Literary Tourism: A Plethora of Places Claim Samuel Clemens As an adult, far removed from the trials of middle school and any controversies about its reading lists, then or now, I don’t think much about Mark Twain, formerly known as Samuel Clemens, commonly known as the uber Americana author, creator of Tom Sawyer and Huck…
Category: Bashfully Literary
Slacking the Saint James
Doing the Camino de Santiago Your Way The little nagging fear about embarking on a pilgrimage is, at least in my case, that everyone else on the trail will be a whole lot more religious than I am. So it is with some pleasure that I pick up yet another book about someone walking the…
Books about the Great Depression: Mont Saint Michel for Changing Times
Looking for a book about the Depression? Roger Vercel’s 1938 novel about the mount still entices What I like about Mont Saint Michel is that the closer you climb to the top of the mount, the farther you are from the touristy crappiness that can accompany any highly popular destination. Ascending the mount in France…
Cruising Cemeteries around the Globe
Touring Graveyards for History and Understanding I suppose if you are bashful, a cemetery is a great place to visit given that no one is likely to talk to you much. I like cemeteries for the opportunities they provide to commune with the universe, to learn a bit about history, and to appreciate how other…
Machu Picchu for Tea Time
Set back by the mid-January wind chill and an ick-disease variation of the flu, I turn to Mark Adams’s Turn Right at Machu Picchu to carry me away far from the sniffles and Nyquil-charged fog. I am already enthused by the story—a contemporary effort to recreate Hiram Bingham’s path toward Machu Picchu—and the romance of…
The Wild Backstory
Although my idea of “roughing it” involves having to walk from my cabin to a clubhouse for dinner, I still enjoy books about more rugged adventures involving far more outdoorsiness than I am ever likely to pursue. I sometimes imagine that I’ll move more toward this type of travel and, truth-be-told, I have over the…
The Key West Wife
Visiting the Hemingway house in Key West, FL, the Bashful Adventurer finds his Key West wife.
Have a Limited Travel Budget? Try an Amazon Jungle Walk
Everything I needed to know about traveling, I could have learned from Ed Stafford’s Walking the Amazon: 860 Days. One Step at a Time. He’s the first man to have walked the Amazon, a little journey that took him just over two years. I’ve spent the last several days reading the book. I’m sure Ed…