Time… (Crossing the Pond III)

Suppose you are a fisherman in something something B.C., in the quite far western Mediterranean, and a gale blows up which pulls your reed boat out into those great Atlantic swells. You hunker down in the bottom, near the fish you’ve caught, hang on for dear life for a couple days, surviving on fish-scale-tasting rainwater, until you scrape up on porous rock, a thousand miles from your village on the mainland. You’ve discovered the Azores.

Not so, says a Portugese government commission appointed to determine who discovered those islands to the west of Portugal, which they own, which they got to first, which belong to them and no one else, mine, mine, mine. Still, archaeologists have persisted in trying to determine who got to the Azores first, and that’s one of the mysteries we encountered in our first week after crossing the Atlantic. Who were the first people on the Azores, and where did they go? How might you own half the world? If an earthquake and tidal wave were to level your city, how would you get past it? And, lastly, is it possible to have too much chocolate?

To answer these questions, we visited Ponta Delgado on São Miguel, Lisbon, and Bruges. Continue reading “Come Out to the Coast, Have a Good Time… (Crossing the Pond III)”