Vicarious travel
And maybe some by car.
While WE ARE WAITING FOR A VACCINE, there is plenty of “traveling” to do, even if I may have to put that in quotation marks. Lots of excellent suggestions have come my way this week.
How about traveling vicariously with the late great Anthony Bourdain?
(By the way, I need to say something about links that are behind a paywall. Newspapers made a huge mistake years ago when they put all their content online for free, as I think most of them now admit. Good journalism is expensive. News junkies like me pay for several digital subscriptions. Won’t you think about it?)
Back to our regularly scheduled programming: Bourdain. He was one of my modern travel heroes, like Rick Steves, whose book Europe Through the Back Door taught me how to travel.
Bourdain was, first of all, a superb writer. You could start with Kitchen Confidential and then make your way through his other writings and many videos and see the world through those while we can’t see it any other way.
Do read the Washington Post article, where there is a fine description of his itch to travel: “Anthony Bourdain had what he called unreasonable, overly romantic and foolhardy dreams. He ‘wanted to wander the world in a dirty seersucker suit getting into trouble,’ he wrote in the book A Cook’s Tour. ‘I wanted adventures’.”
While you’re over at the Post, check out this piece, which combines two of my great passions: travel and reading about travel. I must find a copy of at least one of those volumes.
For those of us lucky enough to be living in Europe, where viral spread is—seems to be, perhaps, fingers crossed, long may it continue, etc.—more under control at the moment than in the Americas, off-the-beaten-track places may be the best option this summer. Here are some ideas in France. I’ve only seen one or two of these recommendations, and I quite like the look of this one.
The one below is not far from me, so maybe I’ll start there.
Finally, Italy has jumped on the bandwagon of the new tourism and is ploughing money into the idea. Note to self: the population of one of these places is 10!
I see a lot of travel by car in my immediate future. . . .
