travel

Ye Olde Waffle Shop

John Lane — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 10:45:18 -0500

There is a great deal of talk in the current election cycle about what is real and what is fake. Who is a real American? Where is the "real" Virginia? Who is more "real"-Joe the Plumber or the latte liberal? It seems to be a watershed year for reality.

The Garden on the Hill

John Lane — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 09:53:09 -0400

This past weekend when I flew to Vermont for an environmental studies conference at Middlebury College I knew I would be impressed by the elite liberal arts school's efforts at "greening" its campus, curriculum, and student body. After all, Middlebury received a grade of A- on the College Sustainability Report Card for 2008. Furman, the greenest school in our region, scored B- on the same report.

Remembering the Everglades

John Lane — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 13:51:01 -0400

Last week the state of Florida announced a monumental conservation agreement as big as anything ever achieved out west-a $1.75 billion deal to buy 187,000 acres of farmland from U.S. Sugar and use much of it in the Everglades' $10 billion restoration project.

Point Reyes Station

John Lane — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:21:08 -0400

On our California trip we stayed several nights in a friend's B&B near Point Reyes Station. Our lodging was officially in Inverness, just across Tomales Bay, but it was an easy drive into town to explore.

Two Nights in the Crab Kingdom

John Lane — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 08:19:02 -0400

This summer our vacation was short, but spectacular, full of Fourth of July fireworks, rich food, and Americana music. Rather than fly halfway across the country for a week in some Ecotopia we hopped a plane to Baltimore to see our son Rob's band The Belleville Outfit open for Lyle Lovett . The concert venue was downtown on the ritzy Inner Harbor, and once on the ground we tried to keep our carbon footprint local and low by riding the MTA light rail in from the airport.

California Dreaming

John Lane — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:18:30 -0400

Sometime it's good to slip away to get a fix on things. With all the talk lately about growth in the Upstate, I wondered where some community had done it differently. Where have those who believe in the rhetoric of growth as if it were a religion not cleared the land and covered it all with suburbs? Where have those in power not simply accepted that populations must double, that all land must be privately bought and sold?

New York Stories

John Lane — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:28:33 -0500

Last week we spent a few days in Manhattan. While I was there I had flashes of previous trips to the City. There have been few enough so that all six or seven journeys north are memorable.

In many ways a trip to New York City is about as different as life can get from living in the suburban upcountry of South Carolina. A trip there always feels like true travel to a foreign place. Strange things always happen. The energy comes in waves. There's the density-a million and a half people living in 22 square miles-but it's not the density that makes the air feel so different and strange in New York. It's the intense life of the island, the way the folkways and culture of the mythic place have developed their own rhythms and surprises. It's the power and the madness and the excitement.

Urban Alaska

John Lane — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:22:28 -0400

When we landed in Anchorage it was near midnight, but it wasn't until we walked out of the terminal that "land of the midnight sun" really meant something to me. It was so light that we could see 20,000-foot Mount McKinley in the distance. Betsy pointed out that she could also see what looked like her worst far-north nightmare: a snowfall swirling in the air all around. Not snow, our Alaska friend Venable Vermont assured her, but millions of cottonwood seeds drifting on the summer breeze.

North to Alaska

John Lane — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 07:58:48 -0400

It's five a.m. and I'm in Valdez, a small fishing town and the southern terminus of the Alaska Pipeline. When I walked outside before disappearing into the stuffy one-room business center to complete my weekly column I could see three hanging glaciers around the head of the Valdez Arm. It took us a full day to get here— two hours by car from Seward, and six hours on a slow ferry from Whittier, a town at the end of a 2-mile tunnel through high ragged mountains. We worried we would hate Valdez. An oil terminal, though an important part of Alaska's story, was not something we wanted to explore. We were looking for another part of the story: Alaska's legendary wildness. Betsy wanted to see a wild moose. I wanted to feel, as the painter Rockwell Kent once did, at the top of the world and miles from nowhere.

Cornbread & Sushi on the Road Again

John Lane — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 07:47:09 -0500

When you read this I'll be in the middle of driving around the upper South for ten days with my colleague Deno Trakas and 12 students in two rental vans. At Wofford we call January "Interim," and it's a chance to be innovative, a chance to focus, to explore one subject in depth for an entire month.