Travel Essays

Roll Over (in Your Grave) Beethoven!

Travel Essays
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You remember Beethoven (aka “Ludwig Van Beethoven”), right? He’s the guy that practically invented “Classical Music” way back in the day—beginning around the time George Washington became the first U.S. President. And we still listen to his stuff today. A least I do, sometimes. Unfortunately, about the time that Washington was stepping down and John [...]

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Travel Memoir: Remembering Budapest

Travel Essays
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“Hey, John!” “Hey, Dick!” “What’s up?” “On the run. Leaving for Budapest tomorrow.  Haven’t packed yet.” So went less than a minute of conversation with one of my travel writing mentors, John Flinn, former Travel Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. Like friends walking down the street in opposite directions, we had just enough time [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: Natural Disasters, Signs of the Times

Travel Essays
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You’ve seen them all too often:  Newspaper photos, television film clips, and even YouTube videos, chronicling the the utter destruction caused when irresistible forces of nature—winds born of hurricanes, the sucking vortices of tornadoes, or the swirling waters of floods—overwhelm puny man-made structures. I have lived in California for over forty years.  It’s known as [...]

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Love Found on the Road: Dante, Mayo and the Libidinous Finns

Love Is In The Air Week

(“Love is In The Air” week continues on Tales Told From The Road with another story of a love aboard train with “Scandinavian connections.”   But on this trip, the author travels from Sweden to Paris, rather than Seattle to Miami as in yesterday’s story “Train Wrecked.”) By Linda Watanabe McFerrin “Il ya des mains pareilles [...]

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Love Lost on The Road: Train Wrecked

Love Is In The Air Week

(“Love is In The Air” week continues on Tales Told From The Road with this story of a love that went off the tracks.) For once in my young life, The Girl Wanted Me.  It wasn’t the other way around. The “love affair,” if that’s what you could call a chaste romance between two junior [...]

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Faking It in France

Travel Essays

Saturday night I attended the “Ooh, La La, Lucie!” birthday party for a French-Canadian friend, formerly of Montreal, who flew back to California from Paris last Wednesday after spending three weeks in France. Lucie, of course, speaks French fluently. And English. And Italian. But you say to me:  “What about you, mon petit cheri? How [...]

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Barbie, Barbie, Where Art Thou?

Travel Essays
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Not a Play on Words No, theatrical historians have not just uncovered a heretofore unpublished Shakespeare play where instead of “Romeo,” the title character’s name is “Barbie,” and she and Juliet become united in death because their parents and the authorities do not approve of same-sex marriage. Ban“The Bomb,” Not “The Doll” But what the [...]

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Remembering MLK: Riding to Freedom

Travel Essays

“White Only.” “Colored.” What did these signs above the restrooms in the train station in the Deep South say to me? And what did they say to America? Separate, but equal? Fifty years later I revisited those questions.

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Becoming a Space Cadet

Travel Essays
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In the 1950′s I watched Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and Space Patrol on TV.  And when I gazed up at Sputnik winking its way across the heavens in the dark October skies over Seattle two weeks before my eleventh birthday, I had no doubt that I, too, would soon be rocketing to the stars on [...]

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Air Travel: The Golden Age of The 707

Travel Essays
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As a kid growing up in Seattle, I watched prototypes of the  Boeing Airplane Company’s 707 jet passing over the city on test flights.  Although a few years earlier I had flown from Seattle to Vancouver, B.C. aboard a United Airlines DC-6 propeller driven aircraft, my first ride through the skies on a jet would [...]

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Following in The Footsteps of Ansel Adams

Travel Essays
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I made my first two trips to Yosemite National Park in the winter or 1968.  In the years that followed, I rambled around the edges of the Sierra Nevada range, and occasionally into the backcountry, on day hikes. For many moons, Ansel Adam’s haunting photo (at left) of the mountains that rise up just west [...]

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9/11 Remembered By Rick Steves

9/11

Beginning this week, Tales Told From The Road will run stories from its readers and other sources about their experiences traveling in the days surrounding 9/11. I invite you to share your 9/11 story by sending an e-mail to tellmystory@talestoldfromtheroad.com. If you can, attach one photo that you took during that trip. You can also [...]

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Well-Traveled, With The New Yorker

Travel Essays
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A few years back I began taking a new companion with me on my travels:  The New Yorker.  Not a denizen of, but the magazine that takes its name from, those who live in “The Big Apple.” Since then, The New Yorker has become one of my favorite “travel publications.”  Here’s why, and how it [...]

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Atlatl Bob Gets His Bison; Tim Cahill Gets His Story

Travel Essays

To Atlatl Bob, what makes humans different from other creatures is the ability to throw things.  To his friend, travel writer Tim Cahill, it’s the ability to tell stories. They are both right.  Here’s what I got from Tim’s remarks about travel writing, and the story he told about Atlatl Bob at the recently concluded [...]

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Getting to Timbuktu, Electronically

Armchair Travel

One of the last, “old-tech” reading joys of mine is sitting at the breakfast table perusing the print versions of the Sunday editions of the local newspapers.  As a travel writer, naturally I check out by the stories and the by-lines (who’s getting published this week?) in the Travel sections where I’ve noticed a disturbing [...]

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Going on a “Pretend” Vacation

Travel Essays

Monday I’m going on a “pretend” vacation.  I’m not going far; just a few feet “uphill” from where I live.  But I hate making this “trip.” Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Dick Jordan

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“Indiana Jones” and The Temple of Basketball

Travel Essays

Plans are what you make. Life is what you get. What I planned for last weekend:  Being an “Indiana Jones” roving reporter at the Los Angeles Times Travel & Adventure Show. What I got: A weekend of televised visitation to The Temple of Basketball—the NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament, and a trip back in time [...]

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