Recently in Armchair Travel Category

Fact-checking Andrew McCarthy's upcoming January/February feature, "The Three Faces of Rome," got me thinking about the Eternal City's 2,000-year past, layer upon dusty layer of it.

Currently, only two metro lines serve the city of 2.5 million. A third, set to open in 2015, has unearthed archaeological artifacts (like the Dionysos head, unearthed near Via Sannio, Rome, above), many which will be exhibited in the stations themselves. What else has been unearthed by metros around the world?

Here are some highlights I found in my research:

• In Athens, when the city expanded its metro to accommodate the 2004 Olympics, 30,000 artifacts were found scattered beneath 17 acres.

• During construction, a 11th or 13th-century shipwreck was discovered at Yenikapi, what had been a harbor in Byzantine Istanbul.

• Approximately 2,000 fossils (mastodon, camel, ground sloth) dating back 16.5 million years were located way beneath the surface of Los Angeles.

• Construction of Line 14 of the Paris metro unearthed canoe-shaped boats 32 feet below the banks of the Seine, dating to about 2,800-2,500 B.C., hinting at what may be the earliest human settlement in the area.

•  At what is now Pino Suárez station in Mexico City, an Aztec temple was found in the 1990s and is displayed in the passageway between lines 1 and 2.
  

Traveler writer Jeanine Barone is just back from Turkey, where she found an alternative way to explore this land that she heard was magical. Instead of going by van from one town to the next to get a glimpse of the magic, or signing up with a big name hiking company so she could trudge on the trails while everyone else chattered away, she opted for a one-man operation. Below, she discovers the magic of Turkey's Middle Earth.

I'll admit up front that I have two somewhat geeky obsessions: the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Surrealist art. Aragorn is my screensaver and my cell phone ring tone is from the soundtrack. I collect books on Salvador Dali, and I'll wait in any museum line to view his bizarre, ingenious creations. Strangely enough, both of these passions came to mind in Turkey's Cappadocia's region, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that's renowned for its elaborate labyrinthine cave dwellings, and cave chapels and monasteries that once sheltered early Christians. As I trekked with my guide, Mehmet Gungor, this land, with its multi-story rock hewn portals, sometimes seemed straight out of Middle Earth. At other moments, I felt like Dali had a hand in the rainbow-hued landscape tinged with yellows, pinks and reds that's riddled with curious, conical shapes, some blatantly phallic, and others balancing boulders shaped like top hats. (They're appropriately called fairy chimneys.) I half expected to see a melting timepiece. As it turned out, watches (real or imaginary) had no place in my journey. Mehmet, who bears a Zen-like mindfulness, doesn't wear a watch. "Visitors ask me how many hours to this or how far to that, but you can't count or think about time. Just enjoy the experience," he declared at the start of our full day hike.

I could have skipped my coffee yesterday. When I got on the elevator here at Headquarters, I was jolted awake by a behemoth photo of a great white shark covering the entire back wall. This unexpected elevator companion was there to inform me about Expedition Week--a National Geographic Channel event that "takes you on cutting-edge scientific missions to explore and discover lost treasures and never-before-seen worlds." Expedition Week begins this Sunday and runs through Saturday, November 21. It will feature a variety of programs about recent research and exploration being done around the world. National Geographic Channel is very enthusiastic about this event because it "is what we are all about--adventure, exploration and the pursuit of knowledge."  Some of the upcoming episodes include:

Sunday, November 15: "Search for the Amazon Headshrinkers": Follow Piers Gibbon as he retraces explorer Edmundo Bielawski's steps deep into the Amazon in search of the tribe that Bielawski videotaped in the 1960s.  National Geographic Channel has exclusive U.S. access to this 45-year-old footage that purportedly is the only of its kind to show the process of an actual--recently deceased--human head being shrunk.

Wednesday, November 18: "Deep Secrets: The Ballard Gallipoli Expeditions":  In this episode, Explorer-in-Residence Dr. Bob Ballard searches for British and French warships that sank during the Battle of Gallipoli--one of the bloodiest campaigns of WWI.  Ballard's expedition is the most comprehensive underwater exploration of shipwrecks from this battle ever undertaken.  [For information on the episode that tells the riveting story of Ballard's search for the Titanic, click here.]

Friend of IT Emily King just got back from York and Adams Counties in southern Pennsylvania, in search of the region's best food and drink.

There are 123 wineries in Pennsylvania. I'm no oenophile, but I was floored by this fact. Amish baskets and potato chips maybe, but wine? Curiosity got the better of me, so my boyfriend and I headed north, on an otherwise dreary weekend, to check out one of the state's 11 wine trails.

Admittedly, we chose the Uncork York trail because of its proximity to D.C., but I like to think we chose it for the clever name. The guidebooks will tell you York is the "factory tour capital of the U.S." as it's home to Harley-Davidson, Utz (potato chips), Snyder's of Hanover (pretzels), and Wolfgang Candy Company--all of which, and more, offer guided tours through their factories. And while York is a decidedly industrial city, the outskirts look more pastoral than industrial, and there's nary a smokestack in the center of town.

Day 1: We arrived around 7 pm on Friday night, and checked in at the Yorktowne Hotel, the one non-chain hotel in a city of Holiday, Quality, and Hampton Inns. Rooms are big, if dated, but its proximity to York's downtown shops and restaurants make it one of the more convenient stays of choice. Locals head to Left Bank for those semi-special occasions, but pouring rain kept us inside and we tried the hotel's AAA four-star restaurant, The Commonwealth Room. We were a good 30 years younger than the average patron, but the food was good, especially that rabbit confit appetizer.

Day 2: As we'd previously learned on other wine country trips, a good day of wine tasting MUST be preceded with a substantial breakfast. Easy enough. We made the short walk on Saturday morning to York's Central Market. This is a treasure: 70 or so vendors manning fruit, sustainable meat, baked goods, and granola stands--all under a 120-year-old roof, in a National Register of Historic Places building that spans a city block. The market is only open Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, from 6 a.m.-2 p.m. We didn't have time to buy our groceries for the week, but we did manage to stuff ourselves with omelets and the unforgettably moist and not-too-sweet mango raspberry French toast ($8.95, right) at the market's hoppin' breakfast joint, Mezzogiorno.

Now to the wine.

The six wineries we'd chosen were not exactly next door to each other, so I plotted each point on a Google map before departure, then we used Patten's iPhone to do the rest of the navigating. (You can also access maps here, or at the Visitor's Center in downtown York). Our first stop was Nissley Vineyards in Bainbridge (Lancaster County), home to an 18th-century mill and modern, stone-arch winery...and 300 acres of land. Like most PA wineries--as we'd soon learn--Nissley specializes in sweet. "Ninety percent of Americans drink sweet wine," says winemaker Bill Gulvin, "so that's what we focus on." After a tour of the tanks (no barrels used here), we gathered with another ten or so folks outside to taste the wines. Most were too sweet for us--with names like "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Whisper White"--but we did take home two bottles of their decadent black raspberry dessert wine ($14), which Patten wants to pour over ice cream.

Low-key best defines our next stop. Moon Dancer Winery in Wrightsville may look like a French château from its exterior, but inside it's another story. Elmer the dog greats you at the door, and when you take a seat at the tasting counter, you get the feeling you're hanging out in your buddy's kitchen. Judging by the locals around us who have come for a full glass of wine (not tasting sips), the tasting room seems to double as a bar. The walls are smothered in local art--there's a good chance the artist will be on site, hawking his work. Ask for a look-see at the tanks and barrels in the "cellar," essentially an unfinished basement filled with wine-making doodads.

Friend of IT Elizabeth Seward had high hopes for the magical mud of Tintamarre.

I'm on a boat that's bouncing fiercely, and in an effort to ignore my rare and yet steadily approaching queasiness, I'm passing comforting glances at my friend, Heather, who is sitting across from me with her eyes tightly squeezed shut, looking like she's about to faint.  I'm trying to remind her telepathically that this will all be worth it for the mud bathing we're about to engage in. The ride to the island of Tintamarre, just off the northeast coast of the Dutch/French island of St. Maarten/St. Martin, is not usually this rough, I'm told.  But we were all grateful to wade through the warm teal waters to Tintamarre's shores once we were close enough to slide down the boat's ladder.    

A few of us made it to the beach to retrieve a beer (it may have been before 11 a.m. in the Caribbean, but it was 5 p.m. somewhere, right?) and bring it back into the water.  While our guides went off into the island's shrubbery, instructing us to "chill by the beach," I floated in the ocean on my back, mesmerized by the clouds for what seemed like much longer than the fifteen minutes it probably was.  Rolling onto my belly and then sluggishly onto my feet, I noticed a cave in the distance and before I could finish formulating my plans on how and when to explore it, our guides returned with the magical mud.  And now it was time to bathe in it.

Our adventurous friends down the hall at National Geographic Expeditions have a last-minute invitation to join them on a free webinar tonight exploring Costa Rica and the Panama Canal.

Wildlife ecologist Taylor Edwards and veteran expedition leader Gustavo Abarco will host the session, taking you into the rain forests of Manuel Antonio and Corcovado National Parks, where monkeys romp (I've seen 'em!), sloths sleep, and a wide variety of colorful tropical birds flit through the trees. Enjoy a virtual horseback ride on a remote beach on the Pacific coast, a kayak excursion around the tiny islands in the Gulf of Panama, snorkeling in the pristine waters off Isla de Coiba, and swimming in waterfall pools on the Osa Peninsula (one of Traveler's 2009 Places of a Lifetime). You'll get a tour of the National Geographic Sea Dragon ship, and see the workings of the Panama Canal. All this for free and from the comfort of your very own computer:

Costa Rica and the Panama Canal webinar
Monday, November 9, 2009
8:00-9:00 p.m. EST, U.S.

Space in the webinar is limited, so please pre-register at the link above to reserve your space.

However, if the Panamaniac within you is screaming for adventure, make sure to take advantage of the current special offer on upcoming expeditions:

Receive a $500 airfare credit on all Costa Rica and the Panama Canal departures between January 1 and March 31, 2010. In addition, receive $250 off per person on the January 2 and 30 and February 20 and 27 departures when you book by December 30, 2009.

For those joining us tonight, bon cyber voyage!

Sabina Lohr visited Salalah, Oman, just after monsoon season. While there, she got a unique taste of the region.

In Salalah, Oman, the annual khareef, or monsoon season, brings cool relief from the oppressive summertime temperatures felt throughout the rest of the country. Each year, many Middle Easterners travel to this town of 180,000 in the Dhofar region of Oman, on the Arabian Sea northeast of Yemen, from late June through September, when its desert skies fill with a drizzle that turns its brown landscape a temporary green. But after the khareef, during the autumn and winter, when the skies dry out and temperatures hover in the low- to mid-eighties, this little part of the earth becomes an ideal escape for Westerners craving a wintertime respite.

For my first visit to Salalah I wait until just after the end of the monsoon season, arriving in late September to find rolling hills blooming with grass, flowers, and foliage. The desert, starkly beautiful itself, is still visible through the greenery. My guide, Ali Amer Al-Mashani, leads me to a roadside stand where strips of camel meat hang to dry before being wrapped in foil and cooked over coals (above). I eat some, tangy and delicious.  We make our way to another stand where we buy coconuts, drink the fresh milk inside and peel and eat the soft, wet and sweet coconut meat.

To conclude Hispanic Heritage Month on a literal high note, PBS aired the first two hours of its engrossing and fact-packed four-hour series Latin Music USA last week, and the second half will air this evening, October 19th. The first two episodes are up in both Spanish and English on PBS's website.

The site also features a slew of ways to learn even more about the genres and songs--bachata, bolera, ranchera, salsa, cumbia, boogaloo, mambo, Latin jazz, plena--explored in sound, image, and through first-person interviews on the show. You can dissect the genres, their multifaceted origins and histories by genealogy, by instrument, by rhythm, and, important for us at Traveler, by place.

New York City shines the brightest in the creation of this music of the Americas; melting pot, salad bowl or whichever imperfect metaphor it may be. The story of salsa blew my mind. I had no idea how young the genre is. Influenced by boogaloo, Latin Jazz, and mambo, voiced by Puerto Rican (Hector Lavoe), Cuban (Celia Cruz), Panamanian (Ruben Blades) immigrants, accompanied by first-generation, South Bronx-born trombonists (Willie Colón) and many others, it's a complex genre like no other with moving, real-life lyrics and a rhythm that energizes and animates.

The Palladium Ballroom on 53rd and Broadway figured large in New York's Latin music scene from its debut in 1948 until its closing in 1966. People of all ages and ethnicities flocked to the second-floor dance floor to listen to the nonstop music and groove to new, syncretic sounds. Of course now, it's an NYU dorm.

Does the music of a place influence your decision to travel there?

Traveler writer Andy Isaacson is just back from Tristan da Cunha on assignment for the magazine. Below, he offers a peek into what it's like to visit the most remote island in the world.

Reaching the world's most remote inhabited island is, and probably has always been, an awesome moment. From Cape Town, I sailed west across the Atlantic for six days on a South African polar research vessel, covering nearly 1,700 miles, or the equivalent trip from NYC to Denver. Every day the horizon was flat, unbroken. On the seventh day, at 6 a.m., I walked onto the deck and looked up to an enormous volcano, capped by snow, towering over the sea. This is how I arrived at the island of Tristan da Cunha, and its tiny settlement, the romantically named, "Edinburgh of the Seven Seas."

How did I get here? One afternoon last spring, I was curious about how it felt to live on the fringe of the planet, and a bit of online searching turned up Tristan, located 1,450 from the nearest inhabited settlement of St. Helena (the distance from Chicago to Miami). I'm spending three weeks here on assignment for the magazine. In recent years, many changes have come to this formerly isolated outpost. Now, in ways, this UK territory, inhabited by 270 descendants of British soldiers, Dutch sailors, American whalers, and (two) Italian castaways, resembles a Scottish fishing village: one general store and pub (The Albatross), and the community meeting place, Prince Philip Hall, which holds Saturday night dances and the mail call when ships arrive every 4-6 weeks. The landscape is a mix of potato plots and sheep fences, and tiny single-story houses with corrugated roofs that have the Internet and British TV piped into their living rooms.

Working here has had its challenges. Over the years, journalists have visited Tristan, only to write or air inaccurate, superficial or somehow offensive things, resulting in a justifiable weariness. (Every visitor, in fact, must be appeal to the Island Council to land here - for real, you can be voted on or off this island.) I've warmed up to the locals by helping plant potatoes and dancing a decent waltz, but I haven't managed to warm the weather any. It's been mostly gusty and overcast; there have only been three sunny days in three weeks, which has confined my movement. Everything is determined by the weather, Tristanians will say, and that also depends on which way the wind blows. Today it's an easterly, and as my host here said: "East is the Beast."

Andy Isaacson has written for the New York Times, Afar magazine, and National Geographic Traveler. Check out his most recent article about an ocean engineer, a famed aviator, and their secret project to reach the bottom of the planet in National Geographic Adventure magazine. Learn more about Andy on his website or by following him on Twitter.

Writer Joe Ray won the Lowell Thomas award last week for Travel Journalist of the Year, bestowed by the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation, and we thought we'd share an excerpt from one of the articles he wrote for the Boston Globe that helped him win this award. This story is about an adventure in the Sahara:

I was looking forward to the desert void, but had no idea what to expect. A small group of friends who had been several times before organized a trip into the southern Algerian Sahara and Hoggar Mountains with a local agency. They promised we would sleep under the stars, climb dunes to their tops, and see mountains that would have made the late Western movie director John Ford green with envy.

There were a few downsides: They talked so much about the stringy camel meat we would be eating that I brought extra floss. A false alarm. There were the hygiene stories: "Showering" is a moist towelette rubdown. Asked where the restrooms are, your guide may simply grin and make a sweeping gesture across the landscape.

Desert silence is disconcerting, melting time and perspective, leaving you listening to the blood swish through your veins as Polaris and the Southern Cross play cat and mouse across the night sky. Later, the sense of time dissolves and the silence becomes addictive: literal quiet comfort that allows the beauty of the desert and the people who live here to reveal themselves.

"We don't follow time," says guide Abdou Zounga as we share a pungent lamb, barley, and vegetable stew called chorba. "No one here ever asks what time it is."

Zounga, 30, is a Touareg, desert nomads descended from Berbers who have roamed the northwest African desert for millennia. Though he earned a degree in computer programming and had a desk job in the city of Tamanrasset, the call of the desert was too strong.

"I told my father, 'I'm sorry. I can't do this,' " he says of life connected to a keyboard. "I want to be physically tired at the end of the day. . . . In [the 9-to-5] life, my eyes were red, I trembled, I couldn't sleep," he says, taking up the hunched-over form of a programmer as he talks.

"Sometimes the Touareg are hard people and the Sahara can be a hard place," says Zounga, "but even when life is hard, it is beautiful."

For the rest of the story, click here.

Joe can be found blogging at the following locations:
Eating The Motherland
And with Le Figaro food critic Francois Simon at Simon Says!
And on Globe-trotting, The Boston Globe's travel blog

Photo:  Pilgrims congregate at the hermitage of Pere de Foucauld at Assekrem in the Hoggar Mountains. (Joe Ray for The Boston Globe)

In case you missed our self-promotion earlier this week, Traveler won Lowell Thomas gold as well!

Our November/December issue is a special collector's edition, "50 Places of a Lifetime," and it's heading to a mailbox or newsstand near you. Here's the introduction to the package from the pages of the magazine; the complete list of all of our Places of a Lifetime can be found after the jump.

A decade ago, Traveler published a landmark issue-- "50 Places of a Lifetime"--that in subsequent years has become something of a hallmark of the magazine, spawning related books, podcasts, special issues, web content, games, mobile apps--even a round-the-world jet trip from National Geographic Expeditions to lift off in October 2010. Long before The Bucket List and 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, we sought to showcase those treasured destinations that every curious traveler should visit in a lifetime.

Now, in Traveler's 25th-anniversary year, we recognize the first 50 places and offer another 50 that speak to the transformation of travel since 1999--how we travel, where we travel, why we travel. Ten years ago, we could see the emerging signs of a new kind of journeying--one that puts a premium on sense of place, authenticity, culture, sustainability, and experience rather than mere sightseeing.

These elements became the compass we use to steer you to destinations that are more than just numbers in a hot list. Our first 50 picks were icons the world collectively recognizes as superlative. What we offer in the following pages is what sets this magazine apart. We go beyond the obvious. You'll see that we've picked locations of character--and asked those with a personal connection to them to tell us why they are important, unique, compelling. Some are places you may know but haven't seen the way we view them here. Others, we hope, are surprises that may seduce you to explore them firsthand. We address what makes a destination special, what will reward the traveler, why you should come here rather than go somewhere else. We are more sensitive than ever to the fact that many places we love most are deeply threatened--and our challenge is to preserve them for future generations. When they travel, I want my children to know the same joy I feel every time I discover somewhere new and different. We all begin that journey by finding a place that sings to us. We hope you find many destinations in these pages that do just that. --Keith Bellows, Editor in Chief

With the struggling economy, hotels have been scaling back their amenities in an effort to save cash. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that large chains have been removing hand lotion, sewing kits, and other former freebies from their rooms, and limiting their hours for restaurants and bars. But some hotels are celebrating their frugality: Introducing the world's first zero-star hotels. Switzerland's Null Stern Hotel for example, occupies a 1980s nuclear fallout shelter. It's more of a hostel, really, with four double beds and six single beds arranged in two large open rooms that are adorned with antique beds and furniture. Says one of the hotel's designers, "We wanted to create a space of contrasts... Like sugar and fish. They are two things that naturally don't go together, but matched up they make people think, for good or bad. For us it's an art installation before it's a hotel--a place where people can think about their surroundings."

San Diego's Rancho Bernardo Inn--normally a swank hotel and spa--offered a similar deal last month. The "Survivor Package" ranged from $19 to $219, offering a progressively lower rate depending on which amenities you decided you could live without. Can you skip breakfast? Your rate is $199. No breakfast or A/C? That'll be $159. No breakfast, A/C, linens, lights, toiletries, or a bed? A night in an empty room will only cost $19. The promotion seemed popular (though I haven't quite figured out why), as reservations were completely sold out. But it begs the question: What are hotels willing to (not) offer to lure guests to their property?

Photo: Null Stern Hotel

Über-author Dan Brown is about to strike Washington, and everyone is getting ready. Brown, whose first two blockbuster novels, The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, have taken up permanent residence on the Times best-seller list and have been Hanksified for Hollywood, has written his next book, The Lost Symbol, about the hidden secrets of Masonic Washington. And the actual Masonic Washington -- the people who work at Masonic sites throughout the city -- are preparing for the onslaught of tourists, according to a story last week in the Washington Post.

"I'm expecting [tourism] to skyrocket," says Heather Calloway, director of special programs for the Masonic House of the Temple on 16th Street NW, which receives about 10,000 visitors a year. She will double the staff of part-time tour guides, if necessary, to handle the crush.

"We might have to spend the next 25 years responding to Dan Brown's fiction," says Mark Tabbert, director of collections at the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria. "That's what I dread." (Think he's overstating? Wait until you hear from his European counterparts, who are still drowning in their own Brown invasions.)

To compile his new book, My Favorite Place on Earth, Jerry Camarillo Dunn Jr., interviewed dozens of famous people -- from Natalie Portman to the Dalai Lama -- about the places they loved most. He's been guest-blogging about his experiences here on Intelligent Travel. Click here for recent posts.

In choosing a travel companion, you might look for a curious mind, a sense of adventure, or a working knowledge of planes, trains, and donkey carts. But most important is a sense of humor. When the frustrations and absurdities of travel pop up, you both just laugh and carry on.

In My Favorite Place on Earth, I talked with 75 celebrated people about the places they love most in the world, and I made sure to talk with funny folks, from actor Will Ferrell to Matt Groening, who created The Simpsons.

Robin Williams spoke about his hometown, San Francisco. "One famous neighborhood is Haight-Ashbury," he said. "It's like a Civil War re-enactment done by Timothy Leary. The sidewalks are packed, and there are still shops from the Sixties."

Jerry Seinfeld reminisced about playing on a softball team with other up-and-coming comics in New York's Central Park. "We were doing this childlike thing in the middle of this most grown-up of places," he said. "On a Tuesday afternoon you'd be in jeans and sneakers, running around playing ball, and you'd see the skyscrapers with all the real people working for a living. You couldn't escape the fact that you had just dodged this huge bullet in life: 'I'm not up there working!'"

Last week I took our two kids, Chase and Mackenzie, for an inexpensive and easy escape to Maryland's Eastern Shore. Unlike Martha's Vineyard or the Hamptons, it's short on celebrities and long on cornfields and regular folks--a bucolic place to play out the last days of summer. Here are some scenes from my Chesapeake Bay diary.

Day 1: There's a secret stretch of sand that few but the locals know. Beside the boat launch and ferry dock for the Oxford Bellevue Ferry is a sandy quarter-mile strip that's usually all yours (with a jungle gym and swings 50 yards away). We swim cautiously with an eye out for jellyfish, but mostly we play in the sand. The kids bury me up to my chin. We hunt shells, build sandcastles, and look for crabs. We take the nation's oldest privately operated ferry to Oxford, a quaint little town with a park near the Tred Avon River where the kids feed most of their lunch to the birds.

Day 2: Chase is fixated on crabs and each morning, first thing, he goes to the end of the nearby dock and helps me haul up crab pots. He pokes the crabs with a finger, squealing with excitement when they give him a nip, and makes me promise to take him for a crab dinner.  Later in the day we head to the Crab Claw, a rustic restaurant on the St. Michaels' wharf that's been around since the mid-'60s. They tape sheets of paper on picnic tables and serve heaps of crabs, clams, oysters -- a very messy affair and the kids love it. As I suspected, they want nothing to do with actually eating a crab. Instead, they gorge on chicken nuggets and fries--and feed oyster crackers to the ducks that jockey in the water near our feet. The day ends with cotton candy ice cream at the St. Michaels Candy Company.

In conjunction with his upcoming book, Here Is Where: In Search of America's Great Forgotten History, we're following historian and Legacy Project founder Andrew Carroll as he drives, flies, walks, boats, buses, bikes, and hikes to seek out little-known historic sites in all 50 states. Bookmark all of his posts here.

While heading to southwest Minnesota to research a little-known Sioux Indian site, I made a short detour to photograph a story related to a historic flight over St. Paul.

During the Civil War, military personnel from other nations came to the U.S. to observe combat operations. One of these visitors was a 25-year-old Prussian officer who was fascinated by the Union Army's Balloon Corps, which conducted reconnaissance missions over Confederate territory.

"Just now I ascended with Prof. [John] Steiner, the famous aeronaut, to an altitude of six or seven hundred feet," the young Prussian wrote from St. Paul to his father back in Wurttemberg on August 19, 1863. "Should one want to harass with artillery fire [opposing] troops...the battery could be informed by telegraphic signals where their projectiles hit. The above technique has at times been used with great success by this country's armies. No method is better suited to viewing quickly the terrain of an unknown, enemy-occupied region."

The experience had a dramatic impact; "While I was above St. Paul I had my first idea of aerial navigation strongly impressed upon me," he would later say. "[A]nd it was there that the first idea of my Zeppelins came to me." His full name was Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin, who went on to manufacture the eponymous airship. By World War I the Germans were utilizing almost 70 Zeppelins both for bombing raids and intelligence gathering against the Allies--including American troops.

Next up: Atlanta, GA

All photos and text © Andrew Carroll

After seeing the movie Julie and Julia last night, I was reminded of an article Julia Child wrote for Traveler several years ago about Santa Barbara, where she lived the last few years of her life. Reading it again, I can almost hear Meryl Streep's voice as Julia, describing her favorite places to visit and of course, eat. Here's how it appeared originally in the April 2002 issue of Traveler: 

I remember well my very first impression of Santa Barbara. I was awfully young--maybe three or four years old. My family would vacation in Santa Barbara in the summer from my hometown of Pasadena, about two hours away. I remember we were at the old Miramar Hotel, which is right on the beach, looking down at the water. I'd never seen the ocean before, and I was sure the sea would come up and engulf us, and I screamed and screamed. My family finally had to take me home, which must have been enraging for them, and confusing: Why is she screaming?

The city sits right on the coast, a narrow strip of land backed by beautiful mountains, about 2,000 feet high. Lots of eucalyptus and oak and flowers make the place verdant and lush. In addition to all the green, I love the warm, cream color of the Spanish-style houses and the red of their tile roofs, and the brightness of round oranges set against the dark-green, shiny leaves of citrus trees.

The climate and the atmosphere recall the French Riviera between Marseille and Nice, except that area of France has now become terribly touristy. Very often, being there on the Riviera, where we used to have a little house, I'd look at all the tourists and say, "Well, I'd just as soon be in Santa Barbara."

IT contributing writer Andrew Evans sends along this interview with his 97-year-old grandfather who vividly recalls his first transatlantic flight in 1949.
Not to boast, but in the last year I've crossed the Atlantic twelve times. In fact, I've done the 8-hour trip so many times, it's become rather routine: I doze during taxi and take-off, read until dinner, watch some movie I didn't want to pay for at home, then fall into fitful sleep before Greenland. Hopefully, I wake up somewhere over the English Channel. It's all so easy and yet still so amazing to me how every night, thousands of people pile into big metal pipes and wake up on the other side of the ocean.

In 1492, it took Christopher Columbus exactly 70 days to cross the same ocean and there was no SkyMall to pass the time. In 1776, tall sailing ships crossed the Atlantic in about 54 days and by the turn of the last century, steam-powered ocean liners crossed in about a week.

In 1912, just two months after the Titanic slipped beneath the icy North Atlantic waves, my grandfather Robert Brown Evans was born. Airplanes were just getting off the ground but by the time my grandfather was a teenager, Charles Lindbergh had made his famous flight from New York to Paris in thirty-three and a half hours.

As a paperboy supporting his widowed mother and three sisters, my grandfather never expected to travel outside his native Salt Lake City. But in 1929, when he was just 17 years old, he won an award for signing up the most new subscribers. His prize was a train trip to Seattle and a quick spin in a World War I biplane: "There was a single passenger seat in the front and a seat in back for the pilot, so they squeezed me and another boy up front. Right before we took off, the mechanics came and switched the propeller on the front of the plane, which of course, made me feel uneasy."

One of the world's most famous street crossings celebrated a milestone last Saturday -- the 40th anniversary of when the Beatles stepped outside their Abbey Road studio to shoot the legendary photograph of the Fab Four crossing the street.

Though tourists frequently stop traffic at this intersection in London's Paddington neighborhood for a quick photo op, you can safely revisit the iconic album cover virtually from the comfort of your own computer. See the zebra stripes via Google Street View, or check out the Abbey Road Studio Webcam for a live view.

-Tim Greenleaf

If you want to get away without actually getting away, check out Traveler's Trip Lit column for July. Our columnist Don George reviews his new Book of the Month, Lime Tree Can't Bear Orange by Amanda Smyth, a novel about a teenage girl in Trinidad, and Aisling Juanjuan Shen's A Tiger's Heart: The Story of a Modern Chinese Woman about the author's journey out of a rice-farming village in rural China.

Other Trip Lit Highlights:

- Near Death in the Desert, edited by Cecil Kuhne: This installment of the "Near Death" series highlights 12 almost-lethal tales of desert adventures.

- An Irreverent Curiosity by David Farley: Part history, part travel reporting, Farley follows the story of Jesus' foreskin from its journey to the town of Calcata to its disappearance in 1983.

Don't Miss:

- The Reading Matchmaker: Love the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series? Then check out Wife of the Gods, by Kwei Quartey. The first in a planned series starring Detective Inspector Darko Dawson, this complex mystery is set not in Precious Ramotswe's beloved Botswana but in grittier Ghana.

Want More?

-Check out our 50 Books of Summer for great picks that will get you inspired for your next trip.

[Trip Lit]

Photo of a Trinidad Beach by Eli Fuller - Antiqua/Getty Images