Travelrific® Travel Journal
Picture postcards in prose.™ Check out the blogroll on the front page for official merchandise and other resources!Archive for U.S. travel
Shakespeare and Beethoven, Perfect Together
By Linda Tancs
Boulder, Colorado brings you the classics this summer in equal measures of music and theatre. From 20 June to 16 August at the Mary Rippon Theatre and University Theatre venues, Blue Mountain Arts presents a half century celebration of Shakespeare featuring Macbeth, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Henry the Eighth. Maybe the Bard will inspire you to picnic at the Flatirons in Chautaugua Park, where you can listen to chamber music, the classics and international music from 21 June to 1 August. In July, Beethoven rules with all nine symphonies presented from the 6th to the 13th of the month. Just one more way to enjoy the mountain air.
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Commuters Zip Along in New Jersey
By Linda Tancs
At busier transit hubs across New Jersey, commuters using rail and light rail services have another option to choose from to reach their intended destination–the Zipcar. The rentals, some of which are hybrid vehicles to benefit the environment, can be reserved online from NJ Transit for pickup at Metropark, Princeton Junction, Morristown, Montclair University, and Liberty State Park. Prospective users will need to complete an application for membership in the program and will receive a Zipcard to retrieve their reserved car. Customers must also return the rental to the station from which it was taken. Cars can be reserved by the hour or by the day at fees ranging from $8 to $73, respectively. Avis says they try harder. Move over.
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The Pretzel’s Demise
By Linda Tancs
After hearing that US Airways is abandoning the pretzel snack on domestic flights, I decided to check out their food offerings online. On “select” flights (suggestion: call ahead for confirmation), here’s a sampling of their mouth-watering options (sans pretzels): fruit and cheese plate, turkey ham on sweet Hawaiian luau bread (aloha!), and a classic chicken Caesar salad.
Readers, I’d like you to rate the meals you’ve had on a domestic flight–from 1(lousy) to 5 (great, or at least pretty darn good). The results, best to worst, will be tallied and posted.
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E-Ticketing Touted as Cost-Saving Measure
By Linda Tancs
You may have noticed that, effective 1 June, paper airline tickets have gone the way of the dinosaur. In a move initiated by IATA about 3 years ago, e-ticketing is now the standard for processing passengers. According to IATA, this move will save the industry over $3 billion per year in expenses. Now the question is: as carriers realize the savings to come through effecting electronic transactions, will we see an elimination of the checked bag charges now being widely introduced by carriers, a reduction in surcharges, and–better snack foods? Stay tuned.
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Hiawatha Lives in Ironwood
By Linda Tancs
At the door on summer evenings
Sat the little Hiawatha;
Heard the whispering of the pine-trees,
Heard the lapping of the waters,
Sounds of music, words of wonder;
‘Minne-wawa!” said the Pine-trees,
Mudway-aushka!” said the water. – “Hiawatha.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Hiawatha still hears the lapping of the waters–from his bird’s-eye view of Lake Superior–in Ironwood, Michigan. There, bearing an appellation that reads “World’s Tallest and Largest Indian,” stands an 18-meter high statue of Hiawatha, a chieftain credited with founding the Iroquois Confederacy. Fans of roadside americana such as this can get directions here.
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Ivy League
By Linda Tancs
When author and former Princetonian F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in This Side of Paradise that Princeton, New Jersey is good-looking, he must have been inspired by a stroll through its public parks and gardens. Boasting a range of heirloom plants, bulbs, wildflowers, mature trees, peeking peonies and exploding irises, the springtime blooms of the town’s greenways await you. Start your tour at Morven, the official governor’s residence from 1945 to 1981. As you walk the rolling back lawn of this estate named after a mythical Gaelic kingdom, you’ll spot towering trees that are at least as old as our country. This Georgian-style mansion was, after all, the ancestral home of Richard Stockton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Step gingerly around the beds of heirloom annuals from the 18th and 19th centuries and onwards to a re-creation of a Colonial Revival-style garden of the early 20th century.
For a less antique perspective, roam through Princeton’s nature preserves, parks and refuges. In the northeastern section of town, you’ll find Herrontown Woods, a completely wooded park best noted for its color-coded, three-mile hiking trails ringed with oaks, red maples, flowering dogwoods and Japanese honeysuckle. Claiming six of its 35-mile tract in Princeton in a north to south stretch, the Delaware & Raritan Canal evokes images of the Irish immigrants who forged the waterway with pickaxes and shovels to create a passageway for coal transport. The tree canopies, some extending up to 50 feet in height, provide lush cover for several species of warblers that predominate in the spring from the Charles H. Rogers Wildlife Refuge nearby. A noted ornithologist, Rogers played a key role in establishing the sanctuary, where springtime blooms amidst its 39 acres include trout lilies, violets and irises. At the steepest southern ridge in town, Woodfield Reservation greets visitors with a full understory of wildflowers and a convergence of spring leaves in the park’s center that locals say is not to be missed. You’ll find convergence of another kind—wetlands and meadows—at Mountain Lakes Nature Preserve, a Y-shaped valley originally granted to colonist William Penn from England’s King James II. Particularly stunning are the “seven sister” cluster of red oaks at the northern boundary, flowering daisies and buttercups in the meadows, and an array of spring beauties in the wetlands. Finally, in the western area of town lies Marquand Park, host to an arboretum including eleven trees that are the largest of their kind in the state. And that’s not the park’s only distinction. It also sports two record-setting fir trees from North Syria and Greece. Thankfully, most of the 200 species of trees found here are mapped and tagged.
Beauty may rest in the eye of the beholder, but Fitzgerald certainly was on to something.
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Airline Combos Read Like a Script
By Linda Tancs
The spate of actual and intended airline combinations reads like a Peyton Place of the transportation industry. Continental breaks it off with United. United begins courting US Air. Continental flirts with OneWorld, perhaps feeling spurned by the impending nuptials of Northwest and Delta. The OneWorld dalliance could portend the greatest development yet in this story. Consider the prospect of a Continental/British Airways merger. Could it happen? Well, continuing open skies negotiations could pave the way for transatlantic marriage. The open skies treaty, after all, opened up markets between the US and EU–allowing, for example, British Airways to fly direct from Paris to New York in lieu of re-routing via the UK. If the well-documented costs of airline operation continue to rise, then suitors will be lining up to cross the borders. Stay tuned….
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Cleanse Your Palate
By Linda Tancs
They say good artists suffer for their art. And if the exhibition taking place at the Whitney biennial art celebration this year is any indication, they suffer for their ecosystem, too. At New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art now through June 1, there’s an interesting fusion of environmental issues and contemporary art among the 80 or so exhibitors. You’ll find such eco-inspired displays as resin-encased compost droppings, a floral-infused recycled industrial trash heap, and sculptures modeled on bird droppings. Not to be outdone, Germany’s Biennial for Contemporary Art in Berlin offers the work of over 110 international artists until June 15. However, the difference between these biennials is like night and day. Literally. Berlin’s event is divided into two parts–Night and Day. At night, patrons can sample a mix of lectures, concerts, and even an out-of-body experimentation. During the day, the exhibition will have you walking the city at four distinct locations to take in sculpture, artwork and movable objects, some designed to evoke images of Berlin’s tortured past, like the Berlin Wall death strip.
Art with a conscience. That appears to be the promise of these events. Will you promise to go?
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York City
http://www.whitney.org
phone: 1-800-WHITNEY
Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art
Multiple locations
http://www.berlinbiennale.de
phone: +004903024345910
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A Twist of Twain or a Dash of Dickens
By Linda Tancs
Book lovers, take note. Do you long to experience the riverscape of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer? Are you interested in the historical underpinnings of chancery, “keeper of the King’s conscience,” as young law clerk Charles Dickens would have seen it? Then why not step into their shoes–and those of other literary greats–through a literary tour. Is this a new trend? Hardly. Think “da Vinci code tour” and you’ll know what I mean. Still, you can’t help but be inspired to write the next great novel of our time after walking in the path of the masters. The thought of their dedication and effort gives more meaning to every edifice of brick, marble or stone lining the tourist trail of the places with which they’re associated. Perhaps Oscar Wilde said it best: “Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.”
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Jewels of the Brandywine Valley
By Linda Tancs
Beginning today, the glorious mansion and grounds of the late industrialist Alfred duPont will re-open after an eye-popping $40 million renovation. Named Nemours after the family homeplace in France, the estate is one of the highlights of the Brandywine Valley, located on Rockland Road in Wilmington, Delaware. While you’re in the neighborhood, why not follow the Brandywine Valley wine trail in the Philadelphia countryside and enjoy the spoils of the six wineries competing for your nose and palate. Poetry in a bottle? Perhaps. But a good vintage is better savored than spoken about.
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