The Reader Travels Vagabond Edition

A New Beginning

One of the best evenings during my early summer travels to Jacksonville was spent at a restaurant in St. Augustine called Cap’s on the Water. We were a new team, dreaming of new possibilities, eating good food, drinking mojitos and enjoying the sunset on the water.

We all felt that we had taken a leap of faith to fly out to Florida, to leave our old lives when we’d only interviewed over the phone. But when we all got together, we knew we had something special.

At times I felt like we were on a reality show, living a social experiment, suddenly thrown together with eight other people, sharing cars and flights, learning too much about each other over breakfast, lunch and dinner. The work days were strange too, playing corporate games of trust and mistrust, muddling through ambiguity, red tape and judgment.

But here we all were on the deck of this comfortable restaurant, feeling the stress pour off as we felt the breeze and smelled the sea. After dessert, we walked out onto the pier over the Intercoastal Waterway and gasped when we saw the dolphins surfacing in the water. The sun set, and we made our way back to our cars, back the hotel and back for another day.

Water Baby

I think my new baby Freya will like the sea too, if bath time is any indication. Of course, it’s summer, and it’s a hot one in Dallas, and it just feels good to get that sticky sweat washed off. But I can imagine her first introduction to the sea after living in a land-locked city, that look of wonder in her big brown eyes.

I remember my early years in New Orleans, sailing on Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico, playing in the sand at Biloxi and Gulf Port, Mississippi, passing under the shade of oak trees draped in Spanish moss.

And I think on this new life, and water at its source. There is comfort here, and a vast new world to explore.

Atlantic Beach, Florida

I spent the last five weeks traveling back and forth between Jacksonville, Fla., and Dallas, Texas, for a new job at Citi. Working all day and flying home every weekend, I was afraid I’d never get a chance to see the beach, to stand in the ocean.

But on our last week there, we ventured out to a restaurant in Atlantic Beach, and after dinner, we walked out to the sand, took our shoes off, rolled up our pants and cooled our toes in the water.

The corners of my mouth raised in a smile that felt as eternal as the waves crashing on the shore. The smell of the salt air brought back memories of childhood trips to the beach, and I was as giddy as the child who spent hours body surfing in the Gulf of Mexico.

It was just a taste, a tease, and then the coworkers were whistling from behind, ready to go back to their hotel rooms to prepare for another day at work. But this one moment of bliss made it clear that I must return to the sea. Soon.

Having grown up in Galveston County, Texas, I spent a lot of time at the beach, on both the island and the mainland. When Wade wrote about the Oaxaca beaches, it made me think about the miles of Gulf coast beaches that were home to me from fifth grade to college. Each destination has its own flavor, from pure tourism flair to cheap family fun to drunken debauchery.

The first thing to know is that if you’re looking for white sands and crystal clear water, you’re not going to get it here (unless you pay $20 per person to go to Moody Gardens Palm Beach). The petroleum industry has staked a deep claim to this coast land, so the waters are brown, and there’s a chance you’ll come away with dark brown sludge staining your toes. Nor is it a place for hard-core surfers, since the Gulf of Mexico waters are generally tame unless it’s hurricane weather.

But despite all that, this place where the earth meets the sea is somehow blessed, and humans are drawn like pilgrims to feel the sand and water between their toes, to taste the salt air and to see beauty on the horizon. Or just to party!

While there are some much more desirable family and tourist destinations, I’m going to highlight my three favorite beach spots, the ones that bear the most fond memories.

#1 – Galveston’s Seawall
The small strip of beach that separates the Gulf from the seawall was my first experience with Galveston. My family moved to town in the summer, so we headed straight for the beach when we arrived. You just find a place to park along the seawall and climb down to the beach, take a walk along the granite pier, visit the souvenir shops, or just set up your lawn chair and cooler next to the sidewalk and enjoy the people watching.

#2 – Texas City Dike
The dike is basically a five-mile levee jutting out from the mainland into Galveston Bay. The beach looks away from the oil refineries, so there’s some semblance of nature. It’s a great spot for local families and fishermen. My fondest memories are from Mother’s Day picnics with my family and a bunch of church friends. There’s nothing glamorous about it, but the laid-back nature of the place has a definite appeal.

#3 – Galveston’s East Beach (R.A. Apffel Park)
This was the party beach when I was in high school and college, and I’m certain not much has changed. Since you could drive on the beach, it was a sandy cruise strip, bumper-to-bumper cars, showing off racing stripes and suntans. Once you found your parking space, you could walk the beach, find your friends, make new ones, play volleyball, maybe even swim in the Gulf. But mostly, it was about loud music, smoking, drinking and gawking. I can smell the salt air and the Hawaiian Tropic now.

I’m inspired by a piece that Wade wrote two months ago about the Character of Oaxaca Beaches and the notion that these locations separated by a few short kilometers would have such distinct cultures. Like beaches, cities also have commonalities, but when you observe their people, you can see how different they really are.

Having lived in both Dallas and Houston, I’ve often pondered the cultural differences between these two large cities. As Larry McMurtry would probably tell you, Houston has more in common with Fort Worth than either city has with Dallas, and I get the impression Larry doesn’t much care for Dallas.

While both cities have diverse economies, Houston has the ship channel and petroleum processing plants that give the city a blue collar flavor. Dallas on the other hand, is predominated by big money, big technology and big fashion. Houston is more down-to-earth, and Dallas is all about appearances. Houston is more about making sure the system doesn’t take advantage of the individual, and Dallas is more about buying into the system. There are two activities where these cultural differences will be obvious to the visiting traveler — driving and eating.

A Driving Distinction
Since Dallas has more of an appreciation for the system, drivers are more likely to go fast in the fast lane and slow in the slow lane. They’re more likely to stop for red lights and yield for cars coming off the freeway. Since Houston is more about the individual, the freeways are a free-for-all, and you have to weave through traffic if you want to get there faster.

While red-light camera technologies have probably made more of an impact on red-light abuse in recent years, the Houston streets have been historically notorious for streams of cars running through the intersection long after the light has changed. I also have to tell friends visiting from Houston that they need to yield to cars exiting Hwy 183 in Irving because they’re likely to get into a wreck driving the way they do back home.

Finding Food
It’s all about the zoning laws, really. Dallas is meticulously zoned so you find restaurants near other restaurants, liquor stores near other liquor stores, retail shops in retail shopping zones, industry with industry. Although I’m not an expert on their municipal regulations, Houston doesn’t appear to have much in the way of zoning laws. You might see a lonely restaurant crammed between a school and a warehouse and no other restaurants anywhere in sight.

It makes the traveler’s job more difficult to find a variety of food options in Houston when he’s hungry. Regardless, there’s some great food, especially seafood, since they’re right on the coast. You just have to do your research before you go. Dallas on the other hand is all about the restaurants since that’s just about the only thing to do in the area. Get off Central Expressway at any exit and take your pick of options — once you spot one restaurant, you’re likely to see several others in close proximity.

Your bigger problem in Dallas will be finding that lonely zone with the liquor stores.

Marie McCarthy has such a fluid prose voice, she makes you feel right at home traveling with her on vacation in Ghana, which is not a place many tourists think to visit. Her e-book Travels in Ghana takes you on a short trip through this friendly west African country, meeting a few people and seeing a few sights along the way.

Marie describes every day of her short trip through Ghana and provides a nice selection of photographs, so the reader can really imagine himself there, riding in the steamy Land Rover with her guide Stanley, seeing the buildings, the people, the food and the merchandise.

I sometimes felt that Marie’s content was superficial, focusing too much on her love for photography and shopping, her hatred of fish and unsafe driving. At the same time, these things serve to connect her with an audience of Americans who share the same thoughts and concerns whenever they travel outside of their own home towns. While she was an unusual tourist, choosing a place that your average American wouldn’t think to go and choosing to go see things even the ordinary Ghana tourists wouldn’t choose to see, she had these mundane concerns in common with her fellow tourists.

Although it was a short trip and by its very nature must barely scrape the surface of the true nature of Ghana, Marie’s open mind and educated perspective gave us a nice view of the country, its people, culture, landscape, history, life styles and conditions. I would recommend this book to anyone planning to take a vacation to Ghana, as a way to set expectations.

For me, it mostly served to whet my appetite for something deeper, something more. Of course, this may have been her intention all along.

I don’t know about you, but I totally buy into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. OK, so maybe not “totally” because I don’t necessarily think that a person needs to be loved before he can achieve high self esteem, and I don’t believe vagrants can’t be enlightened.  But the overall concept is a great way to think about things.

I recently read George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London for my food travels tour on the home site, and I could really see that bottom level of the pyramid in action through his story. The search for food, sleep and shelter predominates in Orwell’s tale, and getting beyond that is a hard task.

He described work as a restaurant kitchen grunt in Paris, how the workers didn’t have time to think about a better life because they had to spend so much of their lives just working to survive. Traveling on to London, his narrator found himself with even fewer resources, eating only bread and tea, hardly sleeping as he landed in shelters and flophouses with rough beds and noisy bunkmates. It was really hard for most of the people he encountered to think about anything but where their next meal was coming from.

It’s interesting to look at Maslow’s pyramid from different perspectives, though. People have different levels of need for different things in the pyramid. For instance, some people are more asexual than others, and having sex might not be of much importance at all to those folks. Personally, I’m out there with Henry Miller on this one. Tropic of Cancer is another Paris story of someone who thinks about nothing but where his next meal is coming from, but Henry is also sure to fit the sex in there as a very important part his base needs.

It’s also interesting to travel along with Wade who has simplified his needs but still attains all those levels to reach the top of the pyramid, even as he continues to focus energies on the safety level. Meanwhile, I’ve chosen my cozy house and 40 hour a week job as my means of keeping my safety in check so that level never goes away, but I still have the time and energy to explore the other levels.

At the other end of the spectrum are people who reach love and belonging to get a wife and 2.5 kids, then get stuck in the safety section because they feel the need for more — more stuff to own, more luxuries for the wife and kids, more insurance for fear of losing it all, more hours at work, more, more, more. Then they lose their wife and 2.5 kids, binge on crystal meth, lose their jobs and find themselves back in the base of the pyramid wondering what happened to their lives.

We can travel up and down these paths, focus on different needs at different times. It’s all about the journey.

Since I read more than I travel, it’s only right that I linger on this thread.  My third and final list of top five travel books is all about the reluctant traveler, the person who finds himself traveling when it’s perhaps against his nature or his inclination. He travels out of necessity or gets trapped in a journey that wasn’t quite expected.

#5 — Alice in Wonderland
Alice’s curiosity takes her on a wild and unexpected journey, through a rabbit hole and beyond, hard-pressed to find her way out. I thoroughly enjoyed Alice’s adventures, and Carroll’s work has proven itself eternal. On the other hand, Alice didn’t experience much in the way of character growth through her travels, and to me, that’s what traveling is all about. I’d probably put The Wizard of Oz ahead of Alice for that reason, but I can’t claim to have read it.
.
.

#4 — The Drifters
The Drifters tells the tale of a few young people running away from some unpleasantness in their lives, only to find new unpleasantness in foreign lands. The late teens and early twenties are a tumultuous time where people are learning so much about the adults they are trying to become, and whether they get jobs, go to college, join the military or run off to travel the world, the journey is not light.  Along with all the drama, one of the fun things I remember about this book was the crazy collection of quotes at the beginning of each chapter.
.
.

#3 — The Accidental Tourist
Macon Leary is a sad man who hates the uncertainty of travel, and yet he does it for a living, writing travel guides for business travelers. He doesn’t experience any of the places he goes. He only does what he can to survive them, just as he does with every experience in his life. But when he’s finally forced to let the experiences and the people touch his life, he starts to reap the benefits of his travels. Travel seems to be a recurring theme for Anne Tyler, from subtle trips to dramatic escapes.
.
.

#2 — The Hobbit
It is not in a hobbit’s nature to travel, but Bilbo Baggins finds himself on a journey through dense forests and craggy mountains, through caves, across rivers and valleys, meeting strange creatures and new friends. He’s very hesitant at first, but by the time he returns home, he has a taste for wandering, and his peaceful home town will never again be enough for him. The grandness of the adventure, the connection to Norse mythology and the mastery of linguistics in creating the elvish language all combine to make this an eternal classic.
.
.

#1 – The Talisman
You may be thinking it’s some sort of blasphemy to put Stephen King and Peter Straub ahead of J.R.R. Tolkien, but I can’t help it. I love this book, and to be honest, King’s The Stand might have also made it on this list if I’d gone to ten instead of five.  Jack is twelve, and the weight of two worlds is on his shoulders as he’s forced to travel from coast to coast, all the while flipping back and forth between the USA and a scary parallel universe with evil sorcerers and friendly werewolves. He makes the journey and perseveres.

Although I love music as much as I love books, I’m happy to announce that I was able to pick a nice clean list of five favorite songs about travel.  Enjoy!

#5 – On the Road Again, Willie Nelson
This was one of my maternal grandmother’s favorite songs, and since she passed in August 2010, this goes out to her.

#4 – Turn the Page, Bob Seger
As Tenacious D suggests, it’s a bit cliche for rock bands to sing about touring, but Bob Seger’s tune is heartfelt and homesick. Although I love to go adventuring, there’s no place like home.

#3 – Route 66, various
From the smooth jazz stylings of Nat King Cole and The Manhattan Transfer to today’s Disney band of the week, this is an ageless classic. I loved the Stones version, and Depeche Mode gave the song a whole new meaning in the ’80s. John Mayer rocked it for the Cars soundtrack, but these girls are slammin’.

#2 – Ventura Highway, America
Travel was a common theme for this ’70s accoustic band, with A Horse With No Name, Don’t Cross the River and a little more symbolically with Tin Man. This one’s all about the wanderlust. “You want to go. I know.”

#1 – 500 Miles, Peter, Paul & Mary
I’m a folky at heart, and this was the first song that popped into my head and poured out of my mouth when I thought of travel songs. I’ve been singing it ever since. Tears come to my eyes.

My second category for top five travel books is all about great adventurers. These characters take on a life of travel and exploration, driven by their need to seek out new experiences and new opportunities, while some are simply drawn into a long pilgrimage in search of something grand.

#5 — Aztec
Gary Jennings had to do some deep research to write a historical novel about the early peoples of the land that is now the United States of Mexico. I had great fun traveling with the Aztec merchant, learning about all the diverse groups of people from north to south. With the gratuitous sex and violence, good drugs and strange and interesting people, who could ask for more?
.
.
.

#4 — Ahab’s Wife
Now, this was a fun book to read, especially after having dragged myself through Moby Dick to prepare for all the references to the master work. It seems the little woman that Ahab married was a great adventurer in her own right, running away from home and traveling the world. This book was yin to Moby’s yang, great for modern audiences in search of instant gratification.

.

#3 — Roads
Larry McMurtry’s travelogue of US Interstate highways is one of my all-time favorites. It gave me the image of highways as rivers, carrying goods and people from place to place. Being a lover of literature, one thing that made these adventures wonderful to me was the focus on places of literary interest, places where famous writers once lived and worked, places they wrote about and loved.

.

#2 — Arabian Nights, the Sindbad stories
I can’t tell if Sindbad was the luckiest sailor in history or the unluckiest. Sure, he survives all these crazy situations, but if four out of five ships you board get wrecked, something’s not right. I wouldn’t have wanted to get on a boat with him, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be one of his wives. Of course, it’s worth reading all of the stories in Arabian Nights, but Sindbad’s were the greatest.

.

#1 — Skinny Legs and All
A little different from the rest, this novel has many travelers, who each have their own intertwining adventures.  A newlywed couple travels the country by Airstream; a husband and wife go their separate ways; a Jew and a Muslim open a restaurant together.  But the most important trek is a very long pilgrimage taken by a group of “inanimate” objects trying to make it to the holy land.