Travel Essays

Remembering Martin Luther King, Chicago, And Miami

Travel Essays

During my conversation about Chicago with Rick Steves and Amanda Scotese yesterday, I mentioned to Rick that I had first visited Chicago during a stopover on the way to a Luther League convention in Miami Beach, Florida.  It was my first “Big Trip” away from home and I recall it vividly on this day in [...]

Read more…

Holiday Time Travel: O Lutefisk, O Lutefisk!

Travel Essays

European travel guru Rick Steves, who like me, grew up in the Greater Seattle area and was raised in the Lutheran religion, may have eaten lutefisk at Christmas or even hopped on an SAS jet and flown to Scandinavia just to scarf up a double helping of this holiday fare called “lye fish” in English. [...]

Read more…

Thanksgiving Time Travel (Part 2 of 2)

Travel Essays

(In yesterday’s first installment of “Thanksgiving Time Travel” Dick Jordan covered the first half of the 1961 “Turkey Day” high school football championship game between his Ballard Beaver team and the West Seattle Indians.  The story, and the game, concludes today). Trailing 7-0, Ballard took the second half kickoff and marched 66 yards down the [...]

Read more…

Thanksgiving Time Travel

Travel Essays

Thanksgiving greetings from a travel writing colleague and reading a college football championship “critique” by Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee turned my thoughts to a chilly, damp, Thanksgiving in my hometown, Seattle, nearly fifty years ago.

Read more…

Travel Essay: “Radio Prague Calling” (Part 2)

Travel Essays

(Part 1 of “Radio Prague Calling” ran last Monday. The story concludes today) In 1999, I went to Rome, Florence and Paris. Two years later, I spent most of a month in the northern half of Italy. I ate great food, drank good wine, rode everywhere on trains, and wondered why it had taken me [...]

Read more…

Travel Essay: “Radio Prague Calling”

Travel Essays

When I was twelve, I received a gift that immediately took me far beyond the cultural confines of Seattle: A Hallicrafters S-38E short-wave radio. Although I could use the set to tune into Seattle AM stations like KING and KIRO, it was voices from far-off places like Japan, Ecuador, and Europe that kept me up [...]

Read more…

Travel Essay: The Bumper Stickers Of Summer

Travel Essays

San Francisco Bay Area residents slept-in this year as winter’s wet blanket of rain continued to cover them well beyond the end of May. When they awoke on June 23, they realized that summer had crept up on them. The solstice had passed, and the days were already becoming shorter. Forty years ago marking the [...]

Read more…

Travel Essay: The Year of Flying Dangerously (Part 4)

Travel Essays

(The third installment of Dick Jordan’s recollections of the events of September 11, 2001 appeared last Monday.  The story concludes today). Unhappy Travels A month after returning from Europe we were in the air again, this time flying from San Francisco to Newark where we picked up a rental car and drove northwestward into Pennsylvania.  [...]

Read more…

Travel Essay: The Year of Flying Dangerously (Part 3)

Travel Essays

(The second installment of Dick Jordan’s recollections of the events of September 11, 2001 appeared last Monday.  The story continues today). Arrival in Italy, At Last! The weather had been good for flying and only a few puffy clouds floated in the skies ahead of us.  We crossed the still snow-clad upper reaches of the [...]

Read more…

Travel Essay: The Year of Flying Dangerously (Part 2)

Travel Essays

(The first installment of Dick Jordan’s recollections of the events of September 11, 2001 appeared last Monday.  The story continues today). Departure Day I turned on my computer before breakfast on Saturday and went to the Alitalia Website.  Departures to the U.S. had resumed. A plane from Milan to San Francisco was in the air, [...]

Read more…

Travel Essay: The Year of Flying Dangerously

Travel Essays

When Evil Flies It was Tuesday morning. I had four days to catch up on work, pay bills, board the cats, and pack up my bags before departing on a 26-day trip to Italy.  I brushed my teeth. shaved, and showered.  I turned the radio on and tuned in KCBS to catch the “traffic and [...]

Read more…

Travel Essay: Remembering Quincy

Travel Essays

I met Quincy in July of 1984 at a campground just west of the McKenzie Pass on Highway 242 which runs between the Willamette Valley and the town of Sisters on the east side of the Oregon Cascades.  We would spend the next five days together camping out in the wilderness that lies at the [...]

Read more…

Travel Essay: Lost City Of Gold

Travel Essays

It was blazing hot outside in Lewiston, a “big city” in Idaho sitting at that bottom of a canyon where the Clearwater and Snake Rivers join up their watery forces and flow toward a downstream rendezvous with the mighty Columbia to continue their journey on to Astoria and the Pacific Ocean.  I had gone there [...]

Read more…

Travel Essay: Man vs. Beast

Travel Essays

Mountain lions stalking hikers in the San Francisco Bay area.  Black bears breaking into houses at Lake Tahoe. Man moves in, but the beasts don’t move out.  To be a viewer of wildlife or a shooter of wildlife, that is the question.

Read more…

Travel Essay: Travel By Catalog

Travel Essays

There are places you’ll drive to by car.  Others you’ll get to by plane or train.  But some can only be reached by catalog.

Read more…

Travel Essay: By The Rockets’ Red Glare

Travel Essays

For the past three nights I’ve heard the explosions from miles away.  I’m not in Afghanistan or Iraq; I live near San Francisco.  It’s just fireworks, bombs bursting in air, going off in the sky over the nearby County Fairgrounds. When I was growing up as a kid in Seattle, the Fourth of July was [...]

Read more…

Travel Essay: On the Value of Photos

Travel Essays

What is the value of a picture? One thousand words? Ten thousand words?  And who came up with the concept of assigning a numerical value to pictures in the first place? As a travel writer I know that photographs have value.  The one shown at the left helped me sell a story about Sitka, Alaska [...]

Read more…