Author: Paul Gerald

To really bond with a place, you have to eat breakfast there. Go where the locals go, eat what they eat, see what they’re like first thing in the morning, hear what they did last night, listen to what they plan for the day.

Each place has its own little twist: country ham and biscuits in the South, corned beef hash in New York, smoked-salmon scrambles in the Northwest. So when I went to London recently, at the top of the to-do list, along with seeing a Premier League soccer game, was to have a full English breakfast.

I wasn’t sure what that meant, advance research not being my cup of tea. But I knew I needed to have one. I assumed that crumpets and clotted cream were involved. But I have no idea what crumpets or clotted cream are.

I walked the endless streets of London for days, keeping an eye out for the proper breakfast spot among the high-fashion shops, the parks, the monuments, the hordes of tourists, the palaces, the row houses, the double-decker buses, the pubs. … London is without real competition the greatest walking city in the world.

I saw that I could get breakfast at Harrods, and the food court there is like something from another planet, but after riding the store’s Egyptian escalator, I had to flee back to reality. Down in Soho, I strolled among sex shops and used record stores until I hit a very fancy hotel offering a Full English for something like $25. Not my style.

Finally, with only a day or two left in town, I mentioned to my friends, an American college friend and her Irish husband, that I had exhausted the to-do list, save this one culinary adventure. They both perked up and said, “Oh, there’s a great place on our high street.” (Cultural note: By “high street,” an English person means “main street.”)

They told me it’s called O Girasol, serves fresh handmade food, and it’s run by a nice Portuguese family. I didn’t say anything, but internally I resisted a little. I didn’t want a handmade English breakfast served by Portuguese people. And wasn’t I supposed to be eating in a smoky pub or at a greasy fishmonger’s or in some uptight dining room?

I default to local advice, though, so let me tell you about the neighborhood, West Norwood. It calls itself a town and a residential suburb of south London. But don’t get the idea that “London” ends someplace and “West Norwood” begins awhile later. London goes on forever.

On Norwood Road, I found O Girasol, a cute café with about 10 tables. I was greeted by a lovely woman and said, “I want a Full English, and I don’t even know what it is!” She was charmed by my American bumpkin-ness and assured me they had the best English breakfast around.

What is an English breakfast? This can start arguments or, in England, polite debates. The consensus is, more or less, eggs, meat, bread, beans, mushrooms, hash browns, and stewed tomato. Yes, they eat beans and mushrooms for breakfast. The meat might be called bacon, but it’s more like what we call Canadian bacon; they call it back bacon. You can also call this whole thing a “fry up,” since it’s usually all fried.

It’s in the variations that things get interesting. According to Wikipedia, up in the North Midlands (no idea where that is), they eat fried oatcakes instead of the bread. The Irish might have soda bread, a potato pancake called boxty, white pudding (what you’re used to, but with oatmeal in it) or black pudding (the same, but with blood cooked in). The Scots like to have tattie (potato) scones, fruit pudding (actually a sausage made with very little fruit), and, of course, their curse on the earth, haggis. (That would be a sheep’s stomach stuffed with its heart, liver, and lungs, mixed with onion, oatmeal, fat, and spices.)

My breakfast was pretty traditional and pretty tasty. And it occurred to me, sitting there with my new Portuguese friends, acting on directions from an American and an Irishman, on a thoroughfare lined with shops and people from all over the world, in a homey corner of a city bigger than our ability to comprehend it, that I was having quite the fully English breakfast.

Of all the things that can be said about food in New Orleans, perhaps this fact explains the most: By all accounts, there are more restaurants in town now than there were before Katrina.

Think about that for a moment: A city gets nearly wiped out, a large percentage of its residents flee, and when it comes time to rebuild, the first thing they say is, “We need restaurants.”

Of course, humans have to eat. But New Orleans doesn’t eat for survival; New Orleans eats the way New York drives, the way Paris celebrates, the way Los Angeles looks good. Food is one of the main threads in the great, unique cultural quilt that sprawls at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Deciding where to start in a discussion of all this is like deciding where to eat first when you get to town. Do you want traditional? Fancy? Dive? Gourmet? Cutting-edge? Down-home? Reaching into a bag of notes taken during a week in town, one comes up with … my hotel.

Sure, hotel food. We all know what that is. Well, I stayed at the Marriott on Canal Street, right on the edge of the French Quarter, and their chef has won local gumbo awards and “Best of Show” at the New Orleans Wine and Food Experience. The guy from the Marriott!

I got a chance to talk with Mark Quitney over dessert (more on that in a moment), and he kept using this phrase, “Trying to be a thread in the city.”

“Coming to cook in this town is like being a guppy in a giant lake,” he says. “It’s a very tough nut to crack, unless you’re in a famous place. But the thing is, now there are so many small, cool, rich places that locals know about but folks from out of town don’t understand. It’s the young people driving it.”

He said more, but I was engrossed in the Bananas Foster Bread Pudding Poor Boy he had served us. You read that right. Quitney was cooking for a bunch of country club managers, and they wanted an all po’boy reception. The staff kicked it around and came up with bread pudding cut in fingers and deep fried, served on sweetened bread dough, slathered with Creole cream cheese and some bananas.

A cynic might call that “stuck in the past, trying to stay relevant,” but I say New Orleans takes the traditional, spins it around a little, and goes to town. Consider the “young folks” Quitney was talking about, many of whom moved in after Katrina.

I talked with Erica Normand, a graphic designer, who referred to “a real entrepreneurial sense” that has infected the city since the water receded. “It’s like starting all over and grass-roots level,” she says. “It’s the old cuisines but with local ingredients. But it’s also new and different cuisines.”

She points to “an upscale gastro-pub” movement, like the Quarter’s new Batch, which is doing small plates and cocktails for several people, served in wood flasks. Also in the Quarter is Sylvain, where an appetizer called Southern Antipasti includes seasonal pickles, artisan cheese, pickled farmer’s egg, country ham, and house-made mustard.

Normand says another trend is formerly seedy streets being reborn as hubs of culture and food. “And these are all locally owned, not chains,” she says. Freret Street, for example, is Uptown by Tulane and has a business association whose mission is “to establish an image that Freret Street is a safe, vibrant, easily accessible destination to shop, dine, play, work and live.” Read between the lines all you will, but also stop in at Cure for Bacon & Bleu Cheese Tartines with Bayley Hazen Bleu Cheese, Louisiana honey, bacon, and onion jam.

Another “up and coming” street is Oak Street, also Uptown, where Jacques-Imo’s has been serving local dishes for 15 years. As Oak has taken off, Jacques-Imo’s has become known for long lines waiting for a shot at its fare like shrimp and alligator sausage cheesecake or stuffed catfish with crabmeat dressing and hollandaise.

Of course, the places you’ve always heard about are still all over New Orleans: Commander’s Palace, Galatoire’s, and Arnaud’s are doing just fine. And they still make Bananas Foster at Brennan’s, where it was invented. And while a cynic (this one included) might wonder if those places aren’t coasting on reputation and “we eat there when we visit because our parents ate their when they visited,” people like Quitney assure us the lure is real.

“You want something authentic and Creole and Cajun influenced, go to [Paul Prudhomme’s] K Paul’s,” he says. “It’s the most simple presentation, 1-2-3 on a plate, but the complexity of the food is amazing.”

Indeed, no town does the combination of traditional and local like New Orleans. We ate one night at Dooky Chase’s, in the same location (aside from a Katrina shutdown) for more than 70 years. There was a trio doing soft jazz, and a very charming lady came out to say hello in between courses of gumbo and fish that were so good I wanted to hug everybody in the place. Turns out that was Leah Chase, a legend in town, an author, and a TV show host. She’s owned the place since 1946. Our waiter was married to her granddaughter, who was also the singer with the pianist and bassist, who had that afternoon played with one of the Marsalis brothers at JazzFest.

This is how it goes in New Orleans. You think a hurricane might kill it, but it comes back stronger and more local. You think maybe it’s all reputation, then you find out the “old folks” can still crank out the good stuff. You think maybe it’s a few celebrity chefs surrounded by mediocrity, then the award-winning food at your hotel blows your mind.

Sometime, well after dinner at Dooky Chase’s, after dropping in on about seven bands over on Frenchman Street, I decided to fulfill my own New Orleans tradition: beignets at Café du Monde. I almost feel like a sucker for going there every time, and several folks had suggested other places to get beignets, but those will have to wait. I needed to feel the old magic.

So I got myself a table and marveled, as always, at two things: the number of people in the place at all hours and the fact that the menu has three items on it: beignets, coffee, chocolate milk. Sitting there in the wee hours, with music and laughter all around me, and powdered sugar swirling in the breeze off the Mississippi, I wondered what else I would ever need.

Walking down Sheridan Avenue in Cody, Wyoming, I was looking for a place I remembered from my childhood. It was one of those cowboy-clothing shops, and it smelled like saddle leather. It had creaky wood floors and dusty glass cases with knives and silver lighters in them.

I was also looking for the city park, where I threw a Frisbee with my friends from summer camp. It was a glorious field of grass, surrounded by tall trees, occasionally visited by crazy-looking biker people; our counselors warned us not to talk to them but also seemed to think they were kind of interesting. I did, too.

Most of all, I was looking for the Irma Hotel. It was the ultimate old-fashioned hotel, founded by Buffalo Bill and named for his sister. There was real magic in the lobby, with a bar that came from Queen Victoria and a breakfast that dreams are made of.

Of course, looking with 44-year-old eyes for places seen by a 12-year-old can be disorienting. I pounced on the first cowboy place I saw: the Custom Cowboy Shop. It had the right smell but had only been there since the ’80s, and the floor didn’t creak.

There were a lot more art galleries than I recall, too. And gift shops. And RVs. Were all those there before?

I caught a glimpse of the Silver Dollar Bar and Grill and remembered the horse wrangler at our camp describing it as a wild and scary place. My 12-year-old brain filed it under Adult Mystery Locations along with Bourbon Street, Las Vegas, and riverboats. Today I saw tourists eating burgers in plastic baskets. I would later learn that the Silver Dollar has a Facebook page.

I crossed the street to avoid a crowd on the sidewalk, only to find that was the line to see the gunfight show at the Irma. I ducked into the lobby and saw that breakfast had become a buffet.

That’s when it hit me: The Cody of my youth was gone, and maybe it never existed. Those creaky floors had probably been renovated, the Irma sold to who knows what developer, and the Silver Dollar just going along with the times. I went back to my car, and on my way out of town, almost drove past the city park without even noticing it.

Ah, but there’s a new Cody in my imagination today. I remembered a frontier outpost at the end of a bumpy and terrifying flight from Denver, where a shy kid from Memphis left the known world, briefly interacted with bikers and cowboys and living history, then hopped on a bus to summer camp in the mountains.

Today, Cody is a tourist hub, with plenty of hotels and restaurants, plus a village of cabins gathered from the mountains, a rodeo, and the fantastic Buffalo Bill Historical Society. Most importantly, a highway leads 50 miles west to Yellowstone National Park. All in all, this “new” Cody is doing just fine.

But here’s what I would want today’s traveler to know about Cody, Wyoming: It is smack in the middle of some of the most amazing and scenic country in the United States. Yellowstone, mobbed as it can be, is but one example.

Cody sits in the 100-mile-wide Bighorn Basin, a semi-arid plateau at 5,000 feet, surrounded by mountains. To the east are the Bighorns, which rise 8,000 feet above the plains, run 200 miles north-to-south, and have 14 peaks over 12,000 feet. There’s more than a million acres of national forest and almost 200,000 acres of protected wilderness up there. West lie the Absorakas, running 150 miles along the border of Yellowstone, with 46 mountains over 12,000 feet and more than 2.5 million acres of protected wilderness. Try to imagine five Shelby Counties: all mountains, no roads.

I remembered a dirt road leading up to the camp with a nice view from on top of a hill. Now I know that’s the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway and the 8,000-foot Dead Indian Pass. The highway is 46 winding, wonderful miles, entirely through national forest, and it connects with Montana’s Beartooth Highway, which Charles Kuralt called “the most beautiful drive in America.”

Miles upon miles filled with forests, mountains, fish, waterfalls, lakes, campsites, meadows, views, and wildlife: all of it basically just outside of this little western tourist town. And to think I was looking for an old cowboy shop that may have never existed.

Rick Steves, author of dozens of Europe guidebooks, host of nationally syndicated TV and radio travel shows, owner of an 80-person company, and even a crusader for drug-policy reform, is currently engaged in something he’s never done in his 56 years: an American road trip.

Officially, it’s to help public broadcasters raise money, and as such he’s giving a travel talk in Memphis on behalf of WKNO on Saturday. (Tickets for the event are sold out.)

But Steves does something like this every year, what he calls his “10 cities in 10 days tour,” jetting around to major markets and then returning to his headquarters near Seattle. This time, though, it’s by car — 20 talks in 20 days — and he’s going to smaller cities like Grand Junction, Lincoln, and Tallahassee.

In fact, something else Steves thinks he has never done: visit Memphis. He even admitted at the onset of a phone interview that he gets Memphis and Nashville confused.

“It’s pathetic how little I know about the United States. That’s a big reason I’m doing this: It’s time for me to get out and see my own country.”

What he does know is Europe, perhaps better than anyone, and the benefits of travel in general. And he has a message for you, wherever you live: Quit being comfortable at home; get out there and be an honest bumpkin on the road.

“You can go to Orlando the rest of your life on vacation and not learn very much,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with Orlando, but if you never see Morocco or Belize, it’s such a shame. A lot of people are not encouraged by the world they live in to get out of their comfort zones. The free spirits who do are so thankful, and their whole existence becomes carbonated with the experience of being the odd one and seeing that different people have different dreams.” One of his favorite quotes is from Thomas Jefferson: “Travel makes us wiser and less happy.” This is where the conversation — and, often, his talks — turn to politics.

“The U.S. leads the world in self-evident and God-given truths,” Steves says. “But it’s so beneficial to the whole world if we get out there and realize that reasonable people have different ideas and different dreams.”

“Fear,” he likes to say, “is for people who don’t get out much.”

Speaking of politics, even longtime readers, watchers, and listeners might not realize that Steves is a major advocate for the legalization of marijuana. He’s co-sponsoring a ballot initiative in his home state of Washington to legalize, regulate, and tax pot, and he’s pausing in the middle of this road trip to give the keynote at a drug-policy conference in Houston. He also bought a 24-unit apartment building in Washington and runs it as a shelter for homeless mothers.

He says that such ideas come from years of being a “bumpkin” in Europe: remaining open to the experience of others and realizing that reasonable people can look at the same situations and come up with reasonable, but different, solutions.

“Be wide-eyed and curious,” he says, in a common refrain. “Don’t try to be a sophisticate when you’re not. If somebody is really enthusiastic and wants to share something with you, they’re not saying they’re better than you; they’re just excited to share something with you.”

Rick Steves’ Europe airs on WKNO-TV Channel 10 Sundays at 1 p.m.

Faced with a city the size of London — really, a sea of little cities — one has to make some choices. We all have our methods, whether it’s checking things off a list or just wandering aimlessly to see what we see. Or we go visit friends and let them show us around, like when my London hosts took me to a lovely park on a hill with a view of South London or when we went to an Arsenal football match.

But, like all travelers, I also have my lists — and London is an amazing city for touring, whatever your style. Years ago, when backpacking, I rode a tour bus through the streets, went to Hyde Park Speakers Corner, and drank a pint in the Sherlock Holmes pub. And another in The Cartoonist pub. And one in … let’s move on.

Last time, since I am something of a journalist and had some great jobs at newspapers, I decided I had to go to Fleet Street. What Wall Street is to finance, Fleet Street is to journalism. Or so I thought.

The thing about London is, it’s just layers upon layers of history. Fleet Street is in what they call the City of London, the really old part of town. The Romans built there, on the banks of the river. On Wikipedia you can read sentences like, “The length of Fleet Street marks the expansion of the City in the 14th century.”

And in the year 1500, Wynkyn de Worde set up a printing press there. Others soon followed, mainly because there were churches and law firms that needed things printed. And in 1702, the city’s first daily paper, The Daily Courant, was published on Fleet Street. With all the presses around, it made sense that other papers would open up, and since journalists like to drink together, the area also became known for coffeehouses and pubs. One of them, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, has been there since 1538, and among the writers once known to drink there are Mark Twain, Alfred Tennyson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and Samuel Johnson.

This is what happens to the traveler in London. You pick a spot, or in this case a street, and pretty soon you’re in a 500-year-old pub where some of the greatest writers of our language hung out: a place that got rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666, when America was barely colonies.

Walking down Fleet Street, I noticed a distinct lack of newspaper offices. I would later find out they all moved to get cheaper rent. So I switched to wander mode, and a little alley caught my eye. Back there, in a quiet courtyard, I saw a church. Churches being generally good tourist habitat, I stepped into the courtyard and found myself at a place called St. Bride’s.

This is when the London Thing happened again, for St. Bride’s isn’t just a little neighborhood church. First, although it’s named for an Irish saint, Bridget, its tiered spire is said to have been the inspiration for modern wedding cakes. Also, I read on a plaque that said spire was designed in 1672 by Sir Christopher Wren, also famous for St. Paul’s, Kensington Palace, many other London landmarks, as well as a pub across the courtyard where his masons lived while building the church.

If 340 years seems like an old church, understand that was the rebuilding of the church after most of London burned in 1666; it was later rebuilt after the Germans destroyed all but the steeple in 1940. It’s believed that St. Bride’s is the seventh church to be built on the spot, dating back to “the conversion of the Middle Saxons in the 7th Century.” Out front there’s a statue of Virginia Dare, the first English person born in America; her parents were married at St. Bride’s in the late 1580s.

I stepped inside to find various pews bearing the names of publications; lo, this is the “spiritual home of the print media.” Admittedly, it will be news to many that journalists ever go into a church, but this might sound more familiar: Apparently, there were quite a few jokes when the owner of a paper lay in rest, awaiting his funeral, in a chapel remodeled after a donation from a competing paper. St. Bride’s was also the scene of vigils for various journalists held hostage around the world, and there’s an altar dedicated to reporters who lost their lives covering the news.

I headed downstairs to visit a museum, and there was one last layer. When they rebuilt after the Blitz of 1940, they dug down to find Roman walls, some of the oldest ruins in the city. They also found a mysterious building from the second century AD. Both these discoveries were surprises to historians.

I couldn’t think of a better image for London: standing on a Roman wall, surrounded by what was rebuilt after fire and war, remembering 500 years of the printed word, and within a short walk of a pub. All because I ducked down an alley, curious.

The first time somebody showed me the Internet, the magic of the thing was that I could type a message, hit a button, and that message would be in New York City in a minute or two. This was in the dark days of about 1993, and that guy said two other things that stuck with me: One day we’ll be able to see live photos of highways to check on traffic, and this thing is gonna kill newspapers.

I thought he was nuts on both counts; Of course, now I get mad if live play-by-play of a football game gets a minute behind.

For a traveler, the Internet has become a dream machine for planning. For example, right now I’m planning a hiking trip to Italy next summer, and by visiting a few websites I managed to get recommendations from actual humans about cool trails, cheap hotels, and excellent food around a town called San Martino di Castrozza, which I’d never heard of. I have also found pictures of, and blog entries about, just about every place recommended.

This is the premise behind a new website called Gogobot, one of several helpful sites I’ve been hanging out on. Gogobot tries to connect your online socializing (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and so on) with travel recommendations. You can do the usual thing by looking for all the user advice on, say, Venice, or you can create a trip plan and ask users to suggest the details. You can also send out the plan to your social network, and if any friends respond, you’ll see their comments first.

“The whole idea is to make it much easier and faster to plan the perfect trip by asking people you trust most,” says Gogobot CEO and founder Travis Katz. “There are 750 million people on Facebook, and collectively those people have a lot of great information on cool places to go and fun places to eat.”

Katz believes this know-thy-informer vibe is the key to using the Internet wisely.

“The dirty little secret of the online travel industry is there’s a lot of fraud going on,” he says. “It’s almost an arms race for those five-star reviews, and everyone believes people are being paid. If you see that a friend of yours, or even a friend of a friend, has commented on a place, that may be all you need to know.”

Gogobot also pays “power users” to take ownership of a particular area.

“We are pretty obsessed with having all the hidden gems and off-the-track places,” Katz says, “and that’s not something we can do by ourselves. We need to find these super passionate travelers, like one lady who added 40 places in South Africa.”

Memphian Jessica Simmons says she finds Gogobot most useful for big cities like New York, where locals can suggest good restaurants or seldom-visited nooks. “It’s fun to have friends on there, especially for restaurants,” she says. “The best part of travel is the food.”

They also have an iPhone app and a fun “Whisk Me Away” random-place feature on their website. I just clicked on it and found 14 reviews of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest skyscraper in the world. Apparently, tickets to the top are cheaper when booked online, but it isn’t worth it on a windy day. And now you know.

Let’s say going for a hike is more your style. Why not go to the experts on that one, too? My experience is they hang out in the forums at Backpacker Magazine‘s website. There you’ll find everything from how the fall colors are progressing in the Smokies to hiking and camping suggestions for South Carolina. And that’s just the Southern forum. There are also thousands of topics for areas of the U.S. and more than 500 international topics. Mountaineers, or lovers of mountain photography, should hang out with the hard-core crowd at SummitPost.org.

If eating well on the road is your thing, you’ll want to visit the sprawling forums at Roadfood.com, the home of Jane and Michael Stern. They have written more than 40 books on the subject, and just one of many discussion areas on their site — “Where should I eat?” — currently has more than 6,800 topics and 73,000 posts. The forums at OpenRoad.tv, associated with a PBS show, are more limited but useful.

If you’re headed for Europe, you probably know about Rick Steves and his empire of travel offerings, including books, TV and radio shows, and travel stores. There’s also a “Graffiti Wall” on his website where European travelers trade tips and suggestions.

And finally, at least in theory, the Internet is about bringing people together, perhaps even in person. For this, a most intriguing website is CouchSurfing.com, where a community of 3.5 million people (about 85 percent of them under 35) offer crash-pads and show each other around their hometowns and cultures. The site claims members living in more than 84,000 cities and speaking 363 languages. The mission, in short, is to build a better world by building meaningful connections across cultures. And also to help us all avoid hotels.

And to think I was once excited about sending a fast message to New York. Now I can find locals to show me their favorite pizza place.

Gogobot.com

Backpacker.com

SummitPost.org

Roadfood.com

OpenRoad.tv

RickSteves.com

CouchSurfing.com

I should be in Dallas right now. But I’m not; I’m in Memphis. At the airport. For at least three hours.

Why? Because I made a tiny mistake — tiny in the size of it, but larger in the significance. All I did was write down 12:10 p.m., when I should have written down 10:35 a.m. The latter is when my flight left Memphis, the former when it arrives in Dallas. So around 10:30 this morning, when I got online to print my boarding passes, I realized my flight was leaving in five minutes.

I cussed loudly, then called the airline to see what my options were. I got a computer voice that I had to “talk” to a few times, then it didn’t understand me, then I angrily pushed zero about 15 times. The computer voice responded with “I understand you want to speak to someone, but …” I slammed down the phone and told my dad, “I need a break; I’m going for a walk.”

So now, instead of rolling into Portland, Oregon, at 3 p.m. local time, I’m at the airport in Memphis, on standby for a 3:15 flight. Can’t leave, either. If I don’t get that flight, there’s one at 6:50 p.m. If I get on either one, it’s standby again in Dallas. Best case scenario is Portland around 10 p.m. Worst is overnight at DFW. Or I can rebook the whole ticket for about $600.

So I am now paying the Idiot Tax — in this case, in units of time and peace of mind, rather than cash. I first heard the term Idiot Tax in Asia somewhere, years ago. It referred to the amount of money one loses by exchanging currency in the official booth at the airport or train station, rather than going outside to look for the guy at the tobacco shop or on the corner, who had a much better rate. I have since expanded the definition to “any additional expense or hassle taken on by not knowing what the hell you’re doing.”

I first paid it, I think, in Bangkok. I don’t even remember what the local currency is there, but I bought some at the airport, then showed up at the youth hostel and found out I had forfeited about 3 million local units by not changing on the street. A common cure for the International Idiot Tax, by the way, is reading the Lonely Planet guidebooks.

Another time I got taxed at a football game. I foolishly believed that the guy selling me a ticket was putting me with my fellow Ole Miss fans and also that the game was sold out, so basically paying face value was fine … you know, because tickets were tight and I wanted to sit with the right people. After seeing about 200 other guys trying to sell tickets on the way in, and then taking my seat in an endzone full of hog-calling Arkansas fans, I realized I had been taxed again.

Another time I was flying to Hong Kong, on the same trip that saw me in Bangkok. Somebody at a hostel in Japan had said, “Dude, you gotta stay at the Chungking Mansion in Hong Kong!” Sadly, I didn’t realize he was being a smart-ass or was displaying the same taste as when folks in Philadelphia told me I “had” to get a cheesesteak sandwich with Cheez Whiz.

I told the cabbie, “Chungking Mansion,” and he dropped me off at what I took to be an office tower. Alas, it was the home of the “mansion,” a decrepit hotel on about the 70th floor, reached by an elevator which was filled by me and my luggage. Unfortunately, five other people got in there with me. My room was so small I had to crawl over the foot of the bed, ducking the TV, to reach the nightstand. I took “showers” sitting on the toilet.

I’ve paid enough of this stupid tax to join the Tea Party: overpaid for meals, gotten screwed on train seats, spent an hour in the wrong passport line, accidentally eaten both horse and pigeon, and missed out on VIP seats to a Cardinals baseball game. I can’t even bear to tell that last story.

And now I can add to my list of paid Idiot Taxes: “spent (an undetermined number of) hours at the airport because I didn’t confirm my departure time.” That’s Travel 101 stuff, and I am ashamed. I am also annoyed by two children romping around (one of them just tripped over my computer power cord). I should be 500 miles from them right now.

All I can hope for now is that some other fool is paying the Idiot Tax so I can have his seat and get back on the road.

The first “Tuscany moment” of our trip came when we were walking along an ancient road through a thick forest, being serenaded by a shepherd whose mother was back at home rolling out hand-made pasta for our lunch. There would be wine, of course, and cheese from that morning’s sheep milk. And jam made from blackberries picked in this very forest.

“Serious” hikers may not often think of Tuscany, or even Italy, as a destination. Sure, there are the Italian Alps, but most people associate the “roof of Europe” with Germany, Austria, France, and Switzerland. But Tuscany is as rich in outdoor entertainment as it is food.

We were in the less visited Apennines, the chain that runs along the spine of Italy. And sure, we weren’t scaling rock faces or traversing glaciers or clinging to ladders and cables. But, I say again, Mama was rolling out the pasta, the ricotta was being made fresh, and by the way, we’d be visiting an 11th-century monastery before heading back for lunch. I’ve been on worse hikes.

Even the Apennines offer a variety that may surprise you. In the north, they are lonesome and glacier-carved, their meadows dotted with lakes surrounded by dramatic cliffs. Mountain huts make possible a trek of some 250 miles across the range. A little farther south, the peaks are even higher, up to Como Grande at 9,152 feet, the highest point on the Italian peninsula. Another highlight is the Piano Grande, a grassy plain ringed by rocky peaks.

Our walk with the shepherd was in a low part of the range, an area where people gather chestnuts in the woods, moss covers the trunks of old trees, and tiny creeks form the headwaters of the Arno River, bound for Florence.

Another time, in another corner of Tuscany, we simply followed a strada bianca, or “white road,” of which seemingly thousands crisscross the countryside around the cities of Florence and Siena. Our guide, a lifelong Tuscan who makes a hobby of driving or biking such dirt roads to see where they lead, knew that this one followed a nearly flat path through grasslands dotted with sheep, cut by rock formations, and scattered with wildflowers. After several miles of this, we were picked up by a bus and hauled to a winery in a medieval hilltop village, where the owner and his daughter served us lunch under an arbor with a view of his vineyard and the forested hills. I’ve been on worse hikes than that one, too.

For a first visit, it makes sense to hook up with a hiking club or some other group tour. REI, for example, has a Tuscan Hills walking trip, but it’s around $3,000 for a week. Cheaper options, including private guides, can be found on the Internet. You can go it alone, of course, but guidebooks may be out of date, “trails” on maps may actually be roads (or nonexistent), and transportation can be an issue.

On one walk, we started at the villa we were renting as a group in Chianti, and we just walked along the road to the next villa, then turned onto a smaller road past houses where women hanging laundry stopped to chat with us, kids came out to gawk, and dogs barked angrily at first but then walked along with us for a while. We strolled past clifftops and down through a forest, across a creek and a highway-sized road, and eventually up into the village of Certaldo, a 13th-century town whose old quarters don’t allow cars and where we dined in a courtyard with a sunset view of the surrounding valley.

And then there’s the coast. Yes, Tuscany has a coastline, and it isn’t just the overcrowded, overhyped scene at Cinque Terre. Even there, a hiker can find out-of-the way spots, and a visit in winter or spring means cooler temperatures and far fewer people. But to experience the scenery without the crowds, go south, where you can start in idyllic seaside towns and hike to the summit of granite peaks.

Our beach experience was in the Etruscan town of Populonia, which dates to 900 B.C. We walked down through a forest where wild boars roam to a rocky outcrop above the crystalline sea, where our guide laid out a picnic of prosciutto sandwiches, sweet pastries, and hearty Chianti wine, of course.

We ate, soaked in the rays, and watched the waves, then decided to bond with them. After a brief scramble down to the shore, we all eased into the water — a bit chilly at first, then utterly soothing, especially after a hike — and bobbed around in the sun. Lying there in the Mediterranean Sea, looking up at the Tuscan coast and remembering the hills, the valleys, and the meals, I wondered if there’s a better place to go for a walk.

I’m a dude. And as such, I like talking to other dudes. When we can’t think of much else to say, we default to sports.

This is great when some dude wants to talk SEC football, but I’ve recently become enamored with soccer in a very big way. It’s a great game to watch, and it should be an “in” with dudes everywhere. So I decided I need a team to root for. And the logical place to pick one was the English Premier League, or EPL, the greatest of them all.

We usually grow up with these things, which is how I am cursed with being an Ole Miss football fan. Still, it had to be done, so I developed a set of criteria and took them on a recent trip to England. I would let the locals pick a team for me.

First, I needed a team that wasn’t already good and loaded with stars and money. No Yankees or Red Sox. Some quick Googling ruled out Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, and Chelsea. But I would like to point out that the home grounds (that’s what they call stadiums there) for three of those teams are called Old Trafford, Anfield, and Stamford Bridge. And those aren’t pet food companies. They appear to be neighborhoods.

Next criterion: nobody who’s hopeless — I already have the Rebels.

Next: somebody who still plays in the old place — no corporate naming rights, no glossy new stadium with skyboxes.

They also need to be in London. I don’t care how good they are in Birmingham (which they pronounce “BIR-ming-um”), I’m not going up there on my soccer vacation. Oh, and it’s called “football” over there, which makes a lot more sense since they actually kick the ball all the time.

Final criterion: They need an American who actually plays. This is a little like saying you want an NBA team with a German (hello, Mavericks!), since we Yanks are kind of the runts of the soccer world.

I ran all this past various English dudes, and they came up with two choices: Fulham and Tottenham Hotspur. The latter is an actual team name, by the way, but not one I could identify with. I already have to explain “Ole Miss” to people. When I found out that Fulham plays in a place called Craven Cottage on the banks of the Thames in the oldest ground currently in the EPL and that their leading scorer is from Texas, I was in.

There are, however, certain things that come with being a supporter of a new side (read “fan of a new team”). You need to know what the hell you’re talking about, and you need some colors. So I went over to the ground for a visit. Craven Cottage is impossibly charming, located in a quiet neighborhood next to a park by the river, with about 25,000 seats, a roof that looks like Churchill Downs, and, get this, no big TVs! It’s like the Fenway Park or Wrigley Field of England. It’s also known as being inexpensive to get into and more family-friendly than your average club. They finished eighth in the 20-team league this year. All good points.

At the team store — excuse me, club shop — I decided to get a jersey, which I found out is a part of England, not a shirt. What they wear during games … I mean matches … is called a kit. And the field is a pitch. Right. So the lads wear kits during the match on the pitch down at the ground. I’ll get this.

I asked them to put the name Dempsey on the back — that’s the team’s star American, Clint Dempsey of national team fame — and the nice lady told me, “Sorry, dear, but we’re fresh out of S’s today.” A club in the world’s greatest league, out of S’s today. I am so in love with this team.

I asked about a historical book or something, and she offered two videos: one about every time they’ve beaten Manchester United and one called Seventh Heaven, about the time they finished seventh in the league. Substitute “Tennessee” and “New Orleans Bowl,” and I may have found the Memphis Tigers of English football.

English dudes … let’s say lads … seemed to approve of my choice. Fulham is a popular, non-threatening second choice for them, except for fans of Chelsea and Queens Park Rangers, who are within about six miles of Fulham in West London and whom I apparently now hate.

I do see a few problems with the new arrangement. For one thing, I now have to worry about things like Dempsey possibly leaving for a big-time Italian team this summer and our (see, I said “our”) early pre-season start because of getting into the Europa League. And, I have to figure out what the hell the Europa League is and how we got into it when we’re already in the English Premier League.

There’s also a statue of Michael Jackson at Craven Cottage; I guess he was a fan, but still, that’s weird. And since they wear white at home, Fulham are often called “the Whites,” and a big cheer is COYW, or Come On You Whites! This is beyond awkward for a Southerner.

Still, I am ready to be a good fan — to obsess over player contracts, bitch about bad bounces, yearn for the glory to come, and talk smack to people wearing the wrong color. I’m a Fulham man now.