Travel
America On the Move (Including the Obamas)
This warm, warm summer has prompted vacationers to seek the cool as well as new (and old) attractions. Even the First Family is exploring new vistas. Could they include the *Chelsea Clinton's wedding on July 31st?
The Smithsonian National Museum of American History presents an online exhibit, America On the Move. The Transportation Before 1876 section explores "the ways that improved American transportation networks that helped create new links within the country. See how the nation’s growing numbers of steamships, roads, canals, and railroads — including the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 — created skeins of connection in the nation. Take a look at a map of America in 1876 — the country’s centennial year — and see how the transportation systems had developed into an increasingly national network."
Travel Notes; Tales to Tell
"I’ll go to Cambridge and see the grandkids!," I fantasize during a sleepless night in February. My husband is hospitalized for breathing problems, the second of two blizzards grips the area and on this third day with no electricity, the temperature in the house has fallen to 40 degrees. Cold and wakeful, I muse about lying on a tropical beach or taking a cruise along the Turkish Coast. As I drift in and out of sleep, I settle on a more practical scenario that includes a couple of days with the children in Cambridge, a day trip to London and a three day tour of Paris.
Read More...A Trip Through Henry James's Italian Hours
An excerpt from the free text of Henry James's Italian Hours at Project Gutenberg:
I must not, however, speak of St. Mark's as if I had the pretension of giving a description of it or as if the reader desired one. The reader has been too well served already. It is surely the best-described building in the world. Open the Stones of Venice, open Théophile Gautier's ltalia, and you will see. These writers take it very seriously, and it is only because there is another way of taking it that I venture to speak of it; the way that offers itself after you have been in Venice a couple of months, and the light is hot in the great Square, and you pass in under the pictured porticoes with a feeling of habit and friendliness and a desire for something cool and dark.
Join In A Worldwide Beach Project, Preserve Memories at Gulf Beaches
The present oil leak situation in the US brings to the fore the need to preserve and treasure beaches around the world. When our husband returned from duty in Viet Nam he was transferred to Eglin Air Force Base, Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. We were lucky enough to find an apartment on Okaloosa Island less than a block from one of the Gulf of Mexico's white sand beaches, one of those now endangered by the oil leak.
London's Victoria and Albert Museum has created a beach project website that you might want to join in; we've copied the explanation and instructions from the site. Devised by weaver Sue Lawty in association with the V&A.
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