Here is a slide show I made to highlight recent trips we have made at William Woods University. In recent years, we have travelled the map, journeying to Peru, the American south, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Italy and Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Next up: France and a return trip to Pine Ridge.
Last week a group of us worked on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. We were hosted by Re-member who organizes a service outreach to the Lakota Nation. For fourteen years, Re-member has been hosting groups in an intensive cultural immersion program. We learned the stories of the Lakota people and did various work projects throughout the week. We built bunk beds and outhouses and skirted a trailer with plywood. Here are some pictures from that trip and some stories of our experience.
In March a group of us traveled to Italy where we toured Rome, Assisi, Florence, Bologna and Venice. Here are some pics from the mother land.
I love hearing stories of people going places, seeing the world, leaving behind their comfort zone, vagabonding.
At an afternoon Easter party yesterday, I met a man from Dallas, Texas. He was in his mid to late seventies and visiting his son and family. He had worked for Texas Instruments for a number of years before retiring ten years ago. I asked him if he had gone into his retirement with hobbies or if he had to find some. He said it took him about a year and a half to get adjusted to the life of a retiree but he eventually he did. He got serious about cycling.
He went decades without riding a bike and then when he was 50, he bought a Huffy bicycle at Target for $69. He rode it three miles and he thought he was going to fall over and faint. A quarter of a century later, and with a much better bike, he now rides three thousand miles a year.
He has made two long trips. He once cycled from Lawrence, Kansas to Omaha, Nebraska, east across Iowa, south to St. Louis, before returning west across Missouri. And a few years ago, he rode his bike from Prague, Czech Republic to Budapest, Hungary. Pretty impressive for a man in his seventies. And get this – he’s not done. As if wanting to be out of earshot of his son and daughter-in-law, he quietly told me he has two more trips he wants to make. He wants to ride from the Twin Cities in Minnesota along the Mississippi River down to New Orleans. And then, if his health holds up, he wants to make a coast-to-coast trip in America.
“There’s just some things you can only see while riding a bicycle. You know, you drive a car around all the time and you miss so much of what is going on.”
I asked him if he was probably in better shape now than when he was in his fifties and he said, “Oh, yes. I ride primarily for two reasons. I ride for myself, to take care of my health. But I also ride for my grandchildren. I want to live to see them grow up.”
His “bucket list” bravado reminded me of another such story. A few weeks ago, the news told of an 85 year old man who, since childhood, had wanted to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a raft. Years later, the man made the trip. He had received a settlement from a car accident and with the money he decided to construct a raft out of pipe. He posted an advertisement and found other volunteer crew members to make the voyage with him. His fellow sailors were also in their golden years. Together, they journeyed for two months, from the Canary Islands to a Caribbean island in a trip that spanned 2,800 miles at sea.
I love this quote:
“Some people say it was mad,” Anthony Smith told the Associated Press. “But it wasn’t mad. What else do you do when you get on in years?”
And then there was this travel story. A guy paid a New York cabbie $5,000 for a taxi ride from New York to Los Angeles. The trip lasted six days and covered 3,000 miles. Why did the passenger want to do it?Well, the man wanted to pay tribute to his father who had been a cab driver. And he also wanted to see the territory and, perhaps, market his story to Hollywood.
Yesterday I had an interesting chat with an Army paratrooper from Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The 26 year old soldier from Baltimore, Maryland was setting up a target on the street for his crew members who would be making the jump at the Memorial Day parade. In order to make a jump into a tight place, you have to log 500 jumps. He had 317 and was hoping to be at 500 by this time next year. He said it took about 250 jumps before he was no longer nervous. The highest he has dropped is from 17,100 feet, a fall that takes about 87 seconds. The most jumps he has made in a day is around 30. We talked about comfort zones, threshold anxiety and the mental preparations required for combat (he has served one year tours in Afghanistan and Iraq) and jumping out of a plane.
Actor Andrew McCarthy doubles as a travel writer and in a recent CNN interview with Campbell Brown he talks about the value of travel.
Campbell Brown: You write that you think traveling makes you a better person, that you are more at home sometimes.
Andrew McCarthy: I find myself feeling more of at home in myself the farther away from home I am. …I think I find myself in a real good way when I’m traveling and when I’m sort of broken out of my normal routine and dependant on the kindness of strangers. I think I’m a better version of myself. I’m think most people are.
Then, when asked why don’t more Americans travel, McCarthy responded:
28 percent of Americans have passports and half of those use them. I think America would be a vastly different place if we traveled. I think we’re very fearful. I think we’d be a lot less fearful if we saw…if we made ourselves vulnerable to other people and their cultures.
Here’s a video of the interview:
http://campbellbrown.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/24/travel-writer-andrew-mccarthy/
With the New Orleans Saints in the Super Bowl and this, the centennial of Twain’s death, here is a description of the time when Sam Clemens first set foot in the “Big Easy”:
When the Crescent City docked at the New Orleans levee in late May 1857, Clemens was exhausted. But he had more than two weeks to practice something he was already quite good at – sightseeing. Two things particularly fascinated him, the market and the cemeteries. The bright colors, the variety of tropical fruits, the plethora of every kind of produce from the kitchen, the farm, and the sea, sent his senses reeling with delight. The market was as much a display of people as of products, their multi-toned voices, their variety of skin tones, their diversity of languages: ‘groups of Italians, French, Dutch, Irish, Spaniards, Indians, Chinese, Americans, English, and the Lord knows how many more different kinds of people.’ To him the variety was an asset, the differences desirable, the community both tactilely sensual and raucously harmonious, his first experience with the American marketplace as a polyglot, multi-ethnic epitome of the national culture. His sheer pleasure in New Orleans was a step toward his gradual transcendence of Missouri slave culture provincialism and his increasing discomfort with xenophobia” (The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography, Fred Kaplan).
Twain would write to his sister Pam: “It has been said that a Scotchman has not seen the world until he has seen Edinburgh; and I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.”
A journal of reflections on things seen and unseen, wimsical and wise, ordinary and odd, magical and mundane
