I recently received an email from my friend Ericka, a New Yorker who is on vacation in Brazil. The last line perfectly captured the bittersweet nature of travel:
"Memories of frigid air, neutral tones, linguistic competence and usable tap water have faded, but a refresher course awaits all too soon."
I was a bit taken aback Sunday when I saw Russell Banks, in the New York Times Book Review, mention travel books as his "guilty pleasure." Especially when he included "classics from Herodotus to Burton to Kapuscinski" - none of whom is exactly beach reading. Can't travel get any respect? I wondered. But then he redeemed himself, and the genre, by adding that his guilt may be because "serious travel is difficult and dangerous, and it's so easy and safe to stay home and read about it instead."
A review in yesterday's New York Times Book Review of the new biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor noted that it was an assignment from Holiday - on "The Pleasures of Walking" - that got him finally to sit down and write A Time of Gifts. The symmetry was exquisite: my favorite travel magazine inspired my favorite travel book.
The nice thing about a delayed flight in Atlanta, especially if it's in terminal B, is that you can head to the Intermezzo Cafe inside Buckhead Books, which always makes me think of James Dickey's "Looking for the Buckhead Boys" (and how many airports remind you of a great poem?).
Sunday evening I sat at the bar in front of two TVs - one showing the Cowboys-Redskins, the other showing the Tigers-Red Sox - and ate a delicious jambalaya which I washed down with a Cabernet Sauvignon. The last time I ate there I complained (here) about how smart phones had killed airport bar conversations, but Sunday the three men next to me paid no attention to any screens and chatted away like old Buckhead boys who had found each other after many years.
Saturday morning took mom down the street to the Nazareth Farmers' Market, where we admired the cauliflower and broccoli and bought molasses cookies and sticky buns from a man wearing a long white beard and a straw hat.
We drove across the bridge into New Jersey, heading past Harker's Hollow golf course to Apgar's for apple cider. Then we made our way south to Frenchtown, driving up and down the side streets admiring the porches, many of them decorated for Halloween. The two chairs of one porch held a well-dressed zombie couple.
We crossed the Milford bridge into Pennsylvania and curved along the river road up to Easton and back to Nazareth. Downtown I stopped at a red light and a woman getting out of the passenger side of a car that had just parked said hello to me.
In the evening we drove back to Easton for dinner at the River Grille with my brother Jim and his wife Joyce. I mentioned the Mexican place south of the circle, and Jim said Easton had become a restaurant town. Back at mom's, we watched Penn State beat Michigan in triple overtime.
At breakfast Sunday morning, mom said: "I think these are the best sticky buns I've ever eaten." At 93, she's had a fair number of them.
Perhaps next year the Swedes will smile on Colin Thubron and do for travel writing what they just did for the short story.