Travels in the Riel World

Since February is Black History Month, it’s an opportune time consider a road trip that takes in sites that are important to black history in the United States. So I created a journey through that runs between Georgia and Kansas and which takes in key locations from the civil rights movement as well as some historic homes of prominent African Americans. The article was just published on Examiner.com. Here is an excerpt from the Alabama portion of the trip:

 

In Birmingham, you can then begin your journey along the Alabama Civil Rights Trail. The main attraction here is the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, a museum that re-creates the world of racial segregation and the civil rights clashes. It is across the street from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where four young girls were killed during a 1963 bombing by the Ku Klux Klan.

 

Another two hours south is the town of Selma. There, you can stop at the Edmund Pettis Bridge, where 500 people were attacked by state police in 1965 while they participated in the Voting Rights March. From here, you can follow the Selma-to-Montgomery National Historic Trail, which commemorates that march.

 

It’s just over an hour to Montgomery, where Dr. King was a preacher and some of the most famous civil rights incidents took place. You can tour the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, where King worked; the Dexter Parsonage Museum, the home where King and his family lived; the Rosa Parks Library and Museum, which pays tribute to the woman who sparked a year-long city bus boycott; and the Civil Rights Memorial, designed by the architect Maya Lin, that honors those who gave their life to the civil rights struggle.

 

Finally, less than an hour east of Montgomery is the Alabama town of Tuskegee, which is not connected to the civil rights movement but is renowned in African American history for other reasons.

 

First, you should visit the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site. It’s the only historic site located on a functioning college campus. The school was founded in 1881 as a teacher’s college for African Americans and grew to prominence under the leadership of Booker T. Washington. One of the school’s most famous professors was George Washington Carver. Today, you’re able to visit some of the university’s earliest buildings, including The Oaks, which was Washington’s home. Another attraction is the George Washington Carver Museum, with exhibits on Carver’s life and scientific achievements. Additionally, the graves of Washington and Carver are in the Tuskegee University Campus Cemetery.

 

Also in town is the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site. Exhibits at Moton Field tell the remarkable story of the thousands of African Americans who were trained here during World War II to fly and maintain combat planes. Since the military was still segregated at the time they had to be trained at a different facility from white pilots, but the Tuskegee Airmen became one of the military’s most respected group of fighters.

 

You can read my full story here, and you can follow the journey with this Google map:

View Black history road trip in a larger map

Americans love road trips. They love taking them and they often enjoy reading about them, as well. But what are the best U.S. road trip books ever written? Smithsonian magazine took a stab at that question and came up with a list of 11 titles, which are featured in a recent article. Here is an excerpt:

On the Road by Jack Kerouac, 1957
When this semi-autobiographical work was published, the New York Timeshailed it as the “most important utterance” by anyone from the Beat Generation. Though he changed the names, the characters in the novel have real life counterparts. Salvatore “Sal” Paradise (Kerouac) from New York City meets Dean Moriarty (fellow beatnik Neal Cassady) on a cross-country journey fueled by drugs, sex and poetry The novel’s protagonists crisscross the United States and venture into Mexico on three separate trips that reveal much about the character of the epic hero, Moriarty, and the narrator.

Travels With Charley John Steinbeck, 1962
Near the end of his career, John Steinbeck set out to rediscover the country he had made a living writing about. With only his French poodle Charley as company, he embarked on a three-month journey across most of the continental United States. On his way, he meets the terse residents of Maine, falls in love with Montana and watches desegregation protests in New Orleans. Although Steinbeck certainly came to his own conclusions on his journey, he respects individual experience: He saw what he saw and knows that anyone else would have seen something different.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenanceby Robert M. Pirsig, 1974
A deep, philosophical book that masquerades as a simple story of a father-and-son motorcycle trip, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenanceis Pirsig’s first foray into philosophy writing. Their motorcycle trip from Minneapolis to San Francisco is also a trip through Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. His friend, a romantic, lives by the principle of Zen and relies on mechanics to fix his motorcycle. Pirisg, on the other hand, leaves nothing up to chance and knows the ins and outs of maintaining his bike.

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon, 1982
After losing his wife and job as a professor, William Least Heat-Moon sets out on a soul-searching journey across the United States. He avoids large cities and interstates, choosing to travel only on “blue” highways—so called for their color in the Rand McNally Road Atlas. Along the way, he meets and records conversations with a born-again Christian hitchhiker, an Appalachian log cabin restorer, a Nevada prostitute and a Hopi Native American medical student.

See the entire list of 11 books in the full story. What titles would you add to this collection?

There has been a lot of politics in the news lately, and President Obama’s State of the Union speech is scheduled for Wednesday. So if you’ve got politics on your mind, or even if you’re just a fan of history, you might consider taking a presidential road trip through Virginia. That’s the topic of may latest road trip feature for Examiner.com.

The Commonwealth of Virginia calls itself the “birthplace of Presidents” and, of the country’s 44 leaders, seven of them have firm roots in Virginia. This includes several of the nation’s Founding Fathers, men such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Virginia has more presidential landmarks and homes than any other state, so it’s possible to construct a nifty little road trip that will enable you to take in a treasure trove of American history.

You can see the full story here, and use this Google map to follow the journey.

View Presidential tour of Virginia in a larger map

During the past year, I wrote a series of articles on the subject of themed road trips in North America. The premise was that while road trips are a popular way to travel, especially in the United States, one can easily go beyond the traditional journeys through national parks or along coastlines. In fact, it’s both easy and fun to bypass the familiar routes and to plan journeys that enable you to focus on almost any topic that you enjoy, from literature to astronomy. Since the advent of a new year is a good time to look back on the previous 12 months, I just put together another article that reviews some of the more popular of these road trips. An excerpt:

 

Literary New England and Literary California – If you enjoy a good book, you’ll love these dual road trips through the homes of some of America’s greatest writers. Just a few of the places you’ll explore are the transcendental roots of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts; the Hartford home of Mark Twain; the quintessential New England homestead of Robert Frost; the birthplace of John Steinbeck in Salinas, California, and the San Francisco literary hangouts of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and other members of the Beat Generation.

 

Journey into the roots of American music – A lot of remarkable music was born in the United States and this two-part road trip enables you to do a pretty thorough job of exploring the roots of jazz, blues, soul, bluegrass, country and rock and roll. Among other destinations, it will take you from the birthplace of jazz in New Orleans to the Mississippi home of the blues, and from the country music capital of Nashville to the Detroit source of the Motown sound.

 

Stargazing the Southwest – A dark sky filled with thousands of glittering stars is one of the most sublime sights in nature. The region from West Texas to Southern California boasts some of the best stargazing locations in the world, and Arizona has more observatories than any other state or country. You can spend your days seeing the sights of the Southwest and your nights enjoying the majesty of the universe.

 

You can read my full story for an overview of more of these journeys, or check out the entire series of road trip articles.

In August, I wrote about some of the best stargazing destinations worldwide, based on an article I’d written for Matador Travel. Now it’s time to look more specifically about stargazing destinations in the Southwestern United States. This time, I put together a road trip itinerary for Examiner.com that stretches from West Texas to Southern California and takes in some of the best views of the nighttime sky that can be found anywhere in North America. There are numerous observatories in that region that offer public viewing programs, as well as national parks that provide you with a dramatic view of the heavens far from any cities.

Here is an excerpt from my article:

It’s one of the most sublime sights in nature: a dark sky filled with thousands of glittering stars. Our ancestors were well acquainted with this spectacle, and they could even gaze up most nights to see a gallery of shooting stars and a visible Milky Way galaxy. Today, unfortunately, light and pollution in populated areas of the world obscure all but a few hundred stars in the nighttime sky.

There are still places on Earth, however, where you can be awed by a view of the heavens, and one of those destinations is the Southwestern United States. This region has some of the world’s clearest skies and Arizona boasts more observatories than any other single state or country, according to the International Dark-Sky Association.

And here is a Google map that traces the Southwestern stargazing destinations.

View Stargazing the Southwest in a larger map

Are you a fan of the American travel writer Paul Theroux? Do you like road trips? Then you may appreciate this article from Smithsonian Magazine, written by Theroux and titled “Taking the Great American Road Trip.” Theroux writes about taking a cross-country road trip recently for the first time in his life, which is somewhat surprising for a person who has journeyed across Africa and taken long train journeys through Asia and the Americas. But perhaps because of this travel background, Theroux brings an unusual perspective to his newest trip, that of an individual who has seen the world and is now discovering more of his home country.

Here, he introduces his journey:

The mixed blessing of America is that anyone with a car can go anywhere. The visible expression of our freedom is that we are a country without roadblocks. And a driver’s license is our identity. My dream, from way back—from high school, when I first heard the name Kerouac—was of driving across the United States. The cross-country trip is the supreme example of the journey as the destination.

Travel is mostly about dreams—dreaming of landscapes or cities, imagining yourself in them, murmuring the bewitching place names, and then finding a way to make the dream come true. The dream can also be one that involves hardship, slogging through a forest, paddling down a river, confronting suspicious people, living in a hostile place, testing your adaptability, hoping for some sort of revelation. All my traveling life, 40 years of peregrinating Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania, I have thought constantly of home—and especially of the America I had never seen. “I discovered I did not know my own country,” Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley, explaining why he hit the road at age 58.

And, later on, contemplates some of the similarities between the U.S. and some other parts of the world that he has visited:

In my life, I had sought out other parts of the world—Patagonia, Assam, the Yangtze; I had not realized that the dramatic desert I had imagined Patagonia to be was visible on my way from Sedona to Santa Fe, that the rolling hills of West Virginia were reminiscent of Assam and that my sight of the Mississippi recalled other great rivers. I’m glad I saw the rest of the world before I drove across America. I have traveled so often in other countries and am so accustomed to other landscapes, I sometimes felt on my trip that I was seeing America, coast to coast, with the eyes of a foreigner, feeling overwhelmed, humbled and grateful.

The whole article may be long for the web, but it’s a good magazine piece and an interesting look at America from a celebrated travel writer.

It’s prime season for leaf-peeping and, while there are wonderful foliage drives in nearly every region of North America, the destination that is almost always associated with the spectacle of autumn is New England. A fall foliage drive can mean a lot more than just beautiful fall views, however. If you plan it correctly, you can also explore some of New England’s loveliest towns and quintessential experiences. You might wander through quaint village greens, pick apples at rural orchards, sip warm cider at a roadside farm stand, or discover the charms of the region’s covered wooden bridges.

To get you started, I created a fall foliage road trip through quintessential New England. This journey is focused on Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts (with apologies to Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine, which have wonderful fall sites of their own). You can read the article I wrote about the excursion here, and use this Google map to follow along or to plot your own version of the trip.

View Fall foliage tour through quintessential New England in a larger map

A lot of great music has been made in the United States, and much of it has roots in the South. In fact, if you journey through just a few southern states, you can have a fascinating time exploring the roots of jazz, blues, soul, bluegrass, country, and rock and roll. You can experience even more of the country’s musical heritage if you extend your explorations into the Midwest.

So if you’re interested in taking a pilgrimage into the roots of American music, you should check out this road trip that I created. It’s a two-part journey that enables you to explore much of the musical heritage of the United States. You can read my description of the trip here (and here), and use these Google maps to follow along.

View The roots of American music in a larger map

View The roots of American music (part two) in a larger map

What are the most spectacular drives in the world? National Geographic Traveler seems to enjoy taking a spin around this topic and they just came out with another feature that covers some of “the world’s greatest scenic routes.” Here are just a few of their choices:

Amalfi Coast, Italy- The Costiera Amalfitana, or Amalfi Coast, is widely considered Italy’s most scenic stretch of coastline, a landscape of towering bluffs, pastel-hued villages terraced into hillsides, precipitous corniche roads, luxuriant gardens, and expansive vistas over turquoise waters and green-swathed mountains. Deemed by UNESCO “an outstanding example of a Mediterranean landscape, with exceptional cultural and natural scenic values,” the coast was awarded a coveted spot on the World Heritage list in 1997.

Cape Cod, Massachusetts- A drive around Massachusetts’ vintage Cape Cod serves up miles of beaches, restful resort towns—and, yes, lobster and clam shacks. There are capes all along the New England coast, but when anyone talks of “the Cape,” the meaning is immediately clear. This drive takes in virtually all of Cape Cod: the quiet villages along the bay side, the beautifully desolate dunelands of the outer Cape’s national seashore, lively Provincetown, and the busy resorts that face Nantucket Sound.

North Island, New Zealand (Lord of the Rings route) - Boasting some of the most varied and rugged landscapes on Earth, New Zealand has long been a source of adventure. In addition, its eclectic Polynesian and European heritage makes it a remarkable center of culture and history. Given New Zealand’s varied attributes, it is little wonder it was the pick of Kiwi Peter Jackson as the stand-in for Middle-Earth in his film adaptation of the Lord of the Rings fantasy trilogy.

Hana Highway, Hawaii- A restorative for mind and body, Maui’s Hana coast delivers black-sand beaches, plunging waterfalls—and a doozy of a drive. Peel a fresh mango purchased from a roadside stand, get ukulele music going on the radio, and embark on one of Hawaii’s great drives: the Hana Highway on the island of Maui. On your left will be the azure ocean; on your right, rushing waterfalls, limpid pools, patches of taro plants, and luxuriant jungles of bamboo and fruit trees. But this highway serves up more than beauty: It’s an impressive feat of engineering, dug out of Maui’s precipitous eastern coastline with hand tools. Clinging to the cliffs, it slinks around some 600 curves and across 59 bridges (over half of which are just one lane wide). This serpentine coastal route offers a perfect antidote to the vagaries of mainland winters—and a complete escape from daily life.

Check out the entire article to see the other drives selected by National Geographic Traveler. What other routes would you select?

In May, I introduced you to the possibilities of a road trip through literary New England. It seems an ideal combination of activities for lovers of both travel and literature. Well, I figured it was time to explore a similar journey, only this time on the West Coast. So now I present to you a road trip through literary California. It takes you to the homes of six authors, from John Steinbeck to Jack London, while also delving into the life and times of the San Francisco Beats. Along the way you’ll get to sample some stunning scenery, as well, including the Big Sur coast and the wine region of Sonoma County.

I published the full article on Examiner.com. You can read my description of the journey here, and use this Google map to follow along or to plot your own version of this trip.

View Literary California road trip in a larger map

If you have any interest in learning more about the Cold War, or the dawn of the nuclear age, there are now a number of locations open to tourists that represent that period in history. From museums to sites that once functioned as missile or nuclear testing grounds, a window has been opened into an historic time. In fact, a number of these sites are located in the neighboring Southwestern states of New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada, which makes it possible to construct a unique road trip through an era of 20^th century history.

I recently created a road trip through some of this Cold War history, which takes you to an underground Titan Missile complex in Arizona, the site of the first nuclear test in New Mexico, the headquarters site of the World War II-era Manhattan Project, and museums dedicated to nuclear history. You can read my description of the journey here, and use this Google map to follow along or to plot your own version of this trip.

View Atomic tourism: Road trip through Cold War history in a larger map

The summer road trip season is in full swing in the United States. So is baseball season. This is, therefore, a great time to combine these two American passions and plan a baseball road trip. Not just a jaunt to see a few games and stadiums, but a journey that enables you to explore the history of the sport between games at some of the country’s most cherished ballparks.

I created my own version of the ultimate baseball road trip, which I published on Examiner.com. It’s a two-part journey that enables you to explore the history of baseball, as well as take in games at some of the country’s most cherished ballparks. You can read my description of the journey here (and here), and use these Google maps to follow along.

View Ultimate baseball road trip (part one) in a larger map

View The ultimate baseball road trip (part two) in a larger map

Americans love road trips, and Memorial Day is the traditional kickoff to the summer travel season. So many of the trips we take, though, are to visit national parks or beaches. These are classic journeys and there’s nothing at all wrong with them. But why confine yourself to a traditional road trip? With so many amazing sights and so many miles of roads meandering across the continent, the possibilities are endless for crafting journeys to fit almost any imaginable interest.

To that end, I created my own version of a literary road trip through New England. It brings you to the towns of ten authors, from Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau to Jack Kerouac and Robert Frost, among others. Along the way, you’ll also encounter some of the prettiest landscapes in the region.

You can read my description of the journey here, and use this Google map to follow along or to plot your own version of this trip.

View Literary New England road trip in a larger map

Happy traveling!

When one thinks of ancient civilizations in the Americas, it tends to be of those societies that left behind spectacular ruins. The Incas of Peru, the Mayans of Mexico and Central America, or even the Pueblo people of the U.S. Southwest who built the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde. Not many minds conjure up images of advanced Indian civilizations in the Midwestern United States.

In fact, though, archaeologists continue to produce evidence that large societies not only inhabited this region, but also built large edifices in the form of mounds that are only now being understood and appreciated. Check out this article for an in-depth tour of some of these sites.

The earthworks left behind by the long vanished civilizations of the Midwest are harder to spot than the pueblos and kivas of Arizona and New Mexico. For a long time many of them were hidden in plain sight or dismissed as little more than heaps of soil. But the more today’s archaeologists learn about the Midwestern mounds, the more intriguing is the picture that emerges from 1,000 or more years ago: a city with thousands of people just a few miles from present-day St. Louis, a 1,348-foot earthen serpent that points to the summer solstice, artifacts made of materials that could only have arrived over lengthy trade routes.

The mound builders lived over a wide area. But on a road trip of a few days in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, you can get a sampling of their work — and, along the way, find some modern-day diversions. Start from St. Louis, which early European settlers called Mound City because of the Indian constructions that were soon flattened to build the modern city.

It’s been two weeks since Time magazine named Vladimir Putin its “Person of the Year.” Now that the holiday craziness has ended, I finally got around to reading that issue of the magazine. In it, there is a fascinating portrait of Putin, but also an intriguing article about Russia itself (”In Search of Russia’s Big Idea”), which is the result of a road trip that Nathan Thornburgh took between Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Russians have always fancied themselves as a special people, not unlike how Americans tend to think of their own nation, and Thornburgh tried to get a read on the soul of the country during his travels. Some excerpts from his report…

“Russia is now resurgent”

I had come to the Russian countryside, though, to get beyond proverbs — and beyond Moscow — in search of what Russians like to call the National Idea. It’s often said that Russia is truly in trouble when it can’t articulate what it stands for. The Soviet National Idea of exporting revolution, conquering space and winning Olympic medals was a strange mix, but at least it was steady. By 1995, the last time I lived there, Russia had disintegrated into a rudderless mess…

Russia is now resurgent…To find Russia’s current big idea, I traced the path of a long-dead St. Petersburg customs official named Alexander Radischev. In 1790, the 28th year of Catherine the Great’s reign, the middle-aged father of four wrote a book called A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow…

With plenty of detours, I visited hospitals, farmsteads, nightclubs and monasteries. At nearly every stop, I heard something that isn’t yet a fully formed National Idea but is perhaps more of a slogan: “Everything is coming back.” This meant a lot of things. Some were talking about rising salaries, others about how Russia had re-emerged as a counterweight to America. But more than anything, they were talking about a return to Russia’s prerevolutionary sense of itself, strong and traditionbound, rooted in religion and autocracy but with a full bank account and a sleek new weapon in oil.

“Do Russians really want to be free?”

Russians are turning inward at the very moment that the Kremlin is mounting a brazen power grab. Governors are no longer elected, just appointed by the President. Opposition leaders are harassed with new antiterrorism laws. Putin’s United Russia Party won a grossly uncompetitive election on Dec. 2. By and large, the Russian people offer little protest.

This raises an old question: Do Russians really want to be free? Russians are, after all, the people who actually begged Ivan the Terrible to return to rule them after he threatened to abdicate. As Radischev put it, Russians “come to love their bonds.”

These bonds — and their modern equivalent, Putin’s paper-thin democracy — are increasingly seen as not only tolerable but also intrinsically, uniquely, gloriously Russian. The Kremlin and its backers use new catchphrases like sovereign democracy to intone that they have their unique form of freedom. The West just wouldn’t understand…Russians are still looking for greatness, on their terms.

The American road trip is a classic journey. Many is the person who has either completed or dreamed of a drive across the United States. The latest such individual is Matt Gross, who reported on his cross-country driving adventures for the NY Times. Here is an excerpt from the tail end of his journey:

“Nothing but sagebrush for 130 miles,” said the construction worker in the orange vest who was temporarily blocking U.S. Highway 20 in southeastern Oregon. As the Volvo idled in the midday heat, I looked past her at the landscape - at the dry, slowly rising hills matted with blue-green-purple tufts of hip-high scrub - then down at my map, and was impressed with her precision: For almost exactly 130 miles to the east, south and west, there was indeed nothing but sagebrush. This really was the desert. I shut off the engine and crossed my fingers, hoping the car and I would survive…

These car troubles, which I should have expected in my final week on the road, only deepened my desire to see Oregon’s deserts. I wasn’t drawn simply to their reputed beauty and remoteness, but by their place in American road-trip history. This was, in a way, where the fabled tradition began.

Back in 1903, the automobile was a novelty, expensive and unreliable. And with no gas stations and few paved roads outside of major cities, horses and railroads offered more reliable transport than a creaky chassis powered by a breakdown-prone internal combustion engine.

Which is probably why Horatio Nelson Jackson, a 31-year-old doctor, bet friends at the University Club of San Francisco that he could drive a car from coast to coast. They scoffed. A few days later, Jackson was at the helm of a $3,000, two-cylinder Winton automobile, accompanied by Sewall K. Crocker, a mechanic and chauffeur, and heading east.

The American road trip has long been a rite of passage for travelers, though for many people this journey may not strike the same romantic chord that it once did. World Hum, though, recently suggested that we may actually be in the midst of a new golden age of the cross-country road trip.

The 1940s and 1950s are generally considered the Golden Age of the American road trip, immortalized in Bobby Troup’s song and Jack Kerouac’s book and the actions and memories of adventurous souls like my dad, who roamed the country in his 1951 Ford and chronicled his trips by tracing his routes in blue felt pen on a U.S. map. …

Then came the rise of the interstate system and the chain-store, fast-food culture that sprung up around its edges. Conventional wisdom said these developments sucked a lot of the romance out of the road. And with the rise in cheap airfares and gas prices, the news just kept getting worse for the long-distance road trip. Sure, people still drove from the Pacific to the Atlantic, but they couldn’t help thinking that maybe they’d missed out on a special era.

At least that’s what I thought until not too long ago. Now I think we’re in the midst of the new Golden Age of the American cross-country road trip. …

What solidifies this era as a new Golden Age, though, is that the reemergence of the road has happily coincided with the ability to tell dynamic stories on the Web. Now instead of writing a book like Kerouac or marking those lines in felt-tip on a map, travelers can use video and flash and Google Maps and blogs and audio to interpret what they’ve seen on the road and bring it to life in unexpected ways. In the age of the Web, the road trip has arrived as an artistic statement.

They go on to list several websites dedicated to cross-country trips.  These include: Matt Frondorf’s drive, in which he recorded a time lapse video of 3,304 photos, or one per mile; Amanda Congdon’s adventure in a hybrid vehicle, in a trip sponsored by an environmental group; and Michael Hess’ unique blog, which plots Jack Kerouac’s journey in On the Road by using Google Maps.

For more insight into cross-country travel, you can also check out this interview that Rolf Potts did a few months ago with Jamie Jensen, author of Road Trip USA.

Ah, the enchantment of the American road.  Rolf Potts uses his Yahoo travel column this week to interview Jamie Jensen, author of Road Trip USA.  Jensen discusses the attraction of this uniquely American journey:

In Europe, you have towns and cities where people walk around; in America, we drive. It’s the difference between the passegiata (the evening promenade you see in Italy), and the weekend car cruises of American Graffiti, listening to Chuck Berry sing “Driving around in my automobile…”

It’s hard to imagine America without cars, and people who come here from other countries want to have the quintessential American experience.  They don’t want to see ancient ruins or monuments or works of art; they want to drive around for days and weeks on end, doing that Jack Kerouac On the Road thing.