North to London

Posted on August 11, 2011 by tsraveling

The English Channel Tunnel must be one of the most boring technological wonders in the world. It’s more than fifty kilometers long, took six years and almost double the original estimated cost, and has since its completion survived fires, technical breakdowns, and attempted crossings by illegal immigrants. And yet when you travel through it, none of this is apparent. All you see is a rail-yard with oddly oversized train cars in neat lines on tracks leading into the ground. The moment your bus drives into one of these cars is the greatest novelty of the trip; after that there’s a flicker of lights, a hum of movement, and half an hour later you’re rolling back off the train into another rail-yard — on the other side of the Dover strait.

The disconnect between the intellectual impact of the journey and the lack of a visceral one is quickly forgotten, though, as the rocky slopes of the southeast English coastal region rise outside. Our bus climbs into the hills and gives us just a glimpse of Dover’s white cliffs before we pass into the clumps of forest and green farms that alternate in the country alongside the road.

Then, London: immense, sprawling, with nearly an hour from the time we enter the city’s outskirts until our bus finally pulls into the Victoria Coach Station. After weeks of rain in Belgium, London is surprisingly warm and sunny, and I enjoy the walk from the bus station to the tube. Twenty minutes underground brings me up to the surface at Edgware Road, in a middle eastern immigrant district in northwest London. My hostel, the Green Man, is right next to the tube station and is located above an old pub. There’s music there most nights, ranging from talented local singers to some truly horrific karaoke.

Hyde Park

I don’t spend much time there, aside from breakfast and sleeping. Between paychecks at the moment, I’m living frugally, walking everywhere and eating out of grocery stores. As a result, I see more of London itself than I would have otherwise; I spend a day walking first south through Hyde Park, where soccer games are being played under a patchy gray-blue sky, and into the whitewashed and stately embassy district beyond it. Then southeast to the Thames, where I find an old man wrestling with a fishing pole, bent double. Throwing a glance at me, he says “hold this!” and thrusts the rod into my hands — I brace it while he pulls in the string by hand. On the end is an eel as long as my leg. The old man grins: “this makes my fourth one,” he says, “now off to supper!”

On the advice of my sister, I walk past Buckingham Palace, but can’t manage to catch a glimpse of Prince William. I walk around the Tate, which is free, then head back as the light softens and warms on the grays and whites and occasional patches of color on the London cityscape.

Another day I meet Tom, a friend of a friend, and we head out for lunch at a Polish cafe before spending the rest of the afternoon walking around and talking about books and travel and international politics. He takes me through a street market in south London where fruits and vegetables are on display at shockingly (for London, at any rate) low prices, and where the people move in a loose mass between fruit stalls and discount electronics carts.

My final day in London I check out of the Green Man and head into the city, where I lock my backpack up at the bus station to wait for my 4:30pm bus to Edinburgh. I’m meeting Shreya here, a friend I’ve actually never met in person; a couple of years ago, when I was traveling through Greece and writing about it, she started reading this blog at the same time I was reading one of her articles on Matador, and we started exchanging emails; the rest, as they say, is history. I meet her around lunch at the Shakespeare Cafe a few blocks from the station. She’s spending a few weeks in Edinburgh as well, on a scholarship for a creative writing program, and we’re taking the same bus to Scotland; while we wait, we walk across the river and wander through a park, where we find a buddhist shrine with a little girl running around its base and occasionally peeking out at passing tourists.

The day passes quickly; we board the bus in the afternoon and make our way back to a pair of hard seats placed directly over the engine, and twenty degrees warmer than the rest of the bus. Shreya’s crossed five time zones and has been traveling for the last three days, so she falls asleep quickly, and I move a seat ahead so she can stretch out. I try to read and ignore the temperature.

In Newcastle, the emergency door, directly beside me, swings open, and two swaying Scotsmen are blinking into the bus. It’s clear enough that they’re drunk, but takes me a good few minutes to figure out that they’re actually speaking English — their accent is thick enough already, and a night of heavy drinking means that I never understand more than about a fourth of what they’re trying to say.

I gather they want a free ride back to Scotland, though, because they loudly clamber in and slam the emergency exit behind them, before hunkering down in the back of the bus to hide until we’re moving. The rest of the Scottish crowd on at Newcastle, a group of five girls, is giggling and whispering at our two stowaways to stay quiet while our driver gets on, sits down behind the wheel, and puts the bus in motion without ever looking into the back.

Our new Scottish friends are talking loudly, and impossible to ignore (though Shreya somehow manages to sleep through most of it), so I think: if you can’t beat them, join them, and we talk for the next couple of hours up to Edinburgh. One of the girls, a little younger than I am, already has “two wee bairns” back at home; in Scotland, new mothers are often very young.

By now it’s dark outside, with rain misting on and off, and when we finally clear a rise and see the sparkling lights of Edinburgh outside I wake Shreya and start getting my things together. The Scots pile off the bus as we stop to light up cigarettes, despite their extremely high cost in the U.K., and Shreya and I look around at our new city for the next few weeks. We’re couchsurfing tonight in the city center, since she can’t stay in her dorm yet and I don’t feel like finding my apartment south of town at two in the morning, but at the moment none of it matters. The air is cool and damp, the buildings old and grand, and I’m happy to be here.

London in the evening

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In Bruges

Posted on July 29, 2011 by tsraveling

The train from Antwerp to Bruges takes less than two hours, a rattling across low green fields and through villages with narrow block houses. Above, gray skies that would be more or less a constant for the next week and a half. From the Bruges station it’s ten minutes walking to the center of town. The streets are narrow and cobbled, and pass over a canal here and there, or a grand old church made the more imposing by the dark skies overhead.

My hostel is located in the floors above a dark restaurant lit by candles and lamps, with dark wood beams and replications of medieval tapestries hung on the walls. I look around and make up my mind; I need to get some work done, and it might as well be here. I extend my reservation from two days to twelve and drop my pack before heading out to explore.

While I’m generally pretty good at finding my way back to a place I’ve been, even without a map, Bruges is a different story. This city is often called the “Venice of the North” because of its network of canals, but the name could fit some of the twisting streets just as well. You navigate by church steeples, as they’re far taller than any other building in the city, and a chance misplacement of one before I leave keeps me circling until dark, when I finally find a map and make my way back to the hostel. With a good walk under my belt and a better understanding of the city’s layout, I go to sleep happy with my choice to stay.

This is a working visit, and so for the first week I hardly get any exploring in. My hostel restaurant opens for breakfast and closes again until dinner at six in the evening, but I can work there otherwise since it has power plugins and free wifi (surprisingly rare in Bruges). My day starts at around 8, when I wake up and walk out into the city to get a coffee at a cafe and write for a couple of hours. Then I go back to the hostel, where I sit and work until the restaurant opens again. I walk out, read on a bench or get coffee and write some more, then find someplace to work a bit more on batteries or head back to the hostel to talk with the new arrivals.

My morning writing setup

At any hostel, being there for more than a few days makes you a veteran of sorts, and during my stay I see a constant flow of other travelers pass through. The first day there’s a couple of young guys from the States on their way down to Italy to try to learn Italian in a few weeks. The next, there’s Jesse from North Carolina, who’s headed to a metal festival in Germany, Karlie, a Kiwi on vacation from teaching in an English-speaking school in Abu Dhabi who’s heading up to the U.K. to see her fiancée, and a trio of girls from Austria who like my name because it’s one syllable and easy to remember. Next there’s Chenoa, an Australian linguistics student getting ready to study German in Germany, a random assortment of Aussies and Spaniards, and a Japanese or Korean couple here and there.

I get to know the staff as well, staying there as long as I am and working inside the hostel as much as I do. There’s Hanne at the desk, who speaks an impressive assortment of languages and works the day shift while I work across the room. Peter the cook, with a shaved head and a pierced eyebrow and a friendly smile for anyone who comes by. Masroud, the hostel’s jack-of-all-trades from Pakistan. Dominic, the tall older guy who lives upstairs, who’s slowly scraping down an outside wall to paint while taking frequent breaks to have a smoke or a coffee or talk about plans for the future. Hakir from Albania, who starts each workday with a cigarette and cup of coffee, and occasionally makes one for me as well if I happen to be nearby. Sabine, the owner, who’s in her late forties and comes in at night. With her weathered face, blue jeans, and plaid shirts, she could fit right in back in Montana, if not for the Dutch accent.

As the days go by I come to realize I rather like working while I travel. Traveling alone in a new country with nothing to do but sightsee is a sure recipe for eventual boredom and restlessness. Work lends some structure to my days and makes me appreciate the free time I do get, and goes a long way to making this new way of living seem less like an interminable vacation and more simply a different kind of lifestyle.

For those who are interested, this is how my business model works: I have clients in the States who I communicate with via email or Skype calls. I make iPhone applications, and my beta builds and their resources are shared via Dropbox, which updates automatically whenever you have internet but is still available offline. For banking, I use Charles Schwab, which lets me handle all my finances — even check processing from clients — remotely. It also redeems any ATM fees, which works perfectly given that some ATMs around the world charge as much as five or eight dollars for an international transaction.

Toward the end of my trip we finally have a marginally sunny day and I head out with Elke, Anoek, and Kyra, students on vacation from Holland. We visit the Chocolate Museum, where we find out about the relationships between chocolate and human sacrifice in the Incan empire, see the famous Belgian methods of chocolate-making,, and finally gaze upon the wonder that is the 500+ kilo Chocolate Obama (an old man I meet later tells me that the chocolatiers here were happy because “it’s a long time since any brown people were famous in Belgium”).

We spend the rest of the day walking around, and I enjoy the first really warm day since I’ve arrived. The edges of the city, where the old walls once stood, still have their moats, now plied by expensive private boats and complete with the modern equivalent to drawbridges.

Elke, Kyra, and Anoek, on a drawbridge

The city itself is narrow and medieval, and is still reminiscent of the vast wealth it controlled in its heyday as an important Belgian seaport. During that time it was a semi-independent fortified city-state, with a tendency to do what it wished and damn the consequences. At one point Maximillian of Austria, the nominal ruler of the region, was kidnapped while passing through Bruges and imprisoned in the building that’s now home to the Cronenberg Cafe. His legal representative, Pieter Lankhals (“Peter Long-Neck”) was beheaded, and when Maximillian was finally released he punished the city by shutting down the Yearmarket festival so important to the city traders. He also proclaimed that they should always feed and care for swans, to remind them of Peter Long-Neck’s murder. Bruges still does, to this day — the canals are full of the birds, much to the annoyance of the boat pilots, who will as soon speed up to run one over as turn aside to avoid them.

The people eventually started itching for their Yearmarket back, so they sent a petition to Maximillian. He’d apparently recovered by this time, because he granted their request. Feeling hopeful, they also asked him for a new insane asylum. Maximillian is said to have responded: “Close the gates of Bruges, and you’ll have your asylum already.” To this day, Bruggians (“Bruhas” in the local dialect) are inordinately proud of this intended insult, and the local beer, “Bruges Zot,” literally means “Brugge madman”.

My final day in the city is as cold and wet as the rest have been, but I’m still sad to finally pack my bags and check out. But as always, walking with weight on my back makes my heart lighter, and by the time I get off the train in Ghent to catch my bus to London, I’m positively happy. I navigate across the city and board outside the train station, settling into a hard seat and watching as the city rolls away outside. Somewhere up ahead is the English Channel crossing, and beyond that, London.

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Big Sticky Now Available!

Posted on July 26, 2011 by tsraveling

As many of you already know, one of the ways I support my travel addiction and vagabondish lifestyle is by developing iPhone applications. We all have to earn a living, and as far as it goes, iPhone development gives me the freedom and mobility I want in a job.

One project I’ve been working on since the beginning of the year and only just wrapped up in Charleston was called Big Sticky, which tells the story of a purple frog prince searching for his lost princess through a giant sentient castle. It was a blast to work on, and my artist partners at Big Bad Brush have the level of talent and dedication needed to make a great game.

As of today, Big Sticky is officially available for download, and is currently only $1.

With prices like that, you can’t resist. In addition, I get a percentage of that dollar. So when you’re thinking that a dollar is maybe too much to spend (*cough*tightwad*cough*), or you’re considering telling your friends about that new taco place instead of this awesome new game, just call to mind an image of me, shivering and cold in a ditch, because I can’t afford a warm place to sleep at night. Have a change of heart, buy, tell your friends, and you’ll keep me traveling and writing well into the future!

If you’re interested in hearing what it’s like to work regularly while on the road, stay tuned; I’ve been now a week and a half in Bruges, Belgium, working every day, and the main subject of my next post will be what the work environment is like for a digital nomad like myself.

Now, loyal readers, go forth into the world and spread the good news, because Big Sticky is here, and it’s here to stay.

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A Week in Antwerp

Posted on July 22, 2011 by tsraveling

A shuttle collects Paulis, Julia, Adam and I from the Hanjin Palermo, and I watch the ship fall away behind us before disappearing entirely in the tangle of stacked containers and heavy machinery. After a brief detour where I have my passport stamped, we head into the city by port taxi, passing factories and industrial areas belching steam under an overcast sky. Then the rattling of our tires on rough cobblestones, and I wonder what the average lifespan of a taxi cab is in a city like this, where the nearly every street must be bad for the axles.

There’s a brand new hostel in town with over two hundred beds, so we head there first. It’s five floors, cavernous, and still sterile and new, with clean white walls and neat, identical beds in room after room. My first thought is of a rather comfortable asylum. But it’s cheap: Adam and I book a room while Paulis and Julia wait, then head out to see the city.

Adam’s planning on getting a ride with a truck driver friend in a few days, so he heads off to find an internet cafe and get in touch while Paulis and Julia and I explore the city. It’s beautiful and busy, with plenty of tourists but still retaining the businesslike feel of a north Atlantic seaport. We walk for a while down along the canal, then head back in to look for an ATM. In the process we get turned around, and coming rather suddenly upon a grungy street full of lone, shifty-looking men, and shocked, nervously snickering tourists, we’re in Antwerp’s red light district. Tired-looking women in scanty getups no doubt meant to look sexy pose in windows, and make half-hearted attempts at seduction when any of the milling men outside happens to make eye contact. It’s two in the afternoon, and neither establishments nor customers are showing much enthusiasm.

Because I didn't know how much I'd have to pay to take pictures of Antwerp's lovely ladies, I didn't take any; here's a random house instead

Since the red light districts here are legalized, this one has clear boundaries and little of the attendant sketchiness you might find elsewhere in the world. The street ends; then there are some cheap diners and fast food places; and then we’re back in the old town, surrounded by churches and outdoor cafes.

That evening, we meet up with Adam again and have a burger near the city’s grand main train station, washing it down with a Belgian beer. As it turns out, Belgium rightly deserves its reputations as one of the world’s capitals of brewing. With our first glass, we make a toast to the Hanjin Palermo.

Then Paulis and Julia have to head back to the ship for their last leg to Bremerhaven. We say our goodbyes, and Adam and I head back to the hostel.

The next day I bring my computer into the shop to get it fixed, and am informed that it will take three to five days. With nothing else to be done, I leave it there and spend the next few days exploring and, in the evenings, talking with people staying at the hostel. I think we all feel a little dwarfed by the size of the place, especially given the fact that it’s still relatively unheard of, and so relatively empty. There’s Leif, an American passing through, Kris, a Norwegian hitchhiking south and still a bit shellshocked by the abundance of legalized cannabis in the Netherlands, and Anke, an art student here for some of the many museums in Antwerp.

I spend my mornings writing in cafes in my notebook, forced back into longhand with the temporary loss of my computer, and rather enjoying it. In the afternoons I walk, or sit on benches and read, or see a museum; Anke and I spend an afternoon at the Plantin-Moretus museum of printing, which turns out to be one of the best museums I’ve ever been to, but which I unfortunately wasn’t able to take any photos of. Cafes and fashion shops are everywhere, as are bikes; for every car that passes at least two or three bicycles do, even in the pouring rain. Parking for cars is all underground, but on the surface all you see is long curving metal racks holding hundreds of bicycles, set up at the edges of the public squares.

It rains on and off, making me wish I was able to work, but I make the best of it. I try Belgian fries, known in America as French fries, which are always cheap and filling and more substantial than their American fast-food counterparts. I try a Belgian waffle, which is a couple inches thick and has a couple more of whipped cream on top, with ice cream on the side. The mussels look amazing, but my computer crash has tightened my budget considerably, so mostly I content myself to just breathe deep when I walk past a restaurant. To distract myself, I buy bread and walk — through the pedestrian tunnel to the park across the river, where there’s a beautiful view of the city, or along the river walk, where you can see long flatboats steaming up toward the docks or down to the river ports further inland.

It’s about four days before I finally get my computer back, and after that I spend a few rainy days in Antwerp calculating my budget and getting everything back in working order. I realize that this is the downside to traveling while working — when you have to work, you have to work. I cancel plans to go to Paris, and reserve a week at a hostel in Bruges.

The pedestrian tunnel under the river

I spend my last day in Antwerp reading and writing in the station while I wait for my train.

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Across the Atlantic by Cargo Ship

Posted on July 16, 2011 by tsraveling


It’s six in the evening on the day I’m supposed to leave Charleston on the Hanjin Palermo, bound for Antwerp, and I haven’t heard a thing. Emails to my freighter agent have gone unanswered; repeated calls get only an answering machine. A google search shows the Hanjin Palermo head into the New York harbor, about two days behind schedule, but I still feel immensely better the next morning when my agent calls me and tells me that I’ll now be leaving on July 1.

I spend my extra two days working furiously to finish a work project, finally wrapping everything up late on the night before my departure. The next morning, a couple staying at the hostel gives me a ride to the container port north of town, and from there I get a taxi to the Hanjin Palermo’s gangplank — due to security concerns, it’s not possible to just walk into a port.

Trucks entering the crane unloading area

We pass through what feel like canyons of containers, laid out in neat rows and presided over by forklifts the width of a city street and four-wheeled lifters three stories high. The Hanjin Palermo, some eight hundred feet long, is being loaded by towering blue cranes that pluck incoming containres off of trucks and with startling precision settle them into place on board.

I pay the taxi driver and, backpack on my back, climb the creaking gangplank up onto the ship. The crew, who aren’t involved with the loading and unloading operations, are sitting on deck, watching everything while they smoke and eat lunch. I’m handed on down the side of the ship to where the first officer, a thin German with a strong handshake, greets me and shows me to my cabin. It’s four flights of stairs, but when I get there I couldn’t be happier; it’s hot and humid outside, but the cabin is air conditioned and spacious, and the two windows facing forward give me a perfect view of the loading operations.

I drop my bags and have a shower (in my very own private bathroom, I might add) and change my clothes, then go out on deck. Two levels further up is the bridge, with wings on either side that allow a greater range of perspective should the ship’s pilot need it for manuevering. Out on one of these is an older German woman named Inga, and we talk as I snap pictures of the activity down on the dock. Her reasons for taking the freighter are much like mine. Her son lives in Michigan. “I wanted to be able to feel the distance,” she says. “If you fly, it’s …” She waves a hand. “It’s nothing.”

The desk in my cabin

My bed and pack

My table and reading couch

At dinner I meet three other younger passengers: Adam from Austria, returning home after nine months on his own round-the-world trip, and Paulis and Julia, who’ve been living in Vancouver for a few years and are headed back to Latvia, where Paulis’ family lives, so that Paulis can start his own cabinet-making shop. Also on board are an older German couple. Wolfgang used to be in shipping, and is enthusiastic about the inner workings of our vessel. His English is sparse and my German is much worse, so I end up writing down ship parts in German with plans to look them up when I reach land.

Adam, Julia, and Paulis in the officer's mess

Dinner is excellent, the first of many heavy German recipes featuring meat and potatoes. Aftewards, the passengers head up to the bridge to watch as we cast off. Ropes thick as my leg are detached from the iron posts on shore and reeled in while two stocky tugboats tie on from the other side. Then, with a shudder barely felt through all the steel and cargo of the ship, we’re moving; slowly sideways at first, the distance widening by an inch a second. Then stronger, as the bow points out into the harbor and the screws get enough clearance from the dock to engage, boiling the water white behind us.

We make a wide circle within the harbor before pointing our nose eastward. The container port, navy base, and industrial plants of north Charleston pass along the shore, backlit by the setting sun; then the poorer parts of the residential areas, where little kids jump up and down on the end of wooden piers, waving at us; then the old town, with its glittering lights and church steeples and promenade along the waterfront. It’s almost dark when we pass Fort Sumter, with its blinking light, and the night obscures our view of land before the distance does.

It’s a strange moment, realizing that those few glittering lights in the distance will my last sight of the United States for a long time, but not an unpleasant one. It has none of the hurried rush of boarding a plane, none of the sterility of an airline cabin, none of the speed of takeoff, none of the objective distance of a coastline seen from thirty thousand feet. It’s just movement, a steady twenty knots, twenty-three miles per hour, and Adam, Paulis, Julia and I have a brief moment of silence over bottles of duty-free Becks beer as we watch it go. For Adam, too, it’s important: the last leg of his journey home, just as it’s the first real leg of mine. When I go inside, I still have cell service, and I give my parents a last phone call before turning off my phone for good.

After that, life aboard quickly settles into a routine. Breakfast is 7:30 to 8:30, lunch is 11:30 to 12:30, and dinner is 5:30-6:30. There’s coffee at 10 am and 3 pm, and for the last half of the trip, a few lively games of Mensch Argere Dich Nicht after afternoon coffee. My computer breaks again early in the trip, leaving me books leant by Adam and a fully stocked Kindle. If it’s nice, I go out on the deck and sweep the soot (which collects slowly, but constantly, from the ship’s smokestack) off one of the deck chairs and kick back and read. If it’s not, I go into my cabin and read. If no one’s at my table when you come down for breakfast, I read. I read one book for almost every full day I’m on board. After the last few 15-hour workdays in Charleston, it feels nice to be able to relax.

Mensch Argere Dich Nicht

One night, the Filipino crew throws a party, the first the weather has allowed in five months. There’s different vegetable dishes, grilled steaks and sausages, pasta, beer, strawberry punch, and an entire roasted pig on a spit. With all passengers, crew, and officers (except for the unlucky soul who draws bridge duty that night) on deck, we still only fill about three tables. We’re dwarfed by the mountain of containers in front of us, which is in turn dwarfed by the vast ocean around us. When the stars come out and the last light of day fades to a blue fringe on the horizon and you’ve had a beer or three, you can almost swear you can see the curvature of the Earth. And under it all, the rumble of constant eastward movement.

The crew (and hosts of the party)

I walk the perimeter of the ship every morning or afternoon, down the corridors that line the containers, to the bow, where if you’re lucky you can see flying fish gliding for stretches of a hundred feet or more, or dolphins leaping in pairs along the wake. Walking back, the containers creak worryingly overhead with the rocking of the ship, but the Captain assures us he’s never lost a single one, not even in the massive storm in the north Atlantic they passed through last year.

Our first few days are sunny, the next week cool and shrouded in fog. It’s only in the last full day that the sun really breaks out again. On that day, we enter the English channel, though at this point it’s still far too wide to see land. That night wake up around one, and outside in the dark is the glittering lights of a city on the French coast. I watch it for a while before going back to sleep.

I spend the next morning packing as the Belgian shoreline passes by outside. We cut into a side passage that funnels us from the English Channel into the vast container port of Antwerp, and spend four or five hours just navigating to our berth. Adam is grinning like a maniac. He breathes deeply and theatrically and says, “Smell this? This is European air!”

The Belgian shoreline

The process from Charleston is reversed; the tugs push us into our berth, the ropes are secured, the gangplank lowered. I check and re-check my cabin, which feels comfortably familiar after eleven days, and carry my pack down to the deck. Adam’s getting off here, too, and Paulus and Julia are going into town with us for the day. We’re finally given the okay to go ashore, and I walk down the gangplank with excitement in my soul.

Breathing deeply of this new air, I take my first step onto European soil.

Antwerp; last view from the Hanjin Palermo

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South to Charleston

Posted on June 28, 2011 by tsraveling

When I finally get my computer back in order, time passes quickly. The nearest bus into D.C. is a couple miles away, and the heat and my heavy workload keep me holed up, and I never make it into the city.

Instead, I stay in Herndon, taking walks when it cools in the evening to the grocery store, or to the surprisingly picturesque downtown area. Now and then I’ll step outside and the upstairs neighbors are out on the patio, and they usually invite me up for a beer or two. Friends of theirs stop by in ones and twos seemingly at random; one guy, Sham, spends hours telling elaborate and possibly apocryphal stories about his extended family — an eccentric old grandmother sitting on a mansion with cash bricked into the walls. Another set of grandparents’ gets married in India complete with elephants from Jaipur and an offer from husband to wife of the heads of the three men that had murdered her father. The wife sets them free in a fit of magnanimity, and later that night two of them are stoned to death by the villagers who had gathered to watch the wedding. The other is never heard from again. “He must have been the fast one,” says Eric, one of the permanent upstairs residents.

Early on Sunday, Storm sacrifices a good night’s sleep to drive me into the metro, and I head in to D.C.’s Union Station. Built as welcoming portals to the cities in an age when grandiosity was to be expected, the station here is as imposing and marble-faced as its equivalents in New York and Chicago. Statues line arching walls, and thick panes of glass let in the morning sun. Also like its counterparts, though, the closer you get to the actual trains, the dimmer, grayer, and more underground it becomes.

This time, the line is short and so is the wait. I board and settle into my window seat, and the world outside begins to move. The Washington Monument rises in the haze behind a sea of parking lots and anonymous office buildings, and then we’re crossing the Potomac, headed south. In Alexandria, we pass through the backyards of a red brick wall of town houses, partitioned by windows and adorned with patios and bare grass lots and old cars parked in tiny yards for lack of any streetside space.

Just past the Alexandria station there’s a building like a Phoenician lighthouse, a narrow cream-colored ziggurat amongst its more contemporary neighbors. It strikes me that there are some similarities between Salt Lake City and D.C. — both were built in inhospitable environs, desert and swamp, with grandiose vision and an unwavering faith in their respective futures. In Salt Lake, that vision was religious, with architecture and terminology coming from Christianity and Judaism; in D.C., it’s political, inspired by the great dead civilizations of the western world.

The city fades into low forests and swamps broken by the occasional field or swollen brown river. With little further variety in the scenery outside, I turn to my book — Paul Thereoux’ The Great Railway Bazaar. As Thereoux rolls through the dense jungles of Vietnam, the dense forests of Virginia and the Carolinas pass outside my window.

North of Charleston we rattle out onto long elevated tracks that pass over the widest swamps yet, punctuated by raised wooden platforms and rusty ladders ascending out of the muck.

Nine hours after leaving D.C. the train pulls into the little station ten miles north of Charleston. Stepping off the train is like walking into a sauna; the wall of heat and humidity makes me catch my breath. On a Sunday evening the buses into the city aren’t running this far out, and I get a ride in one of the waiting taxis. My cabby’s a talkative connoisseur of the city, who keeps a laptop on the passenger’s seat to take online courses when he’s not driving. He gives me his recommendations of restaurants and things to see in the city, outlines a basic walking layout, and drops me off at my hostel with a wave.

The NotSo Hostel is a surprisingly quiet place in the student district northwest of downtown, with public radio playing in the lounge, a kitchen (with free bagels and coffee in the morning), and un-air-conditioned but quiet dorm rooms upstairs. In classic southern style — it used to be a private residence — it has a wide balcony and front porch, both empty in this heat.

I spend the next full day in Charleston, stopping at cafes and libraries to work for a few hours at a stretch between exploratory walks. Venture off of the main drags and you find the coffee shops that serve the students here: you can tell a local place by its conversation. Someone comes in, joins, someone else leaves, voices hush, and the person who just left is discussed briefly: “did you hear she just moved in with …?” In the background, sounds of porcelain clinking and the hiss of steam.

In the evening I walk down along the Battery, a stretch of walkway that fronts the bay. It’s lined with ornate antebellum mansions and palm trees, and out in the harbor you can see the blocky shape of Fort Sumter under wheeling flocks of gulls. The Civil War started here: they say that when the first shots were fired the citizens of the city watched the opening hostilities from the their balconies and cheered. A century and a half later, their descendants sit as elderly and dignified as their houses, drinking and watching sailboats trace across the water.

I stop in at a place called Toast and order a platter of shrimp and grits, drenched in a buttery cream sauce, and an ice-cold glass of Belgian beer. It’s the first time I’ve had grits, and I can see why they’re so popular here in the south; they make the perfect compliment to an otherwise rich cuisine.

It’s dark when I walk back to my hostel, and it’s only then that one of the other charms of southern living is noticeable. The lights here are dimmer and warm, the buildings lower, the alleyways more frequent; here and there you see lit candles or old lanterns hanging from wooden beams on slanted porch roofs. Laundry on lines serve as privacy curtains, and look down a dark alley and you see a pool of warm light at the end, with quiet music or conversation drifting out into a night filled otherwise with only heat and cicadas. You never see more of the speakers than an occasional silhouette or movement of a head.

Tomorrow, if all goes well, I’ll board the Hanjin Palermo in the Charleston container port and begin my first transatlantic journey by sea. With the unpredictability of freighter travel, though, who knows; maybe I’ll be here another week. One way or another, I’m happy.

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New York, New York

Posted on June 21, 2011 by tsraveling

I step out of Penn Station in New York to a warm evening almost twenty-four hours after the time I boarded my train in Chicago (for an account of that journey, check out my guest post, coming soon over at Trains on the Brain). The air smells of gasoline and hot cement and recent rain.

There’s something about New York I’ve yet to really find anywhere else. I’ve now been here more than half a dozen times, coming for a few days or a week at a stretch. The first time was a cold November a few years back, with homeless men huddled around barrel fires and bundled shoppers staring at the Christmas displays in the windows of Macy’s and a gruff older gentleman who offered me a cigarette as I stepped of the bus and said a genial, “Happy Thanksgiving, motherf*cker,” as he walked off into the night.

To outsiders, New York has a reputation for rudeness, especially when coming from a background like mine. In the small town where I grew up, you waved at people while driving past them on the road, nodded at people you happened to make eye contact with across the street, and said “how’s it goin,” or “mornin” to people you passed on the sidewalk.

Here, you don’t make eye contact except by accident, and anonymity on crowded subway rides where you’re pressed in from every side can become an art form. But it’s not some inherent coldness that makes New Yorkers this way: it’s logistics. You take the subway down twenty blocks to hit your favorite grocery store and you pass maybe four hundred people on the way. Take it at rush hour and those numbers climb to the thousands. To stop and greet each one would take a lifetime.

Get past that unavoidable facade of impersonality, and you’ll find people just like you’ll find anywhere else: people who want to tell you about their kids, who want to show off their city to visitors, who want to apologize for the weather or maybe just say hello. As I ride the One train uptown to Columbia, backpack tucked under my seat, an older woman standing with a hand on the rail enthusiastically tells two British visitors her favorite hangout spots in Manhattan. Fifteen minutes and ninety blocks later when I get off at 116th, she’s still talking.

I’m staying with friends in Columbia Law, who are working in the city over the summer. Even now, at nine pm in the middle of summer vacation, the campus is full of students, lounging on benches or on the steps in front of the big marble library. It’s comfortably warm, moist but not muggy, and a perfect night to be outside. I drop my pack and head out with Kyndra, a friend from college, and Houston, her boyfriend and my host. We go to a hole-in-the-wall Mexican place a few blocks away, where I try to reverse-engineer a stuffed pepper in cream sauce and Houston makes a futile assault on a burrito the size of his head.

I have work to do in the city, and over the next few days I mostly hop from one wireless spot to another, from the small cafes and bookshops around Columbia and NYU to the chains like Starbucks and Argo Tea to New York’s big public spaces like the library on 40th and 5th avenue, home to the famous Rose reading room, made more famous by being the site of that famous scene from Ghostbusters. Outside one Starbucks bathroom on Broadway, a man in cowboy boots and a nice suit, who’s either a junkie or really has to go, dances nervously and apologizes under his breath until the door opens and he ducks inside.

I go out to dinner with my friend Marc, who I met as my couchsurfing host in Paris a few years back, and his girlfriend. We hit a truly excellent burger joint (bacon, sauteed onions, bleu cheese, spicy mayonnaise) and they tell me the story of how they met, which involved a Costa Rican beach bonfire, an insane and temporarily homeless Frenchman, and the discovery that they’d soon be living across the street from each other in Queens. Marc’s apartment is on the sixteenth floor of a high rise on the river’s front, and at night from the balcony the lights of Manhattan glitter out across the water.

On my way back, I take the ferry down the east river, passing under the Williamsburg, Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, past a tugboat steaming for the harbor, and finally docking in South Ferry, on the edge of Wall Street. After a requisite photo of the Bull, I head back north, putting more grimy sidewalk miles underfoot. Already I can feel the soles of my feet blistering, healing, turning tough and leathery, can feel my calves hardening up. It’s good to be walking again.

I drop into a used bookstore on Prince St. and am unable to resist buying a copy of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which I read on the subways and in a park here and there, struck and inspired by his cleanness of prose. I stop for an evening with my friend Kate, who I also met in Paris. She helps me pick out a present for my sister’s birthday, and then I’m on my way again. My last night, I have drinks with Houston and Kyndra, say my goodbyes, and sleep soundly.

In the morning I head back to Penn Station to catch the bus to DC. It’s about three hours into the drive when my computer makes a hard crash and doesn’t recover. It stays that way for the next couple of days, until I finally bring it in to a Mac Store in northern Virginia to get it fixed. The repair is free, but my hard drive is gone, wiping out all of my photos and some of my old work in the process. Fortunately, I still have all of my second-best New York pictures on my camera, and I pick through these for ones suitable for posting. My writing and important work is all backed up online, and at the end of the day, everything’s more or less back to normal. My moment of panic when I thought I’d have to blow my bank account on a whole new machine has passed.

I’m now in Herndon, in the DC area. I’m solvent, I’m working, and I’ll be here until Sunday, when I head down to Charleston to catch my freighter. Tune in then for news of old friends and explorations of the city I lived close to for three years but rarely really saw.

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Greyhound Buses and a Deep-Dish Pizza

Posted on June 14, 2011 by tsraveling

That night in Salt Lake City, there’s a point where I’m sure I’ll have to spend the night on the sticky station floor.

As of a few days before, my Amtrak ticket to Chicago had been canceled due to severe flooding on the tracks in the midwest. And so I’m here, in Salt Lake’s dingy Greyhound station, in the middle of a long line that stretches around blue plastic seats and a broken vending machine and through the gated waiting room entrance.

The man ushering people through the doors and onto the bus is big, with a crooked grin and an eastern European name, and waves passengers through one by one: a group of laughing black guys, one of whom is wearing a brand new cowboy hat on top of a faded blue baseball cap, a large woman with three wild kids, and a dour old man who, two spaces in front of me, is certain we’ll be left to fend for ourselves until tomorrow’s bus.

Outside, the idling greyhound fills, person by person, until even from the outside it looks crowded. As the girl immediately in front of me gets to the door, the big man holds up a hand for her to stop. The bus’s driver leans out, looks at the line, and shakes his head. In front of me, the girl curses under her breath.

As my mind starts working, wondering if I can change my train ticket out of Chicago, if I can sleep here without getting robbed or stepped on, the doorman grins and tells us there’s a second bus.

Laughing with relief, the remainder of the line piles on board. There are few enough of us that each of us gets our own seat. By this time it’s already late, and I sit and read as we roll out of Salt Lake and east towards Wyoming.

By the time I wake up, stiff and bleary-eyed the next morning, we’re rolling into Denver. I contemplate calling an uncle who lives here, but it’s early and the line for the transfer to Omaha is already forming.

The wait isn’t long. Soon enough, we climb onto the bus — and then sit. And sit. It seems the driver’s expecting another bus, and it’s forty-five minutes before we finally leave the station.

It’s a full day between Denver and Omaha, and in the space of that time transient communities spring up along the length of the bus, brief friendships formed by shared circumstance and proximity. I work through the morning, but by lunch start talking with the girl in front of me and the big guy in the cowboy hat to my right.

The funny thing about these kinds of short acquaintances is that you can hear a lot about a person’s life before you even learn their name. The girl is from Wisconsin, and is on her way back from dropping off her son, Kalihon (a thousand pardons if I mistook the spelling), with her parents for the summer while she works in Wisconsin transcribing phone conversations for the deaf. The guy in the cowboy hat is a truck driver, genial despite being diverted 500 miles out of his way en route to Fargo to pick up a semi. I’m struck by the fact that drivers like him easily cover in a month the distance I’ll travel over the next year.

The man behind us, with a thick voice and hangdog eyes, speaks up occasionally, telling us about his girl, who he met online and has been planning to visit for more than a year. The reason he hasn’t yet is that she got into a fight with “some foreigners” and was put in jail, and his ticket money went to bail her out (“Expensive first date,” says the girl from Wisconsin). Now he’s finally scraped up enough to buy another ticket and is going to visit her, and help her sue the foreigners for, he says, half a million dollars. The story calls to mind a quest, Quixotic or not, with villains and damsels and a pile of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Through it all, I never learn any names. It’s only later in the day, as we’re crossing Nebraska, that I learn that the girl from Wisconsin’s name is Shannon.

Shannon and the trucker get off the bus at Des Moines, and I settle in to sleep til Chicago. We pull in early, despite running late the night before, and I make my way out into the city on a cold gray morning.

By the time I’ve found the train station, a grand old building just a few blocks away, the mist is clearing and the sky is blue. I lock up my pack and head out into the city. My first thought is to find a cafe, but it’s six in the morning on a Sunday and everything is closed. Instead, I walk through the city to the lakefront, than along the shore out to the Navy Pier — an impressive location that, in entrepreneuring practicality, has been turned into the city’s most touristic spot, complete with ferris wheel, tour boats, and a super-McDonalds. It does, however, make for a good view.

By the time I’m walking back through town, the city’s come alive, with the sorts of things you only see in cities — enterprising homeless people selling advice and copies of The Onion (available free from stands on streetcorners), lines of tourists in front of this sight or that, and, at one point, an elderly black couple shrieking with laughter while roaring down the street in a brand new banana yellow Mustang. Above it all, the Willis (née Sears) Tower, with a line out the Skydeck entrance a hundred yards long.

No trip to Chicago would be complete without a ride on that fabled El train, so I make a circuit round the loop and walk another line through the city, enjoying the ache in my legs and the feeling of ground underfoot after thirty hours on the bus.

There’s a blues festival in town, and in the lakefront parks visitors swarm to the sound of bass guitar.

I stand and watch for a while, being a fan ever since I discovered Mark Knopfler and Gov’t Mule, but my stomach is whining for attention after a day and a half of nothing but sparse bus fare, and I realize that it’s time. Time for the thing I came here for, the main reason I was glad for a 15-hour layover in this city:

Deep-dish pizza. Cooked in a cast iron pan, with crunchy crust and thick white cheese, with smoked sausage and fried mushrooms, with big chunky tomatoes, with nothing in my stomach from the last couple of days but a fast food stop in Nebraska.

It was heaven.

Note: Even though I’m in New York as I write this, I’ll be covering my Amtrak trip in my next post. Meanwhile, keep an eye out for my guest post on the Lake Shore Limited from Chicago to New York over at Trains on the Brain.

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The Rubber Hits the Road

Posted on June 10, 2011 by tsraveling

And so it begins.

Early on the morning of June 4, I climbed into the family car with my two sisters and parents for a week of camping in southern Utah and, for me, the start of a three-year journey around the world. Despite my mind’s clambering about the portentous nature of the occasion, though, my body just wanted to go back to bed, and I ended up sleeping for the first few hours of the drive.

I awoke as we drove into Salmon, Idaho, under clear blue skies. A cluster of arrows protruded from the second story sideboards of the Owl Club, presumably fired by  revelers the night before from the saloon across the street. But this was Saturday morning, and the town was asleep. We stopped for donuts, bagels, and coffee, and headed south.

The forests, mountains, and prairies of Idaho and northern Utah began to fade after Salt Lake City into the arid desert and monolithic rock formations of the southern part of the state.

As the sun began to set, we turned off I-15 and drove into Springdale, the gateway town to Zion National Park. The gray asphalt of the interstate changed to the deep orange-red of roads made with redrock gravel and tar. The buildings, low and stocky to cope with the heat, were small against the towering sandstone cliffs.

With the last of the sunlight glowing on the rock walls of the canyon, we set up camp, had supper, and went to sleep.

We were up early the next day, eager to get on the trail. I’ve been coming down to Utah with my family since I was about eleven years old, and hiking seems to be in our blood. Jenny (above, right) and my dad were training for a marathon until Jenny hurt her knee, Abby (above, left) is endlessly energetic, and my mom, despite reminding us that she’s now over 50, kept a pace that would have exhausted quite a few 30-year-olds. As for me, my legs burned from unaccustomed exertion — working on a computer, it seems, isn’t all that good for your walking legs. After months of sitting, even the burn felt good.

On our first day, we climbed up to Hidden Canyon, on Zion’s east wall. Though the stream was mostly dry, the canyon was still green with trees and brush, in the way only a wet spot in the desert can be. In the evening, we climbed to the Emerald Pools, where we were greeted by the sound of hundreds of frogs in mating season, their deep croaking resonating off the surrounding cliffs.

The star hike of Zion (when the river’s too high for the Narrows, at any rate) came the next morning, when we made the three-mile climb to Angel’s Landing, a high spire of rock jutting out from the west wall, and accessible only by a frighteningly narrow bridge that arcs out from the flat at the top of the switchback trail (called whimsically, Walter’s Wiggles).

From the flat, you climb up and out across the bridge, holding on to chains set in the rock, until finally you come out on top. From there your position commands the view up and down the main canyon, and the Zion shuttle-buses are nothing more than bits of white on the thread-thin road. Hikers, if visible at all, are only moving points of color in the desert.

I first climbed Angel’s Landing at the age of thirteen or so. Though I didn’t let on about it to anyone at the time, I was afraid of heights, and I remember laying awake the night before imagining the vast space between those thin chains and the valley floor over a thousand feet below. When the time came I steadied my nerve as much as I could, and ventured out — to find that the climb was not so difficult, and that whenever a sure foot or handhold was available, there was no danger of falling. I haven’t been afraid of heights since.

We had only two days in Zion before heading east through the desert to Kodachrome Basin State Park, where we found (oh wonder of all wonders) a campground with showers and beautifully clean bathrooms, things which only inveterate campers can really appreciate. While not so spectacular as Zion, Kodachrome was nice in its own quieter way, and the colorful rock was especially pretty in the sunset.

We finished our hiking within the park on our first day, passing some old fence-lines, rock pinnacles, and a rather underwhelming overlook called “Panoramic Point.”

Nearby Paria Canyon was better, traced with cracked dirt roads and dusty trailhead markers and old creekbeds. We hiked down one of these on our second day, with a trickle of brown water running through high-walled slot canyons and arid gulches that seemed right out of the old west.

At the end, where the creek met a wider riverbed at the base of a high cliff, Native American petroglyphs were cut into the walls: antelope, stick-man hunters, plants, spirals, glyphs that clearly had some meaning once, but were indecipherable now. On one half of this wall was a long line that looked for all the world like a map of the canyon, with markings along it for food plants, game, and shelter.

Around these were petroglyphs of newer mint: graffiti from 1986, 1943, from a few years ago, names and dates and hearts with arrows. Humans, like dogs, feel more inclined to leave their mark on a place where someone else has already done so.

We hiked a few more trails, drove out to see an arch, and got briefly lost in a bone-dry canyon. We spent our nights playing games or reading around Dad’s propane lantern, then bundled into tents and sleeping bags as the hot desert days turned into cold desert nights.

And then it was done. Yesterday morning, we packed up camp and drove north for Salt Lake City, deciding against stopping en route at Timpanagos Cave, but stopping instead at the (still cavernous) Cabelas store south of the city. While driving I got the news, just a day old, that my train ticket had been canceled due to “service interruptions.”

Suddenly thrown into uncertainty about my transportation options to the east coast, I quickly called Amtrak, and found that their tracks are underwater in parts of the midwest between Denver and Chicago due to extreme flooding. After some quick ticket-hustling, I rebooked for the same times on a Greyhound to Chicago, and a train onward to New York.

I was thrown briefly out of sorts by the whole affair, but then it occurred to me that this is what my trip is all about. Icelandic volcanos aside, air travel is rarely affected by the quirks of the planet it moves across. As it is separating by nature, it is also separated; in an air-conditioned compartment at 30,000 feet, floods can never be anything but abstract. On the ground, they can change everything.

Tickets sorted, we arrived in Salt Lake and checked into a rather ornate hotel (the Little America) across the street from a very ornate hotel (the Grand America). The knowledge that this was our last night together before my return to Montana in a few years did little to dampen mine and my family’s spirits, and we headed into town to see the sights. In Salt Lake City, that means Mormonism, and the Temple square was unavoidable (if pleasant; Mormons are clean, friendly, prosperous folk, rather like Canadians, if Canadians wanted very much for you to also become Canadian).

More interesting to me, though, was the rest of the city. The main public library (above) is truly wonderful, with wide open spaces, sweeping architecture, a rooftop garden, and elevators so fast and smooth they almost seem to be From The Future. And then there was the bookstore (seeing a pattern?): Ken Sanders’ Rare Books, just a few blocks away. I had to remind myself that my backpack space was limited, and that I couldn’t buy anything. Had I still an apartment, I would have come out with an armload.

Then dinner, our last together as a family until I get back: excellent brick-oven pizza and, for my dad and I, a dark microbrew. We walked back to the hotel happy, and watched a movie in the room as night fell.

This morning, we woke up and said our goodbyes. I love my family, and leaving them is one of the only real downsides to this trip. We’ll have Skype and phones to talk, and I can’t help but wonder what it must have been like a century ago, when a trip of this length meant occasional letters and no other contact. As romantic as the travel of 1900 seems to me, there are plenty of reasons I’m glad I’m traveling now.

On my own for the foreseeable future, I’m spending the day in Salt Lake. Tonight I board a bus for Chicago, and on Sunday, a train for New York.

Until then.

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Eastbound

Posted on June 4, 2011 by tsraveling

Early tomorrow morning, I’ll leave the town I’ve called home since I was four years old, and I won’t see it again for the next three years.

The business of wrapping up work projects, packing, and condensing my life has occupied my mind for a couple of weeks now, barely allowing me a moment to think about just what it is I’m doing. When I do, it’s flashes of thought, panicked, excited, doubtful, questioning: I walk into a gas station and suddenly say to myself, I won’t buy anything here again until 2014. I watched the sun set behind the mountains tonight and thought: that’s something I’m not going to see again for a very long time.

Add to that the knowledge that the person I am now will never be here again. Travel changes you, matures you, expands you; when I see this place again, I’ll see it through different eyes.

And then there are the little things, like choosing between two shirts in limited backpack space. Or deciding how many pens to bring, or whether or not to bring Hesse’s Siddhartha in German (will it really force me to learn?). But one by one, these things are decided, and the pack coalesces within a halo of detritus, piles of trash, piles of “give to siblings”, piles of thrift store donations.

Goodbyes: repeating, over and over again, that awkward admission that no, I won’t be back here for quite a while. Easier with acquaintances; harder with friends. But one by one, goodbyes are said, and fewer obstacles remain to departure.

Finally the sun goes down, my pack is loaded into the car, and my things are laid out for tomorrow morning. Whatever isn’t in my pack or my work bag isn’t coming. Phone numbers for travel are set up, bank is informed, and minor tasks are taken care of.

And with them, my final worries, final second-guesses, flicker out. Replacing them is only a single word, a single concept, rising above all else:

Eastbound.

Hells yes.

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