Tag: Road Trips
Jim Harrison: ‘Road Trips Are Good For You’
by Eva Holland | 07.09.10 | 10:18 AM ET
The author of The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand talks travel in this video interview. His favorite road trip ever? A 12,000-mile, 39-day circuit around North America.
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Yahoo! BuzzA Foodie Road Trip Across… Small-Town Canada?
by Eva Holland | 07.08.10 | 2:46 PM ET
The Globe and Mail’s Ian Brown is on a road-tripping mission to explore the foodie scene beyond Canada’s “big three”—Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. He’s been blogging the trip as he goes, and his latest post finds him at a restaurant called Moose’s in North Bay, Ontario, home to 102 flavors of chicken wings. Here’s Brown’s introduction to North Bay:
You pull into North Bay, which is full of interesting people but does not present well, if you know what I mean, you see the Bull and Quench pub, ‘Home of the 1 lb burger’ - think about that - and Indra’s Curry House, next to the Heart and Stroke Foundation office.
You think: Maybe this is my last day on earth. Maybe this is where my heart explodes.
By the Numbers: America’s Most Dedicated Drivers
by Eva Holland | 06.23.10 | 4:32 PM ET
Bundle.com crunches the numbers on American gas spending, state by state and city by city. The result is a pretty interesting set of graphics on U.S. car use. The country’s busiest road-trippers? Oklahomans. Hawaiians, meantime, drive the least.
The study notes that, on average, Americans spend 72 minutes a day in their cars—in other words, “290 hours [annually] of drive-time radio, talking back to the GPS and wondering why, for the millionth time, people think it’s okay to drive 60 in the left lane.” (Via The Daily Dish)
William Dalrymple’s Trans-Global ‘Spinal Tap’
by Eva Holland | 06.22.10 | 10:41 AM ET
Writing in The Daily Beast, William Dalrymple looks back on a nine-month book tour that, from the sounds of it, almost warrants a book of its own. Here’s an enumeration of his companions on the trip:
[A] smoky-voiced Tamil diva who is struggling to keep alive a dying sacred song tradition from the temples of Tamil Nadu on the southern tip of India; six Sufi mystics from a shrine in the badlands of Pakistan who sing the poetry of an 18th-century saint in a strangely haunting falsetto, and who between gigs have been fending off the Pakistani Taliban from taking over their home town; five dope-smoking Bauls, the minstrels of Bengal who travel from village to village teaching tantric mysticism through their songs; and a dancer and part-time prison-warder who is believed in Northern Kerala to be the human incarnation of the God Vishnu; he travels with his side-kick, a small-town taxi driver who has a second career as a theyyam make-up artist and drummer.
Dalrymple’s “City of Djinns” recently landed on our list of the 100 Most Celebrated Travel Books of All Time.
How to Taxi Like a New Yorker in New York City
by Layne Mosler | 06.21.10 | 10:39 AM ET
iStockPhoto Hailing a cab in the Big Apple takes technique. Riding like a local requires panache. Cab driver Layne Mosler explains.
From James Brown to the Spice Girls: A Soundtrack for the Road
by Eva Holland | 06.10.10 | 3:13 PM ET
In the Globe and Mail, Peter Cheney looks back on four decades of road trips, and the music that accompanied them. It’s a good read—here’s a taste:
Music always seems best on the road. As a little boy, I strained to hear the Jackson Five over a fading AM station as my dad drove our 1963 Mercury Comet from Calgary to Kingston in the dead of winter. The Comet only had a single, tinny speaker, but the Jackson’s never sounded quite as good as they did that winter day, their voices soaring over the hum of our studded snow tires.
Indeed. We offered our picks for the ultimate travel soundtrack here.
The Roads Home
by Tom Swick | 06.02.10 | 9:43 AM ET
On a bi-coastal life amid the bridges of the Delaware River
Tales of a Second Grade Traveler
by Julia Ross | 06.01.10 | 10:55 AM ET
Is it possible to pinpoint the moment a girl becomes a traveler? Julia Ross thinks so.
Route 66: The Multimedia Graduate Thesis Project
by Michael Yessis | 05.17.10 | 9:40 AM ET
A few years ago I wrote that we were experiencing a new Golden Age of the Road Trip because, among other reasons, new technologies were providing incredible ways to tell road trip stories:
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.
Here’s one of those ways I never expected. Students at California State University East Bay are creating a virtual tour of Route 66 utilizing Wii, Google Earth and other technologies—all contained in a 1969 VW bug:
The project is scheduled to debut in June.
Travel Movie Watch: ‘180 Degrees South’
by Jim Benning | 05.04.10 | 2:37 PM ET
180 South looks like a great new outdoorsy travel documentary. In it, Jeff Johnson retraces a 1968 road trip from Ventura, California, to southern Patagonia undertaken by Yvon Chouinard and a few others. The film features surfing and climbing, and, it seems, a healthy dose of philosophizing about travel and life.
It’s touring the country now—dates and locations are listed here—and it comes out on DVD in June. Here’s the trailer:
The Roads Between Us: A Journey Across Africa
by Frank Bures | 04.19.10 | 11:58 AM ET
Photo by Frank Bures In a five-part series, Frank Bures explores the meaning of travel when arrival is not guaranteed
Why You Should Care More About Signs Than You Do
by Michael Yessis | 03.12.10 | 11:16 AM ET
Slate’s Julia Turner just concluded a terrific series about signs—Penn Station’s horrible ones, London’s plans for better ones, efforts to standardize exit signs, what GPS technology means for the future of signs and why signs are “the most useful thing you pay no attention to.”
For an example of the consequences of what happens when you don’t pay attention to signs while you’re traveling, just watch—shameless self promotion alert—America’s Worst Driver on the Travel Channel this Sunday.
Photo You Must See: Vertical Volkswagens at Germany’s Autostadt
by World Hum | 03.11.10 | 12:32 PM ET
REUTERS/Morris MacMatzen Volkswagen Golfs are stacked in one of the massive glass silos at Autostadt, the Volkswagen theme park
Boing Boing Does the Road Trip
by Eva Holland | 03.09.10 | 1:58 PM ET
Boing Boing’s Mark Frauenfelder is cruising Southern California in a Buick, making an eclectic series of roadside stops. His latest? The very quirky Museum of Jurassic Technology.
Another Casualty of the Down Economy: Rest Stops
by Michael Yessis | 03.05.10 | 4:47 PM ET
And the people of Arizona are pissed off. From the New York Times:
Arizona has the largest budget gap in the country when measured as a percentage of its overall budget, and the state Department of Transportation was $100 million in the red last fall when it decided to close 13 of the state’s 18 highway rest stops.
But the move has unleashed a torrent of telephone calls and e-mail messages to state lawmakers, newspapers and the Department of Transportation deploring the lost toilets—one of the scores of small indignities among larger hardships that residents of embattled states face as governments scramble to shore up their finances.
Other states have closed rest stops, too, including Colorado, Georgia, Vermont and Virginia.
Interview With Ted Conover: Traveling ‘The Routes of Man’
by Frank Bures | 03.02.10 | 11:39 AM ET
Frank Bures asks the author about the role of roads in the world -- from Ladakh and the Peruvian Andes to the West Bank
How I Got My Chinese Driver’s License
by Peter Hessler | 02.18.10 | 11:23 AM ET
In an excerpt from his new book, "Country Driving," Peter Hessler -- aka Ho Wei -- recalls his Beijing driving exam
Interview With Peter Hessler: Behind the Wheel in China
by Frank Bures | 02.18.10 | 10:23 AM ET
Photo by Darryl Kennedy Frank Bures asks the New Yorker writer about his new book, "Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory"
The Critics: ‘The Routes of Man’ by Ted Conover
by Eva Holland | 02.16.10 | 12:10 PM ET
Hard-traveling journalist Ted Conover’s latest, The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today, hit stores last week. The book sees Conover traveling six different roads, some official and some unofficial, from Peru’s mahogany export routes to China’s new superhighways, in an effort to understand the way they are “reshaping the world.”
The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley is skeptical of the concept. He writes that “what we have here essentially are a half-dozen magazine pieces, stitched together in such a way as to resemble a real book but missing the thematic core that Conover strains to locate.” However, Yardley adds, “Conover’s six reports are variously interesting in and of themselves, and one shouldn’t expect any more from them.”
Over at NPR, Maureen Corrigan notes that the “vivid armchair travel aspect of Conover’s book is undeniably a great part of its appeal,” but wonders where the women are—the book, she writes, takes place in “a road warrior universe that is pretty much all male.” The Los Angeles Times’ Taylor Antrim is less conflicted, describing “The Routes of Man” as “refreshingly nonromantic road writing.” He goes on:
What Conover has brought back is a clear-eyed understanding that roads confine as much as they liberate, that they make the world more accessible but also infinitely more dangerous and exploitable. Perhaps the only certainty he offers is that these “paths of human endeavor” are inevitable: “They are the infrastructure upon which almost all other infrastructure depends.”
Recommended Reading in Planes, Trains and Automobiles
by Michael Yessis | 02.12.10 | 10:52 AM ET
The Millions asks its contributors to recommend reading material suited to different modes of transportation. Sample recommendation for travel by train: “I like the Russians for train travel. When you’re watching the natural landscape—the largely uninhabited regions—of a country fly by in flashes, it just feels right to be reading stories that take place over the great land mass of Mother Russia.”