Travel

alaska.jpg Twenty years ago this summer I fell in love with Alaska. After graduating from college and moving permanently to Atlanta with friends, I thought I had died and gone to heaven by escaping my small town life. My parents quickly threw a wrench into all the excitement by informing me we were going on a family vacation to Alaska - a week on a cruise ship. I balked, begged and pleaded not to go. I am the least 'outdoorsy' person in the world. I don't like to be cold and I don't like to be hot. My definition of camping is a night at a Holiday Inn Express. 

We boarded the ship in Vancouver and spent the first night at sea. When I woke up the next morning and peered through the tiny porthole, I was amazed and astonished. It was the most magnificent scenery I had ever seen. The snow covered mountains soared above the clouds and the ocean looked so vast it almost seemed powerful. Since there are only about 4 hours of darkness each night, I woke up when the sun came up with as much excitement as a child does on Christmas morning.

I have been back to Alaska about 10 times since that summer, another cruise, a trip to Juneau to visit my old friend Reecia and the rest for work, long layovers in Anchorage with my “stewardess job."

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grilled-sea-bass-in-hvarMy wife, Peggy, and I recently returned from a cruise from Barcelona to Venice with a few extra days in the Veneto for wine tasting and despite being an occasional internet food blogger (and therefore a food expert without any real knowledge or training – I do so love the internet), we still learned a few things that might help you eat and drink your way across Europe. Enjoy!

Eat the local food: I know that this can be scary for some, but just do it. Even though Peggy and I were on a cruise, we found plenty of chances to eat off the ship, and part of the fun of traveling is trying what you’ve never had before, or just the better, more authentic local versions of the dishes found at home. For Peggy and me, this meant mounds of homemade pasta in every shape, size and texture – and pasta is never scary. In Sardinia, the pasta was fregola, which looks like big couscous, tossed with local shellfish and bottarga, a local specialty of cured fish roe that has been salted and preserved and then grated over the pasta (okay a little scary, but amazingly good with a briny deep sea flavor). In Malta, we were told rabbit was the local staple and while the few times Peggy and I have eaten rabbit it has felt a bit like eating the Easter Bunny, the fried rabbit was fantastic, with a crisp and sticky garlicky outer shell covering the tender sweet meat. (Once, in Sweden, we were told to try the reindeer, which we ate and enjoyed, but then it felt like eating Rudolf.) In Hvar, Croatia, a small beach resort town, the fish is brought in fresh, and then grilled with coarse salt. We were told to eat it and we did. No regrets.

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old-style-suitcase.jpgI have a horny wanderlust, always insatiable, perpetually unrequited.  Oh sure, I’ve had my trips on locations:  from the gentler parallel reality of Canada to the third world intensity of Jamaica.  And vacations to the usual European locales — Italy, Ireland, Scotland, England, France for business and pleasure.  But I want moooore!  Although currently landlocked until the dollar heals, business prospers, travel improves, and fuel cheapens, I can best trip out by visiting friends from other cultures.

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ImageI’ve just returned from a quick trip to Tokyo, where The Hub was promoting a new film and where we were both doing our best to eat from morning to night.

Eating in Japan is serious business, and sushi is no less than an art form.  The Michelin Guide expanded to Japan for the first time in its history in 2008, and in its debut year, it awarded more stars to the Land of the Rising Sun than any other country, including its native France.  In fact, there are now more than twice the number of cumulative stars found in Tokyo (227) than in Paris (97)!  (Not that any of the Japanese chefs really cared.  One 3-star designee apparently asked, “Why does a French restaurant guide care about what we’re doing in Japan?”).

Over our four days and nights, we ate like kings.  We sampled hot oden noodles, hot ramen noodles, cold soba noodles, mounds of tempura, shark fin soup (supposedly very good for your complexion), skewers of yakatori (basically chicken on a stick, though our selection included chicken skin on a stick, which was inedible), and all sorts of other delicacies that I’ve now lost in a haze of sake and jet lag.  Speaking of sake, we knocked it back – always cold and dry and delicate.   We were also given a shot of something that looked like a weak Bloody Mary but turned out to be 40 proof vodka laced with turtle blood.   My arm hairs were on end for about 10 minutes.

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leopold-schmidt.jpgsteve_zaillian.jpg Olympia is a charming little city in the Pacific Northwest, set down on rolling hills surrounded by forests of Douglas-fir, bigleaf maple and red cedar – a pretty, speckled egg resting in a nest of twigs.

This is the old part – the far end of the Oregon Trail, settled on Native American land by Europeans in the 1850’s – where Leopold Schmidt founded the Olympia Brewing Company in nearby Tumwater Falls and sold his beer, if you recall, with the slogan, "it’s the water," which I’m surprised none of the hundreds of water bottlers has adopted now that Leopold’s beer business has folded.

olympia-brewing-co.jpg This is Downtown Olympia, with its century-old buildings, its perfectly-proportioned Capitol, its tree-lined streets on which people drive politely and you can always find a place to park – often without a meter – near the still-family-run bookstore or café or bike shop you want to go to.

But that’s not where I wanted to go, or rather needed to go, to help my son move into an unfurnished apartment.  We needed to head over to the other part of Olympia and it is this part – which I imagine you’d find outside most other American towns of its size – that I’m still trying to figure out as the plane banks over Puget Sound taking me home.

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