An editor recently asked me to write a series of articles about Miami geared for different types of travelers: first-time visitors, romantic couples, families, foodies and hipsters. I declined (it was a last-minute assignment, and I didn’t have time). But afterwards I thought it might have been fun to mix up the categories, and send foodies to the places for first-time visitors, and hipsters to the city’s best family destinations. I would have been performing a valuable service, making it possible for everyone to have the shockingly out-of-the-ordinary experience that real travel is.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times Travel section featured a Q&A with the author of Travels With Epicurus, a septuagenarian who, in his younger years, backpacked through Europe, as he said, “like an anthropologist with A.D.D.”
Now, older and wiser, he has discovered the pleasures and rewards of staying in one place, which is exactly how I traveled when I was young. (Summer in London, year in France, four months in Greece, two and a half years in Poland.) I never owned a backpack; I carried (with great effort) a large leather suitcase. Now I wonder: Will I, in my 70s, go chasing after all the sights I missed in my youth?
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.