Tag: What We Loved This Week

What We Loved This Week: Echo Mountain, Book Passage and ‘Big Red Son’

Eva Holland
I picked up Consider the Lobster, a collection of David Foster Wallace essays, over the weekend, and each one has been better than the last. I think my favorite so far is “Big Red Son,” a 50-page look back at DFW’s time in Las Vegas at the Annual Adult Video News Awards. It’s probably the oddest combination of intelligence, insight, humor and crude double-entendres I’ve ever encountered.

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What We Loved This Week: Rory Stewart, New York City and ‘How to Eat at Chipotle’

Eva Holland
I’m in New York City this week, and my visit coincides with a handful of travel-themed readings, including two events for the new anthology, A Moveable Feast. The timing is perfect—I always love the chance to immerse myself in the city’s writing community.

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What We Loved This Week: Antarctica, San Diego Sunsets and the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

Chris Epting
I’ve loved reviewing some of the 3,000-plus penguin/iceberg/landscape photos I shot in Antarctica last week while on a glorious Quark Expeditions trip with my teenage daughter. Here’s one:

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What We Loved This Week: Bourdain’s L.A., Haruki Murakami and the Airport-Only Lane

Eva Holland
I loved reading Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. For whatever reason, I’ve never felt particularly drawn to Japan, but Murakami’s re-creation of 1960s student life in Tokyo had my interest piqued for the first time.

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What We Loved This Week: The Texas Rangers, Willian Finnegan, and Lunch at Singapore’s Embassy

Eva Holland
I’ve been sifting through old travel photos this week, and I came across a snapshot that I’d completely forgotten about, from the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. I still love this quote:

Photo by Eva Holland

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What We Loved This Week: The Dead Sea, Diving the Azores and ‘I Want to be a Travel Writer’

What We Loved This Week: The Dead Sea, Diving the Azores and ‘I Want to be a Travel Writer’ Photo by Nuno Sá

Terry Ward
Diving through lava formations under the shadow of Pico’s volcano in the central islands group of the Azores. On many a Transatlantic crossing, I’ve wondered what the Azores (about two hours’ flying time from Lisbon and just a five-hour flight from Boston) were like. “A mini New Zealand in the Atlantic,” a Portuguese friend had told me before my visit. From the rolling green hills, rocky windswept beaches and towering volcanoes to the fine local cheeses, shellfish and wine, I agree.

Photo by Nuno Sá

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What We Loved This Week: ‘Swingers,’ Boy Scout Base Camp and Scratch and Sniff Cartography

Eva Holland
I loved re-watching one of my longtime movie favorites, “Swingers.” I’ve only visited Los Angeles once (discounting a few extended visits to LAX) but this movie always makes me want to go back and get to know it better:

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What We Loved This Week: Calor Norteño, ‘Packing for Mars’ and the Astronomy Picture of the Day

Jim Benning
This Spanish-language cover of the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” by a band called Calor Norteño, performed in Tijuana (and recorded, unfortunately, with a shaky camera):

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What We Loved This Week: E.B. White, Calexico and ‘Metro Song’

Eva Holland
I loved E.B. White’s 1948 essay, Here is New York. My favorite sequence:

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What We Loved This Week: Grey Mountain, Don George’s Peru and ‘Sweatpants in Paradise’

Eva Holland
Last weekend I drove up Grey Mountain, just outside Whitehorse, for some great views and fall color. Here’s one of my favorite shots from the excursion:

Photo by Eva Holland

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What We Loved This Week: Rock Creek Park, Rainy Day Camping and ‘Sweetness and Blood’

Eva Holland
I spent a rainy Labor Day weekend camping in Haines, Alaska, and the weather didn’t detract at all. The beautiful thing about camping in town? We were never more than a few minutes’ walk from a warm, dry bar and the local brew on tap.

Michael Yessis
Rock Creek Park. The too-hot summer in Washington D.C. seems to be over, and I spent some of the long holiday weekend walking through the park’s shady paths, basking in the glorious weather.

Jim Benning
I’ve really been enjoying Sweetness and Blood, which is both a travel narrative and a look at surfing and globalization. Great stuff.


What We Loved This Week: Rachid Taha, Fall Colors at Alaska’s Denali Park and More

Jim Benning
Algerian musician Rachid Taha. I discovered him recently on a flight—he was a featured artist on Delta’s in-flight audio entertainment system. He has covered the Clash’s “Rock the Casbah.” Here’s a taste of something perhaps slightly less familiar:

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What We Loved This Week: Jonathan Raban, Ricardo Arjona and Ernest Hemingway, Humor Writer

Eva Holland
“At Sea,” Jonathan Raban’s ode to the simultaneous isolation and civility of the seagoing life. It’s a 1996 magazine story that I came across in The Best of Outside—here’s a favorite section:

In the society of the sea, it is the duty of every member to keep his distance from all the others. To be alone is to be safe. It’s no coincidence that those two most English of attitudes, being “standoffish” and keeping aloof,” are nautical terms that have long since passed into the general currency of the language. Standing off is what a ship does to avoid the dangers of the coast; aloof is a-luff, or luffing your sails, head to wind, to stay clear of another vessel. The jargon of the sea is full of nouns and verbs to describe the multitude of ways in which a ship can keep itself to itself.

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What We Loved This Week: Ayaz Nanji and Eating in San Francisco

Ayaz Nanji

Michael Yessis and Jim Benning
We spent Thursday evening out in New York City with fellow Travel Channel staffers to say goodbye to our friend and colleague, Ayaz Nanji. As senior director of Interactive, Ayaz oversaw the company’s digital operations, including World Hum. This site wouldn’t exist without serious support, and Ayaz was as smart, thoughtful and supportive a boss as we could hope for. He also happens to be a hardcore traveler—recent trips have included weeks in Tunisia and Uzbekistan. He’s leaving Travel Channel to embark on a ‘round-the-world trip, and we wish him all the best. He’ll be sorely missed.

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What We Loved This Week: Book Passage, Seatmate Chitchat, and David Sedaris’ ‘Standing By’

Eva Holland
I’m in the Bay Area for a few days, visiting with friends and colleagues at the Book Passage Travel, Food and Photography Conference, and it’s been a treat so far—the in-person writing community is one of the few things I’ve missed since moving to the Yukon nine months ago, and it feels good to reconnect.

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What We Loved This Week: ‘Shipping Out,’ Joan Didion and the Last Roll of Kodachrome Film

Frank Bures
I loved this story about Steve McCurry (of green-eyed-Afghan-refugee-girl fame) going around the world with the very last-ever produced roll of Kodachrome film, shooting pictures on it in Italy, Turkey, India and other places. The end of an era.

Jeffrey Tayler
I’m afraid I’ve had a very negative week, with Czech Airlines fouling up my return reservation to Moscow from Paris, and then arriving in Moscow itself. It’s now so smoky we’ve closed our windows, and it’s almost 100 degrees inside. ... So there isn’t anything I’ve loved in travel this week.

Jim Benning
I’ve been reading Joan Didion’s heartbreaking memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. I loved this anecdote she included about her daughter, Quintana: “All PSA planes had smiles painted on their noses. ... When Quintana at age two or three flew PSA to Sacramento to see my mother and father she referred to it as ‘going on the smile.’”

Michael Yessis
A list of all-time best magazine articles has been making the rounds online in the last couple weeks. Yup, David Foster Wallace’s Shipping Out (pdf) is on it and, yup, I got sucked in yet again by the all-red leisure suit with flared lapels and the image of 500 upscale Americans dancing the Electric Slide.

Eva Holland
I loved bringing home leftovers from a tasty restaurant meal in Skagway, AK—certainly the first time I’ve taken a doggy bag across an international border. Somehow, despite the frequency with which I cross the Yukon-Alaska border these days, I still get a kick out of it each time.


What We Loved This Week: D.C. From the Air, the San Diego Zoo and ‘Newport State of Mind’

Michael Yessis
My view from seat 22A on American Airlines flight 1442 during the final approach into Reagan National Airport Tuesday evening. Stunning.

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What We Loved This Week: Roadside Cinnamon Buns, Off-the-Beaten-Path Ethiopia and a Good Rant

Eva Holland
A delicious, enormous cinnamon bun—no joke, it was the size of my head—from a roadside bakery on the Klondike Highway, between Whitehorse and Dawson City. That’s my kind of road trip fare.

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What We Loved This Week: The Chilkoot Trail, Susan B. Anthony House and a Virtual Tour of Chicago

What We Loved This Week: The Chilkoot Trail, Susan B. Anthony House and a Virtual Tour of Chicago Photo by Eva Holland

Eva Holland
The Chilkoot Trail. I spent four days hiking the old Gold Rush route from outside Skagway, Alaska, over the Chilkoot Pass to Bennett Lake, where the stampeders of 1898 boarded boats for the rest of the journey to the Klondike. It was hard work, but the scenery was outstanding. Here’s a shot from a few kilometers beyond the pass:

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What We Loved This Week: World Cup Cookies, Gary Shteyngart and ‘The Father of All Things’

Eva Holland
My copy of The Father of All Things, by World Hum contributor Tom Bissell, arrived in the mail this week and I can’t wait to crack it open. It’s been on my must-read list since I first came across Bissell’s story, War Wounds, in The Best American Travel Writing 2005 a couple of years back.

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