Page 16 October 21, 2021 EL SEGUNDO HERALD
Travel from page 2
see for Daniel Boone, Troy and Ithaca for
Ulysses, the Alamo for Travis and Crocket,
central Switzerland for Heidi.
Is there some theme from your education
that still puzzles your imagination? How the
entire continent of Europe could come to
blows in a world war that sacrificed millions
of lives without trading a postage stamp’s
worth of real estate? How one man could
bankrupt an entire country in Versailles to
build a monument to his personal power?
How another wealthy prince on the other
side of the world could erect the Taj Mahal
as a monument to eternal love?
Are you looking for a change from everyday
life? A place where no one looks, speaks,
or thinks like you? Where every word you
hear can be a learning experience? Where
the memorization of a few simple phrases
can help you cross a divide as eloquently as
Lincoln at Gettysburg?
Are you looking to win an argument? Are
the French really that rude? Did the Austrians
invent skiing? Is Indian cricket as boring as
it looks? Is it safe to cross a Paris street?
Does every Muslim on the face of the earth
love us or hate us (or even think about us
to begin with)?
Is there some question about life that you’ve
never fully resolved, that you can only approach
by planting your own two boots on
the ground? How Jesus, godly or not, could
summon the strength and courage to walk
up the stations of the cross to Calvary and
still forgive the rest of us? How the politest
people on earth, the Indians, could have
fallen into some of the nastiest arguments
in history? How innocent wives at Pearl
Harbor woke up one Sunday morning to all
hell raging overhead?
Are you a foodie? Do you want to finally
figure out the difference between Tuscan, Roman,
and Sicilian pasta? Burgundy and Bordeaux
wines? Mandarin and Cantonese soups? Turkish,
Lebanese, Greek, and Israeli skewers? And
what’s that curry powder all about?
Are you keeping up with the travelling
Joneses after years of suffering through
At last, the genuine article—legally certified Bouillabaisse at le
Miramar in Marseille.
their tackiest selfies and videos? Are you
finally going to prove what you suspected
all along—that they really just holed up in
a motel in Newark and sent away for all
those images?
Are you bored? Do you just want to get
out of the damn kitchen?
We’ve travelled for all of the above reasons,
and all of them—even simple boredom—are
valid. But what they all have in common is
that they require the next step in any plan,
which is (silent groan)…
Research:
If you’re not really committed, research might
involve tossing a dart at a map, buying a glossy
guide book, listing the more familiar sites, and
programming them into Google maps for maximum
efficiency. We see people do this every
day, and if it works for them, that’s okay. The
Joneses will squirm and silently accuse you of
holing up in that motel in Newark. But you’ll
have gone to all the trouble of nudging your
family through Versailles without understanding
how that particular pile of rocks empowered
one generation of rulers and utterly broke the
spirit of another. And worse yet, you’ll never
know why it matters—to any of us!
So yes, we’re jaded when it comes to guide
books. The ancient Murrays and Baedekers
make for fun reading, but they say more about
19th century England and Germany than they
do about their destinations. If you want to
understand Americans, read the Fodor and
Rick Steves guides to Outer Transylvania.
But before we set foot on a plane these days,
we’re spending weeks figuring out the subjects
that really matter to us and what we need to
know about them.
For Example:
Ancestral and family searches have taken us
to hillbilly Kentucky, Scotland’s Isle of Skye,
the Yorkshire of the Bronte sisters, and the
elegant 19th century spas of Baden-Baden.
But the searches started years earlier at the
feet of our grandparents and continued with
official record caches and all those online
ancestry services.
Every foodie trip starts with cookbooks,
whether the baguettes of Paris, the stews
of Corsica, the tagines of Morocco, or the
curries of Kerala.
Childhood adventure books never get old.
Neither does Shirley Temple.
We try to work on the next language in
Rosetta Stone. Numbers and money, hello and
goodbye, the meaning of life (just kidding!).
Phrase books are great, but some phrases are
more powerful than others. Parlez-vous Anglais?
Habla Ingles? Sprechen Sie Englisch? Amazing
how many doors open with that one, even
when it’s obvious. On our last trip to Mumbai,
Glinda discovered the phrase “No, but happy
New Year” and worked it into every negative
shake of her head. The Indian hawkers, with
their love of impeccable manners, didn’t know
what to do with her.
But mostly, we read books and watch
movies—histories of course, but mysteries,
romances, spy novels, comedies, biographies,
and autobiographies, serious and otherwise,
current and ancient. Newspapers and glossy
scandal rags from our future host country.
By the dozen.
And for this we have to thank my mother.
The first time she took me to Paris for a
long weekend, she handed me five books
and insisted that I immediately inhale them:
Madame Bovary. A Tale of Two Cities.
A Moveable Feast. Is Paris Burning? The
Fall of the Dynasties. She wasn’t about to
shell out all that cash just to trudge past a
meaningless heap of easily forgotten stones.
Next up: This Travel is a Risky Business.
Or is it?
Ben & Glinda Shipley, published writers
and photographers, share their expertise
and experience of their many world travels.
If you have any questions or interest in a
particular subject, please email them at
web@heraldpublications.com. •
Renting royalty for a night—the lighthouse from the Palace Instant BFFs on the holiday ferry to Elephant Island off Mumbai.
at Biarritz.
Home sweet ruined home—dawn over Rubha an Dunain on
the Isle of Skye.
“Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”
– Ibn Battuta
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