Taking America’s Pulse
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 11.11.01 | 9:30 PM ET
America’s major newspapers are doing an excellent job covering post-September 11 travel issues beyond economics. Some highlights:
>> The Maryland Aviation Administration hired entertainers, including Madonna and Groucho Marx imitators, to soothe the nerves of delayed travelers at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. Most people, reports Fern Shen of the Washington Post, love it. “I thought I had a weirdo on my hands, for a minute,” Mel Hilderbrand, a program manager for Bell Helicopter heading to Dallas, said following a Moment With Groucho. “Then I realized, he does this for a living. It’s good. God knows, we need it.”
>> Julia Chaplin quotes Larry McMurtry, the Texas novelist and author of a travel memoir, Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways, and Travel & Leisure editor in chief Nancy Novogrod, among others, in a New York Times piece about recently laid off workers are turning to “meandering journeys whose destination is a state of decompression and, just maybe, self-discovery.”
>> Jodi Wilgoren explores the new realities of bus travel on a Greyhound trek from Chicago to Ogallala, Nebraska. It’s essentially a news story, but the writing is sharp and evocative. “Heads bop with the beat from silent portable stereos, bob with sleep as dusk sweeps the aisle,” Wilgoren writes in the New York Times. “Passengers fixate on the flat emptiness punctuated by repeated eruptions of fast-food neon—except on bus No. 1861, whose windows are blocked by a wraparound advertisement for 1-800-COLLECT featuring Mr. T.”