Travelrific® Travel Journal
Picture postcards in prose.™ Check out the blogroll on the front page for official merchandise and other resources!Waxing Poetic in Wales
By Linda Tancs
Welshman Dylan Thomas is best known for his poetry although he also wrote scripts for radio broadcasts, radio plays, short stories, films and an unfinished novel. Wales is undergoing a yearlong celebration of the centenary of his birth. The son of Swansea wrote many of his major works at a house in Laugharne, where the annual Laugharne Weekend takes place each April. This year’s centenary event will feature additional poetry weekends there into early May.
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A Shrine to Innovation
By Linda Tancs
If you think the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan is just a shrine for car enthusiasts, then think again. Sure, you’ll find the first Mustang and the last Model T among its collection, but you’ll also discover a world of innovation through amazing exhibits like Made in America, featuring a Newcomen engine, gothic steam engine and McCoy lubricator. The sprawling museum compound also celebrates pioneering in aviation, including a replica of the Wright Flyer. And don’t miss Greenfield Village. Founded in 1929 as an educational and historic landmark, it comprises seven districts chronicling 300 years of American industrialism in railroading, farming, handiworks, patentable inventions and, of course, automotive engineering.
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The Oldest City in Holland
By Linda Tancs
Located in the western Netherlands, the medieval city of Dordrecht is Holland’s oldest city and ancient capital. Its attractions are easily navigable via numerous bicycling paths, which isn’t at all surprising considering that the nation has more bikes than residents. One of the oldest dwellings is ‘t Zeepaert, adorned with a decorative Gothic stepped gable of Belgian blue limestone. Augustijnenkerk is an old abbey church dating from the 1200s with 200 tombstones, including that of Dutch painter Aelbert Cuyp. A city of harbors and monuments, Voorstraatshaven forms its backbone. Among all of its attractions, perhaps nothing is as monumental as the full-sized replica of Noah’s Ark, a museum that retells the biblical saga. The unsinkable dream of builder Johan Huibers features commanding views of the Merwede River and the city.
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Tales From the Crypt
By Linda Tancs
New Haven, Connecticut was settled in 1638 by a group of Puritans. In 1812, a church was built on the Green to house their remains and those of Revolutionary War veterans. Built over part of the burying ground, Center Church on the Green sports a basement crypt with a who’s who of eternal occupants. In peaceful repose lie Benedict Arnold’s first wife, President Rutherford Hayes’ family, Reverend James Pierpont (a founder of Yale College) and Sarah Rutherford Trowbridge (marked with a stone dated 1687, the oldest one in The Crypt). Overall, The Crypt contains the identified remains of about 137 people and the unidentified remains of over 1,000 souls and marks the last remaining evidence of the city’s early settlers. Crypt tours take place April through October on Thursdays and Saturdays.
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Crown of the Continent
By Linda Tancs
Its crowning achievement is the preservation of more than a million acres of forests, alpine meadows, lakes, peaks and glacial-carved valleys, 70 species of mammals and over 270 species of birds. That’s reason enough why Montana’s Glacier National Park is aptly dubbed the Crown of the Continent. Named for its prominent glacier-carved terrain and remnant glaciers descended from the ice ages, it’s nearly four times the size of rival Rocky Mountain National Park. Take a ride on Going-to-the-Sun Road, a 50-mile drive through the park’s interior offering some of the best sights in northwest Montana. Glacier is also a hiker’s paradise, offering 700 miles of trails, like the shutterbug-friendly Logan Pass. Better act soon; some scientists predict that by the year 2030, Glacier National Park will not contain any glaciers. In fact, the park has only 25 glaciers now, down from 150 in the 1800s.
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Bienvenue à Shanghai
By Linda Tancs
Following China’s loss of the Opium Wars in 1842 and the opening of its port cities to international traffic, the government of Shanghai granted land comprising today’s Xuhui and Luwan districts to the French consulate. Known as the French Concession, its cafes, boutiques and tree-lined avenues are possessed of a certain je ne sais quoi, an attractive respite from the otherwise bustling and futuristic-looking metropolis. Bienvenue à Shanghai!
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The End of the World
By Linda Tancs
On the west coast of Galicia, Spain, is Cape Finisterre, the Spanish equivalent of Britain’s Land’s End. The rocky peninsula was thought to be the end of the road, so to speak, in medieval times. The area is rife with memorials and dedications, a place where pilgrims celebrating the end of their Camino burn their clothes and boots in the fire pit. The area’s famed lighthouse sits atop Monte Facho, bearing witness daily to the ferocious Atlantic and its storied shipwrecks.
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The Highs and Lows of South America
By Linda Tancs
In Argentina, you can truly experience the highs and lows of South America. That’s because the highest and lowest points of the continent are found there. Mount Aconcagua is the highest point at 22,837 feet. Less than 10 miles from the Chilean border, the summit beckons via the northern route, a non-technical climb devoid of axes, ropes and pins. The lowest point is the Valdes Peninsula at 131 feet below sea level. This whale-watching destination in the South Atlantic, one of the largest mating grounds in the world, is renowned for its conservation of marine mammals.
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The Largest Theatre in Paris
By Linda Tancs
Grand Rex is the largest theatre in Paris and one of the largest in Europe. Boasting the city’s largest screen, the cinema’s outsized lines and Art Deco-style dome are out of sync with the hotels, bars and pubs along rue Poissonniere but nevertheless befitting a shrine to Parisian cinema. Inaugurated in 1932, the Ministry of Culture has decreed it a national monument. Discover its legend through an interactive, 50- minute long audio guided tour.
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The First Veterans’ Monument
By Linda Tancs
The traumatic fate of nine colonists in 1676 is commemorated in a wooded area near the public library in Cumberland, Rhode Island. Known as Nine Men’s Misery, the stone memorial there is reportedly the first veterans’ monument in the United States, a tribute to nine colonial militiamen slaughtered at the site by the Narragansett tribe during King Philip’s War. The conflict, named for its Native American leader Metacomet (referred to as King Philip by the British), pitted tribes in New England against the British colonists and their allies as the Puritans increasingly encroached upon Native American settlements. Despite the colonists’ eventual victory, the war ravaged the population and economy of the region.
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