Destination: United States
“Nothing Makes Me Laugh as Much as the Zagat Dining Guide for Los Angeles”
by Jim Benning | 10.15.03 | 9:09 PM ET
Writer and food lover David Shaw buys three Zagat dining guides for Los Angeles each year—one for his car, one for his home, and one for his office. After all, Zagat guides are enormously influential. But in today’s Los Angeles Times, Shaw unleashes a spirited attack on the guide’s L.A. rankings. Spirited attacks, of course, are always fun to read, so you don’t have to live anywhere near Los Angeles to enjoy this. “I love Woody Allen’s movies, Billy Crystal’s Oscar monologues and Darrell Hammond’s impressions on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” Shaw writes. “But nothing makes me laugh as much as the Zagat dining guide for Los Angeles.” And that’s just the first paragraph. (Registration required to access the article.)
Email to friend
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! BuzzNew York From Above
by Jim Benning | 09.12.03 | 1:36 AM ET
Two years after planes toppled the World Trade Center towers, Salon columnist and airline pilot Patrick Smith marks the September 11 anniversary by recalling his own flights over New York City. Smith once piloted small turboprops around the World Trade Center and Statue of Liberty. Maneuvering there was always, he writes, “a unique and unforgettable procedure.”
The W.P.A. Travel Guide Series: ‘One of the Noblest and Most Absurd Undertakings Ever Attempted’
by Michael Yessis | 08.05.03 | 12:31 AM ET
Eudora Welty served as a photographer for the Mississippi guide. Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” features references to people he met while reporting in the South. And John Steinbeck called the collective Depression-era works “the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together.” Now, according to a story in Saturday’s New York Times, the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) American Guide Series and the Federal Writers Project that spawned it are garnering new attention as scholars and historians discover a relatively untapped source of information about the U.S. and its most celebrated writers. “[M]any of the printing plates for the guides were smashed in the wake of a late-1930’s witchhunt by Representative Martin Dies Jr., Democrat of Texas, who insisted that the W.P.A. was a Communist plot,” writes University of New Orleans professor of history Douglas Brinkley. “But the Library of Congress has hundreds of boxes of the guides’ raw material…It is one of the most underused and untapped historical collections in America.” Almost 3,000 oral histories regarding the projects can be heard at the Library of Congress.
Cuban Cigars? $18. Fine for Visiting Cuba? $10,000. Fighting Fine With Trip to DC? Priceless.
by Jim Benning | 07.17.03 | 10:09 PM ET
When Californian Joan Slote signed up for the bicycle tour of Cuba, the Canadian company operating the tour assured her that she would not be violating the U.S. ban. But after returning home three years ago, the 75-year-old traveler was fined $7,600 for violating the ban. With penalties that have since accrued, the fine has reached nearly $10,000. But Slote is fighting back. She just made a trip to Washington to speak in opposition to the ban. Her response has borne fruit. A spokesman for Sen. Byron Dorgan called prosecution of Slote “an absurd use of resources by the Department of Treasury,” according to an Associated Press report on The San Diego Channel. “At a time when they should be tracking terrorist funding and the movement of terrorists around the world, they are spending resources tracking little old ladies riding bicycles in Cuba.”
The Literature of Los Angeles
by Jim Benning | 07.02.03 | 12:14 AM ET
Writers bring their own psychological baggage to a place—baggage that affects the way they depict that place on the page. Perhaps nowhere is that more true than in Los Angeles. Why is that? Adam Kirsch offers an insightful analysis of L.A. lit on Slate. He takes novelists to task, but what he criticizes is, in my mind, also a form of travel writing. He writes: “Our classic descriptions of Los Angeles were written by visitors who spent only a few weeks or months in the city; or by imported slaves of Hollywood, who act out their rebellion against the city at large; or even by natives writing mainly for an audience somewhere else.”
Langewiesche on the Zeitgeist of Travel
by Michael Yessis | 04.28.03 | 3:18 PM ET
“American Ground” author and Atlantic Monthly contributor William Langewiesche sat for a brief interview with Savvy Traveler host Diana Nyad last week. Langewiesche, who worked as a pilot before becoming one of the Atlantic’s star writers, offers some much appreciated against-the-grain insight into the current psychology of travelers, particularly American travelers. “The idea that we’re facing a fundamental change in travel is pretty shortsighted,” he says. During the same program, Jake Warga offers a piece about “traveling without a purpose,” which means he just set out without a plan. It’s a practice we advocate every once in a while, and a story we’re happy to recommend.
Michael Lewis Follows Mark Twain’s Trail, Pays $240 for Snow Chains
by Michael Yessis | 04.24.03 | 3:30 PM ET
I read Michael Lewis’ book “Liar’s Poker” in one sitting. I was jetlagged in a Munich hotel room and it was the only book I had with me, but I was thrilled to have it. It’s terrific, and it turned me into a big fan of Lewis. Thus, I was excited to see that he and his wife, former MTV News personality Tabitha Soren, are tag teaming Slate’s latest installment of Well Traveled, the online magazine’s multimedia travel feature. Lewis is writing the text, and Soren is filing photos, as they follow the “Mark Twain Trail” from the San Francisco Bay Area to Carson City, Nevada and points beyond. They posted their first dispatch yesterday, a 2,000-word throat clearing focusing on mishaps with snow chains along the Donner Pass. I’ve got higher hopes for the next seven installments.
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.
Is the U.S. Quarrel with France Merely a Lovers’ Spat?
by Jim Benning | 04.07.03 | 3:56 PM ET
American writer Josephine Humphreys hopes so. As she confesses in Sunday’s New York Times, she loves France. “Somehow the French manage to meld reason and passion, a combination I like,” she writes. “They strike me as witty, tough, quirky and kind. I’ve tangled with only one snappish French person, but his annoyance was justified; he was stuck with me in a revolving door I couldn’t get the hang of. Others have been so hospitable that when I came home I missed them, and I consoled myself with baguettes and cornichons, some Edith Piaf, a little Voltaire.”
Kentucky? That Ain’t Kentucky.
by Michael Yessis | 04.04.03 | 4:00 PM ET
It happened again. We recently reported that Bermuda’s Tourist Board had been caught substituting photos of Hawaiian waters for those of its own country in an advertisement. This week, Kentucky’s Department of Travel succumbed to similar embarrassment: A bridge used in a travel ad for that state actually resides in New Hampshire. It was an honest mistake, according to Kentucky Department of Travel spokeswoman Jayne McClew. “I apologize,’’ she told the Associate Press. “I was so adamant that it was our bridge until I looked at the right picture.”
The Return of the Stews
by Michael Yessis | 03.31.03 | 8:57 PM ET
It’s said you can gauge a country’s state of mind by examining its pop culture. So what to make of the recent rash of American movies and books where flight attendants play major roles? According to a story by Greg Morago in the Seattle Times, they take center stage in the new Gwyneth Paltrow movie “View From the Top,” Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me if You Can,” the Adam Sandler/Jack Nicholson flick “Anger Management,” Elliott Hester’s book “Plane Insanity” and Johanna Omelia and Michael Waldock’s “Come Fly With Us.” Do these in-the-sky narratives demonstrate that, contrary to popular opinion, we are determined to travel, even in the face of fear? Or are we simply longing for the golden days of flying, when flight attendants were stewardesses and we didn’t have to take our shoes off three times before we got on the plane? Perhaps it’s a little of both.
If You Lure the World’s Largest Cheeto to Rural Iowa, They Will Come
by Michael Yessis | 03.14.03 | 2:55 PM ET
An Iowa DJ spearheaded an effort to bring the world’s largest Cheeto—for the uninitiated, Cheetos are a crunchy American snack product coated in a thick, orange faux-cheese powder that inevitably ends up caked on your fingers—to rural Northern Iowa in an effort to stir up tourism. The super-sized Cheeto, which is comparable in size to a small lemon, was discovered when Navy Petty Officer Mike Evans, stationed at Pearl Harbor, bought a bag of Cheetos for his 3-year-old son. Does this sort of thing happen in other countries, or are Americans the only people who will travel thousands of miles to see junk food?
The Ugly American
by Jim Benning | 03.13.03 | 3:01 PM ET
To Travel or Not to Travel?
by Michael Yessis | 02.25.03 | 3:47 PM ET
We generally like to focus here on stories about people traveling, but the big story in the U.S. these days continues to be about how Americans are feeling about traveling, or not traveling, particularly given fears of terrorism and the likelihood of an invasion of Iraq. Enter the pollsters. In a recent New York Times/CBS News poll of 747 people, 55 percent of respondents said “they would not travel overseas in the next six months, regardless of vacation time or money,” Sunday’s New York Times reports. “Of those, 5 percent said the chance of war with Iraq was the reason for not going beyond North America.” What’s more, “among the 55 percent who said they weren’t going overseas any time soon, 21 percent said they were generally afraid to do so or thought the world is just too unsettled.” (Registration required.)
‘I Feel Safer on a Normal Day Here in Bosnia Than I Have in Some Major U.S. Cities’
by Jim Benning | 02.25.03 | 3:44 PM ET
American readers of Rick Steves’ European travel Web site have been debating the safety of overseas travel on the site’s Graffiti Wall. While some of those who have posted say they’re staying home for the time being, Americans contributing opinions from Europe maintain that now is a fine time to travel. “As an American that has lived in Europe for over a year, I can tell you that there should be no problem with travel here,” one reader wrote. “I’m a contractor currently working in Bosnia. Over the past year I have done a few trips in and through western Europe had have had no problems. In fact I feel safer on a normal day here in Bosnia then I have in some major U.S. cities.”