Destination: England
Farewell Concorde
by Jim Benning | 10.24.03 | 8:57 PM ET
After 28 years of service, the history-making British jets completed their final commercial flights today. CNN has a story. I never had the pleasure of flying on a Concorde, but I’ll never forget looking up at a blue sky over a London suburb 10 years ago and seeing the Concorde’s sleek profile pass overhead. Its shape is unmistakable. For a young traveler on a rare visit to London, it was a rush. I wouldn’t have been any happier seeing the Queen.
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Yahoo! BuzzTravel Like Beckham!
by Michael Yessis | 06.17.03 | 11:28 PM ET
This David Beckham-themed item may seem like a shameless ploy to gain some readers from his legions of fans. We’re not above that sort of thing. Apparently, neither is the New York Times, which took some time away from legitimate issues of the day (the Middle East conflict, the elusive weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, etc.) to run an editorial about his rumored transfer from Manchester United to Barcelona. However, in this instance, we’ve got a legitimate reason to drop Beckham’s name. He is the subject of one of the more unlikely travel stories we’ve seen recently, a piece called “The David Beckham heritage trail,” which appeared in last Friday’s Guardian. Ed Vallance and Paul Hamilos have compiled a destination guide to 12 spots with Beckham ties, including the Walthamstow greyhound track east London (where he had his first-ever job collecting glasses), the Met Fair bar in Mayfair (where he met his wife) and Brooklyn, New York (where he and his wife conceived their first child). The piece has one serious omission: Where do we find the stylist who gives him those lovely hairdos?
Administering the Beer Test in Europe
by Jim Benning | 04.22.03 | 3:32 PM ET
James Gilden wondered how Americans would be received in Europe these days, so he went to Paris, Berlin and London to find out. He interviewed Americans about their experiences, and he ordered beer at bars in each of the cities and dutifully studied the bartenders’ responses. What did he find? Despite the controversy over the war, he writes in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, the Americans he talked with were having a grand time, encountering no ill will. As for the beer, “My beers were delivered with no more or no less aplomb or foam than in any of my previous visits to London,” he writes.
Whew. We’d hate to think that politics could get in the way of a good beer.
Pondering the DNA of Wanderlust
by Jim Benning | 05.14.02 | 8:28 PM ET
The Los Angeles Times’ John M. Glionna doesn’t have the nerve to ditch his sedentary reporting job for the world traveler dream life. But Richard Gregg does. A one-time engineer in his home country of England, Gregg has spent the last 12 years pedaling around the planet. When Gregg walked into Glionna’s office recently hoping to talk to a reporter, Glionna found himself so inspired he invited Gregg to stay at his home to learn more about the vagabond way. “What I wanted to know was this: Why do some people choose to live out their lives within a few miles of their birthplace while others clamor to escape their roots in an evolving effort to reinvent themselves?” Glionna writes. Warning: You may be asked to register. To learn more about Gregg, visit his Web site.
These Travel Books are Flying Off the Shelves
by Michael Yessis | 05.03.02 | 10:39 PM ET
The Guardian recently published a list of England’s top-selling travel books. It’s split evenly between guidebooks and narratives, with Bill Bryson’s “Down Under,” Ryszard Kapuscinski’s “The Shadow of the Sun” and, for some reason, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. Nothing, apparently, says travel like an analysis of slaughterhouses and French fries.
The Joy of Jet Lag
by Jim Benning | 04.02.02 | 7:45 PM ET
Jet lag gets a lot of bad press, but not in Sunday’s New York Times. In an essay, W.D. Wetherell writes that he rather enjoys it. Take the delightful bout he experienced after arriving in England: “The drive in to central London, dreary enough in reality, seemed incredibly splendid, a veritable yellow brick road, to the point that I stared at the nondescript bed-sitters and dreary industrial parks with as much excitement and interest as if they were Buckingham Palace, the Tower and Westminster Abbey combined.” We wonder if Wetherell has ever tried malaria. The fever-induced hallucinations, we hear, are fabulous.
Gnomes that Roam
by Michael Yessis | 03.19.02 | 9:47 PM ET
The prank of the moment—as seen in The Full Monty and Amelie—goes like this: One of your more mobile possessions gets abducted. It’s often a garden gnome, but it could be anything. Soon photos of the missing object begin appearing in the mail, postmarked from faraway locales. Los Angeles Times writer Susan Carpenter traces the history of the “roaming gnome” and unearths some exemplary executions of the gag. Dave Stockton’s running shoe, for instance, was taken from his balcony in Chicago. Eventually, he received snapshots of the shoe in St. Petersburg, Florida; London, England; and Hollywood, California, where “Righty,” as the wayward shoe began identifying itself, was laced-up on the foot of actress Neve Campbell.
She Travels in Time With Flaubert and Twain
by Michael Yessis | 03.11.02 | 4:20 PM ET
Caryn James has stopped reading modern travelogues. “Why taunt yourself reading about a place you’ll (wistful, martyred sigh here) probably never see?” she writes in Sunday’s New York Times. James hasn’t given up on the genre entirely, though. She copes by reading travel books from the past. “I found the perfect alternative by accident, when I spotted Peter Ackroyd’s thick anecdotal history, “London: The Biography,” while browsing in a store. The thought of struggling to Kennedy and landing at Heathrow may have been too much, but landing in London in the 17th or 18th century suddenly seemed irresistible. You can’t feel bad about not being in a place that doesn’t exist anymore. Armchair time-travel was the answer: a vicarious journey with no regrets.”
“Bridget Jones” Meets “The Beach”
by Michael Yessis | 03.08.02 | 4:12 PM ET
That’s what some reviewers are calling “Backpack,” Emily Barr’s debut novel. “Backpack,” a U.K. hit which was recently released in the U.S., follows the exploits of Tansy Harris, a Londoner who leaves behind a dead mother, a coke habit and a boyfriend, and backpacks through Asia. “Her journey is prosaic in the extreme, filled with hearty Aussie backpackers, haughty French, outwardly friendly but inscrutable native guides, beachside bars in Cambodia, beachside bars in Thailand, etc.” Bryan Walsh writes in a review for Time Asia. “Although Tansy enjoys it, the strongest sensation the reader is likely to get from her trip is the been there, done that ennui pervading the backpacking scene.” Barr, who traveled around Asia for a year and wrote a column about it in the Guardian, has her own say about the genesis of the book in an author essay reprinted at Bookreporter.com.
A Bench in London
by Michael Yessis | 11.12.01 | 9:27 PM ET
Paris was Marylin Bender’s town. Her husband’s was London. When he died nine years ago, Bender began visiting some of his favorite places. At London’s Berkeley Square, she noticed that plaques adorned the benches. Bender decided to try to secure one in her husband’s memory, resulting in an unexpected journey of errors, persistence, sweetness and heartbreak. “As a teenager, after my family had moved to Manhattan, I had a few park bench trysts with impoverished students in Central Park,” Bender writes in a New York Times essay. “None ended happily until, years later, a man I had met a few months before proposed that I accompany him on a business trip to Europe and Asia as his wife. I accepted instantly, we married, and thereafter we snuggled on benches in the gardens of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, in the Tuileries in Paris, along the Hofvijver in The Hague and regularly in Berkeley Square.”
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