Tag: Travel

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Wandering Through New Orleans

CREDIT: Lesley Young

Parnassus: home to the Muses, sacred to Dionysus and Apollo, and generally a center of creative activity. Also known as New Orleans. Creativity is part of the air you breathe in this mythological city. The street names, the mispronunciation of street names — ride the streetcar just to listen to the conductor. Locals dedicate entire rooms to costumes in this City of Festivals. Wandering is the best way to see it. That’s when you run into the milliner or the sno-ball stand that uses Louisiana cane sugar. Wander on your bike. Just recognize that the city was built on a swamp, so there are lots and lots and lots of potholes. And don’t be alarmed by how many people talk to you — it’s a stoop city.

So how does one break it down in a city so filled with … history/bon vivance/inspiration and food? By neighborhood.

Let’s start with the Bywater. There is a strong tinge of mini-Williamsburg to the neighborhood, but this section of the Ninth Ward is mostly residential, populated with Creole cottages and shotguns, with the little coffee shop here and the little junk store there. I’m a big fan of Booty’s Street Food, a virtual global food truck fest for around $10/dish. They have “globally inspired cocktails” and, say it with me, Stumptown coffee. Slick interior with friendly staff, outdoor seating and plenty of bike racks and dog bowls, and arguably the most interesting bathroom in New Orleans — the Bywaterloo, a set of washroom galleries curated by the owner, a travel journalist. Other places to check out include Bon Castor, with locally handmade goods; Maurepas, doing the local purveyor and hand-crafted cocktail thing, and well; Satsuma, the coffee shop and juice place; and two of my all-time favorite places in New Orleans — Elizabeth’s and Bacchanal Wine. Elizabeth’s I can’t even begin to suggest something. They take all the usual suspects — po’boys, eggs Florentine, shrimp and grits — mix them up, throw in some surprises, and everything is done to exact measure. I have a romance with Bacchanal Wine. Think wine shop with an elaborate backyard of all the leafy trimmings, lit by a lone strand or two of Christmas lights, well-curated live music on a rickety stage, and affordable and divine small plates that change frequently.

Lesley Young

New Orleans is the City of Festivals.

Next, the Faubourg Marigny (pronounced FO-burg MAR-i-nee. “Faubourg” means “suburb.”) It sits next door to the Bywater and is also mostly residential with some great neighborhood establishments. Mimi’s in the Marigny was voted Best Bar in New Orleans by the Gambit. I’m pretty sure that says a lot. A two-story corner bar, Mimi’s has the hipsters and millennials and long-time locals and seersuckers and tattooed faces and artists, walls of windows, a pool table and dart board, and food. The best tapas this side of the Atlantic, in fact. Just close your eyes and point to something on the menu, and you’ll be grand. The Orange Couch is a great little coffee shop with mochi Japanese ice cream, and at one point, their Wi-Fi password was “rickjames.”

Cross Elysian Fields to the Marigny Triangle, the real entertainment district. Many say Frenchmen Street has jumped the shark. I do remember the days when reservations were not a must to get into Three Muses, my personal favorite. I had a moment there. Wandering at high tea, I heard a blind Frenchman wafting accordion music out of this little gem, where I later heard Walloonian Helen Gillet chirping French chansons and playing the cello with a loop. I cried. But it might have been the Warm Chocolate Cream Cheese Brownie. Frenchmen is still quite possibly the best place to hear the best live jazz music in the world. Wander and pop in and out of all the venues. It’s usually only a one-drink minimum. Eat at Adolfo’s, a pocket-sized place with big taste offering Italian Cajun-Creole. You’ll have to wait, but it won’t matter, because you just head downstairs to the equally small Apple Barrel for another hit of phenomenal music.

Well, folks, we’re out of space, so we’ll make our way further upriver another time. In the meantime, I’ll take one for the team and do some more research for you.

Also. Take cash. Some places require it. The musicians live off of it. And it might be someone’s birthday.

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News

Get Outta Here!

If you were to summarize Patricia Schultz’s message for her legion of readers, it would be this: “Travel makes you a better person.”

If you haven’t heard of Schultz, you have probably heard of her first book, 1,000 Places To See Before You Die (Workman Publishing) or the Travel Channel show based on it. That bestseller has spawned a U.S./Canada edition, which Schultz will be signing on Wednesday, May 21st, at Davis-Kidd Booksellers, and it grew out of that core passion of so many travelers: a “life list.”

“I have been traveling insatiably as long as I can remember,” Schultz says in an interview from her New York home. “And the whole time, in my head, I was compiling this list of places I wanted to go to, like the average human does. But mine was growing and growing.”

It took her eight years to write that first book, because, as she put it, “The more you see, the more you still need to see.” And it’s that kind growth — in the life list and in the person — that Schultz says she wants to encourage in people.

“I believe that to write off something as precious as free time, which is meant to recharge and reinvigorate you, and instead to spend it painting the deck or organizing the garage is disheartening,” she says. “A lot of people are complacent about staying at home, but the more you stay at home … the more you stay at home.”

Staying at home certainly isn’t something Schultz does a lot of. At the time of our interview, she had just returned from “exploring Croatia” for an upcoming 1,000 Places Europe book. She spoke fondly of family car trips to the Jersey Shore when she was a kid and of the time when, after graduating from Georgetown University, she took off on her alternate life path.

“When everybody else was packing up for their Wall Street internships, I grabbed my passport and left,” she says.

She lived for almost 10 years in Italy, her mother’s birth country, and slowly expanded her travel circles to include the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. “Had I stayed in New York, I would have been stuck in the corporate, career-oriented mindset, so I took a ‘gap year’ … or 10.”

All of that experience led to a travel-writing career, including working for Frommer’s, Berlitz, and Access. She has put all of that fact-gathering skill to work in the 1,000 Places books.

In essence, 1,000 Places To See in the USA and Canada Before You Die is a 1,200-page pile of places to go and stuff to do (perhaps even more than 1,000, in fact, but who’s counting?), told in a witty and personal style. It’s organized by region and topic (wilderness, great dining, best beaches, world-class museums, sports and adventures, road trips, etc.). There’s also an index that breaks out the best destinations for families with children. Following each entry are the nuts and bolts: addresses, websites, phone numbers, costs, and best times to visit. It’s easy to imagine keeping this book around as a reference, no matter where you’re headed.

Just reading through some of the suggestions gets the blood flowing: sailing Maine windjammers, exploring Alaskan gold-mining trails, listening to cowboy poetry, eating dinner under the Brooklyn Bridge. But Schultz insists that a destination need not be exotic, much less expensive or far away, to be worth visiting.

“Everybody’s talking gas, gas, gas,” she says, “and if this book serves no other purpose, it is to have people understand that even if it’s within a day’s trip of your home base, or a long weekend, or the precious seven days with the kids, you should do what gets you excited. It doesn’t need to be to Botswana, for example. We have wildlife in our national parks that can give you that same sense of wonder and awe. This book is to remind you of places that are nearby.”

At her signing at Davis-Kidd, Schultz says she will “give a little tour and talk about my excitement of being in Memphis, because it is one of my favorite cities. It’s also a real give-and-take, with people always wondering about where to go for their summer trips and exchanging their favorite places.”

So it’s kind of a big swap meet of travel ideas, much like Schultz’s book. And when it’s done, you’ll probably feel at least a little of what drives Schultz: “This book is meant to open your mind and see that all you need to do is go out the door and see the world,” she says. “It’s like a call to arms.”

Patricia Schultz signs 1,000 Places To See in the USA and Canada Before You Die at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on Wednesday, May 21st, at 6 p.m.

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Opinion

Striking Out

Northwest Airlines willing, when this column appears I will be about as far away from Memphis as you can get and still be in the U.S.A.

Unalakleet, Alaska, is 400 miles northwest of Anchorage on the Bering Sea at the edge of the Arctic Circle. I am told the sun shines 22 hours a day this time of year. I am told that by my son Jack, who is a fishing guide at Unalakleet River Lodge and my benefactor for this trip. He promises to watch out for grizzlies while backtrolling and putting me on some monster salmon, grayling, and Dolly Vardens.

Honestly, this is a waste of high-grade talent and expensive tackle on a rank amateur. I don’t know a Dolly Varden from Dolly Parton. My fatherly knowledge of hunting and fishing consisted of “pull the thingee and it goes bang” and “if you can’t tie good knots, tie lots of them.”

When Jack was growing up, summer was all about baseball. We spent our evenings in the living room with Greg Maddux, Fred McGriff, and the Atlanta Braves. Summer weekends meant tournaments, car pools, “it’s our turn to bring the drinks,” and “will we ever beat Germantown?” (No.) This lasted about 10 years, from coach-pitch to kid-pitch to high school.

Then suddenly it was over. Really over. For 95 percent of baseball players, the game ends before they even reach their physical prime. Tennis players, swimmers, and runners can compete and get better well into middle age. Basketball players can get a game at the gym until their knees give out. For most baseball players, though, high school is the end of the road. Try rounding up 18 guys next weekend for a pickup game. You might as well put your glove and spikes on eBay.

Jack got a last trip around the bases. He tried out at the University of Tennessee, threw 87 miles per hour once he got one close enough to the plate for the gun to measure it, and impressed Coach Rod Delmonico enough to make the team. In the spring of 2003, he pitched three innings in three games at Knoxville, Baton Rouge, and Johnson City and sat on the bench for what must have seemed like about three years. My wife and I would pick up the broadcasts of the games on the Internet, our hopes rising and falling with every blowout. One year of that was enough for us and for Jack, too. He quit the team.

He would throw no more strikes. Instead, he would strike out alone like Thoreau (Henry) and Theroux (Paul) for the woods and distant places. End was beginning.

Fly rod replaced baseball glove. Time spent in the weight room and on the bench became time spent fishing the French Broad, the Hiwassee, the Cumberland, and streams in the Smokies. Then he traded his fly rod for a passport.

In a year and a half, he hiked the Gower Peninsula in Wales, played rugby in Swansea, rode the Heart of Wales railway at midnight, made the last bus to Cardiff and the Snowdon Sherpa to Snowdonia. He fished the Wye, got loaded on Guinness in Galway, and watched punters on the Thames. In Argentina, he drove a rented Fiat 1,700 kilometers to Tierra del Fuego, saw Che Guevara’s motorized bicycle and Butch Cassidy’s hideout, picked Malbec grapes for $15 a day, watched the evidence of global warming on the glaciers near the Strait of Magellan, smuggled a puppy from Chile, taught English, learned Spanish, froze in the howling wind of the Glaciers National Park, and fished the Limay, Chimehuin, Malleo, Arrayanes, and Rivadavia. He came home for six days last month then took off for Alaska.

“I’m learning a lot about outboard motors, salmon runs, waterfowl, the Eskimos, and the Arctic. I’m having fun, eating well, and staying healthy,” he wrote.

Four years after Jack threw his last curve ball, I can see things in a different light. There is a huge gulf between good and great athletes. Once in a while a few of Jack’s contemporaries make the sports page. Paul Maholm from Germantown High pitched against Roger Clemens when “The Rocket” made his return to New York. Matt Cain from Houston High was the losing pitcher against Maddux a few weeks ago. Luke Hochevar from U.T. was one of the first picks in the draft last year. I hope they make the Hall of Fame. And Rod Delmonico got fired. Serves you right, Coach. And thanks.

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News

Near Miss

CREDIT: Courtesy of Sandestin Golf and Beach Resort

The thing about golf is, you never really know how you’re going to play until you go out there and play. So it came as quite a letdown when my first shot at Sandestin’s Baytowne Golf Club went straight down the middle of the fairway. “Great,” I thought. “Watch me shoot a great score, and then I’ll have to come back.”

Not just come back to golf, you understand — on that I am hopelessly hooked, pun intended — but come back to the resort life. Maybe it’s aging, or maybe my demagogic travel mind is finally opening up a little, but a guy could get addicted to renting a house between the bay and the beach, playing some golf in the morning, and choosing between a few nice restaurants for dinner.

Consider: I woke up that morning in a room with a view of Choctawatchee Bay, walked over for a big breakfast in Baytowne Village, then called for a free shuttle to the course, where I was set up with a cart, clubs, and a four-color guide to the course. Even the course designer knew how to get a duffer like me. I scanned the scorecard and saw that the first hole was a straight-ahead par 4 with no water, 381 yards from the gold tees … but only 281 from the white! My companions — two salesmen from Birmingham and a local — and I looked at each other, shrugged, and said, “Let’s play the whites!” A golf course is no place for pride.

The other thing about golf is, it suffers from a double-barreled bad reputation: one, that it’s a refuge for guys who want to get away from women, and two, that it’s a refuge for rich, white assholes. (Certainly, the latter would have been my view, had I been visiting Florida in my usual Greyhound/campground mode.)

As for the first, well sure, sometimes the guys want to be with the guys. And sometimes the ladies want to be with the ladies. And sometimes everybody wants the kids to be with the kids. So let’s just put gender aside and say you’re a golfer, traveling with other golfers. And let’s say you’ve decided to stay at Sandestin. And let’s say you want to get in 18 holes while the rest of the crew does something else.

Just as a quick sampler, here are some options, golf first: On the 2,400-acre Sandestin property, you’ve got four courses to choose from: Raven, designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr., has mango-scented towels and people who clean your clubs for you; his brother Rees Jones’ Burnt Pine rolls along the coastline for 7,000 yards; Baytowne, which winds through the resort and features kids’ tees; and The Links, which has views of the bay and marina.

So my Guy Mind was whirling on that first fairway. But what if I were married and had kids? What to do with the non-golfers? Obviously, there’s the beach, but there’s also more shops than flagsticks around (including the world’s largest factory outlet mall) and the inevitable salon/spa in the resort. The wife can send the kids out for a sailing lesson, tennis camp, or a ride on a pirate ship, or she could just drop them off in the KidZone to do games, arts, and crafts.

And then there’s the money. They’ve got “stay and play” packages that include lodging, greens fees, cart, and practice balls. Prices vary by season. Four people can spend two nights in a house and play two rounds at Baytowne for $230 in winter up to $356 in summer. Two people can share a hotel room and play The Links twice for the same amount of money. You can spend more than that, but getting together a few friends for a couple nights and a couple rounds and spending a few hundred bucks each is downright reasonable, even to a guy who used to have as his life motto: “Don’t pay rent — pay bus fare!”

That’s why I was in so much trouble on the first hole at Baytowne. I mean, there’s the comfort. And the convenience. And the variety. But now this: a reachable par 4? It got worse when I hit my approach onto the green. Walking up there for my 10-foot birdie putt, I had visions of grandeur: the rental house on a lake, walking to the beach in the mornings, a different course every day, the fishing, the sun, the surf …

It’s a good thing I missed that putt.

portlandpaul@mac.com

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News

South Walton vs. The Machine

Everywhere one goes in the Beaches of South Walton, people say “10 years ago … “: This was a lonesome beach 10 years ago. None of these strip malls were here 10 years ago. Heck, 10 years ago, this was a two-lane road through a forest. You could get a house around here for nothing 10 years ago.

Traveling east on US 98, my host and I headed for Scenic Highway 30A, a 20-mile strip along the Gulf Coast that is the heart of the place I’d been brought in to see.

“Up until about 10 years ago,” my host says, “hardly anybody knew this road was here.”

No more. By the end of my tour, when I had seen all 13 “eclectic beach communities” collectively known as the Beaches of South Walton, it was astoundingly clear what happened here about 10 years ago: The Machine found the place.

You know the Machine. It finds places and fills them up. It develops sleepy little nooks into communities of resorts, condos, fancy restaurants, and golf courses. It forms marketing plans to fill $200 hotel rooms and sell $35 steaks. It raises property values and brings in hordes of service-industry employees who live on the fringes and work three jobs driving shuttles and making lattes and folding sheets. It serves cocktails on the beach. It surrounds fishing towns with skyscrapers.

The Machine has come for South Walton, and it can’t be stopped. But the folks who live here have a plan. It’s apparent that they looked around at their neighbors and said, “Not here — not all of it, anyway.” They set aside forested strips of land as state parks, even reserving some beaches for walk-in-only access. All the other beaches are entirely accessible to the public, and boardwalks connect 30A to the white sands at numerous places. They limited buildings to four floors. They make serious, successful efforts to keep the beaches clean. Even the name, “Beaches of South Walton” (which, of course, is less than 10 years old), reflects a collective search for an identity — and/or a slick marketing campaign. Even as construction explodes in every direction, the PR materials constantly refer to “the pure and simple Beaches of South Walton.”

Such is the pitch: great beaches and every luxury you could want but not completely over the top. We still have some real nature! And we barely got touched by the hurricanes!

And yet the Machine churns. As America gets older and the rich get richer, the Machine gets hungrier. And it doesn’t build for the working class. Scenic Highway 30A is now the scene of such things as Blue Mountain Beach, which “offers spectacular views of the coastline, making it a hot spot for lavish homes and condominiums.” Offerings include Redfish Village, the Village of Blue Mountain Beach, and the Retreat.

WaterColor and WaterSound Beach, owned by a logging company, are both “Southern [themed] coastal resorts.” Seaside is “designing buildings to fill empty parcels” while planning a “splendid plaza” and a tower “in the center of town.” Alys Beach bills itself as “a traditional neighborhood development” with “environmentally friendly courtyard homes with whitewashed masonry and rooftop terraces.” Seacrest Beach touts “marshlands perfect for wading birds” and extensive plantings of live oaks — on a golf course. Rosemary Beach, all of 11 years old, went for the Dutch/West Indies theme: “Bermuda shutters, wide second-floor porches, and arched garage doors.”

It’s a heaping helping of Vegas in the Florida Panhandle, with “beach solitude” replacing “win big” as the central pitch. In both places, the Machine churns out high-end shopping and dining, seven-figure homes and condos, designer golf courses, and brand-new “towns” filled with the food and music of other places.

Consider: A couple years ago, Sandestin, the biggest and oldest resort around, built its own “village” of shops that includes an Acme Oyster House straight from New Orleans and an artificial pond with an “Italian” gondolier. Through this village, every year, winds a golf-cart Mardi Gras parade.

Or this: Seaside proudly proclaims that it was the main location for The Truman Show — a movie about a man who unknowingly lived in a false world.

There’s more of this coming: a big, new airport — the Machine demands multiple nonstops daily — and developments popping up everywhere you look.

The question remains: Can you market a place to death? In South Walton, the counted-on answer is to make peace with the Machine and try to limit it: in other words, be a shopping/dining/beach/condo/gallery/golf destination that manages to retain more than its share of quiet, natural moments.

If, on the other hand, you’re looking for that quiet little fishing village with the mom-and-pop restaurant out on the dock, it’s too late for South Walton. The Machine already got it.

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News

Dog Treats

Russ’s Market in Dickson, Tennessee: The trip is now a few hours old, with a C-minus Greyhound start. We were an hour late leaving Memphis, the bus is horribly crowded, and among its passengers are three people on crutches, two others who stretch across the aisle because of their size, and four or five kids who won’t stop moving or screaming. Anything else would have been disappointing.

Knoxville: There was a woman upset about something, raising all kinds of hell, and this guy identified himself as a police officer and told her, “I will help you, lady, but you need to shut your mouth.” She shouted, “I will not shut my mouth.” And by golly, she didn’t.

The driver was both surly and strange. When he was giving the usual “Don’t smoke or drink or make noise on the bus” speech, he asked us if we all liked Lawrence Welk. There was a long, confused silence. “Well,” says the driver, “If I hear anybody’s stereo playing on this trip, I’m gettin’ out my Lawrence Welk, and it’s gonna be loud.” Quietest bus I ever rode on.

Wytheville, Virginia: A tiny station, a shed in a McDonald’s parking lot. The lady behind the desk asked about my computer. I said I’m a writer, and then she said, “Yeah, I’m getting my bachelor’s degree, too.” Huh? “Mine is in hotel and restaurant management, but what I really want to get into is tour directing. I’m real good with people, which is why I work here, because I just love being around people. This job isn’t much, but it’s good while I’m in school, and it can lead to other things. But I’m gonna have to leave town when I get done with school, ’cause there just isn’t anything around here.”

I didn’t get much work done in Wytheville.

Around 10 p.m., all of a sudden the little parking lot was filled with buses. First the Detroit bus came in. Then came the New York bus, then the St. Petersburg bus that I was getting on to get down to North Carolina. All the smokers were hovering in the breeze between those buses when one more came in, one reading Dallas. Here was a parking lot in Virginia filled with people who tomorrow will be in New York and Dallas and Florida and Detroit.

York, Pennsylvania: The bus we were waiting for was broken down somewhere, and we didn’t know when it would get there. There was one woman who was getting real uptight, drawing long breaths every now and then, shifting obviously uncomfortably in her chair, and trying to draw other people into a conversation about where she was going and how long she had been waiting.

Finally, the driver stuck his head in the door and called out “All aboard for Elmira!” When he took the loud woman’s ticket, he said, “Oh, you’re going to Rochester? You have to wait for the 4:30 bus.” She heaved a breath, threw up her arms, and looked around for somebody to complain to, but we all averted our eyes. When the bus pulled out into the street, I saw her waving her arms at a baggage attendant who was staring intently at his feet.

When we pulled out of the next station, the driver said as he shut the door, “Lord God have mercy, I wanna go home and go to bed.” He seemed to have a particular hang-up about trucks. Whenever a truck went by, he would yell out, “Trucks, trucks, trucks!” Somebody made the mistake of asking him about trucks, and he spouted, “Well, y’see, they always got to run at night. I’ll give you a crisp new five dollar bill for every truck you, see on the road. They just got to run at night, and then when they go by you, they make a big swoosh of air, which don’t affect your average car but which’ll flat toss a bus around the road.”

Ithaca, New York: The station attendant is on the phone, talking at a high volume and not caring at all that there are other people in the room. I heard him say, “Yeah, the f—in’ Giants sucked,” and then a few minutes later he made several whispered references to smoking pot — “whispers” that could be heard loud and clear across the room. He then admonished whoever was on the phone with him, “Dude, you didn’t drink no half-bottle of vodka. Dude, you’d be f—in’ dead!”

Rochester, New York: When we got here, I asked the driver to open up the luggage compartment so I could get my backpack. His response was, “Sorry, these guys here are union. I can’t touch that thing.”

Lake Placid: I’m using an Ameripass, and I asked the ticket agent/sandwich maker if I needed anything else to get on the bus. She snapped at me, “We don’t deal with those things.” Then she made me a crappy turkey sandwich. When I showed the pass to the driver, I asked if he needed to see any ID or anything, and he snapped at me, too: “I don’t give a shit, just get on the bus.”

portlandpaul@mac.com

Categories
News

Redding Where?

Quick: What comes to mind when you hear the name Redding, California? Did you even know there is a Redding, California?

I didn’t — not until I took a trip down the California coast and found myself marooned in Redding, in the heart of the state’s northern reaches. I had called the local Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the very nice woman I spoke with did her job beautifully: She promoted the town’s premier attractions, none of which I honestly cared about. But I did my job as well: I listened, took notes.

She picked me up at the bus station and took me around to said sites. Redding’s latest venture in tourism is Big League Dreams, a sprawling athletic complex with soccer fields; batting cages; an indoor facility for hockey, soccer, and basketball; and softball fields. But not just any softball fields: These are replicas of Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, and Yankee Stadium. To say the least, seeing Boston’s “Green Monster” left-field wall with the Cascade Mountains in the background is odd, but my host insisted the fields are full all summer with leagues and pickup games.

Next, we went to official Redding’s favorite place: Turtle Bay Exploration Park. It includes a butterfly park, arboretum, gardens, a play sculpture, a water sculpture, and a nature/history museum. A great place to spend the day with the kids or go for a nice stroll. I added it to my internal list of Things To Do in Redding, should I ever come back.

The crowning achievement of Turtle Bay is the Sundial Bridge: a steel walkway over the Sacramento River, with a sundial pylon 217 feet high built at a cost of $23 million.

But one big question: Why? I was wondering what some of the folks around town must think of this thing. So I asked the nice CVB lady. Turns out, most of the money came from a local, private foundation. Besides, every town needs a signature, right? I added the Sundial Bridge as an interesting attraction, but not something I’d come to Redding to see again.

Then something happened that changed my whole perception of Redding. I looked down at the Sacramento River and noticed two guys fly-fishing. “You have fly-fishing in town?” I asked. “You bet,” my guide said. “We have salmon in this river!”

A salmon run, from the ocean, in the middle of town. Now I was intrigued. And when she saw my interest in nature, you might say the hook was set. Soon she was handing me a brochure on the 11 major waterfalls within a short drive of town. Next came Shasta Lake, just up the road, with 365 miles of shoreline near Mount Shasta. Next was Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, just eight miles outside of town. Just beyond that was the Marble Mountain Wilderness, the wildly scenic Castle Crags, and the Trinity Alps Wilderness. Next up was Lassen Volcanic National Park an hour away. Six national forests. Nearly a dozen rivers for whitewater rafting. Ski areas. Scenic drives. Mountain climbing. Heck, the redwoods and the coast are only a couple hours away.

My head was spinning. California is amazing. Here’s a town surrounded by more natural stuff than most states offer. And as for the fishing, it isn’t just about fly-fishing for salmon. I asked a friend who’s a fishing guide, and he got all excited reeling off the names of blue-ribbon trout, salmon, and steelhead streams around Redding: the Trinity River, the McLoud River, Hat Creek, the Klamath River, the Upper Sacramento …

Finally, he just said, “We should go there sometime.” It was the first time anybody suggested a trip to Redding, but I intend to take him up on it. And I didn’t even tell him we can walk to a bridge with a 200-foot sundial and jack one out of Yankee Stadium while we’re there.

portlandpaul@mac.com

Visit Redding, CA on the Web

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News

Breakfast in Skykomish

Working through bacon and eggs at the Cascadia Inn and Cafe, it occurs to me that Henry, the guy who owns the place, has quite a challenge ahead of him.

It isn’t just that he’s alone in the kitchen with several orders, or that he also has some rooms to clean up, or that he’ll have to handle any check-ins that arrive, or that his lone, teenage staffer doesn’t seem to understand the cash register. No, even if he gets all that figured out, there’s still the fact that he, and his hotel and cafe, are in Skykomish.

Never heard of Skykomish? Folks in Seattle have. They take Route 2 past it on their way up to the ski hill at Stevens Pass, and 99 percent of them don’t stop. Just some old town along the road. “Sky,” as they call it, is a Chevron and a deli along the highway, a rusty old bridge, a few buildings across the river, and some big construction project. There’s good fishing in the river, but that’s lower down.

We had been on the Pacific Crest Trail, and when we walked out of the woods up at Stevens, we’d hiked 75 miles in six days, without a shower or a bed. We knew all about Skykomish because it was the closest place we could get clean and fed, and there were a couple of cheap places: one that lets you pitch a tent in the yard and the Cascadia, Henry’s place, where two people can share a room with bunk beds and a bathroom down the hall for $20 each. For another $5, Henry does your laundry, and there’s a TV room with cable. The only table-served food in town is just off the lobby.

Across the road from the cafe was evidence of all that Skykomish once was, for good or ill: the rail yard. The Great Northern built the town back in the 1890s, when giants hacked the line over Stevens Pass and then dug an eight-mile tunnel under it. They needed Skykomish to hold coal and water and extra engines for the long haul over the pass, and the town boomed.

Then came the diesel engine, and now the trains hardly stop in Skykomish. Amtrak hasn’t even slowed down in Sky for 30 years, and the cargo trains might stop to exchange a car here and there. Timber played out years ago.

Now the railroad’s mess supplies most of the work. Seems that for several decades, when they had oil to get rid of, they just dug a hole and poured it in — so much of it that Skykomish septic tanks were said to float on it sometimes. When it finally leached into the river and started killing fish a few years back, about 435 government agencies got involved, and now the whole town is a cleanup zone. They pick up buildings, some of them over 100 years old, and move them so they can dig up the soil underneath. They had moved the river when we were there. Of course, the construction guys are all from out of town, but some of them share rooms at the other hotel, and they keep the Cascadia busy at lunch.

So I guess the town is on the move again — in a sense. My friend pointed out that they could put the buildings back wherever they want, sort of re-create a town. Maybe they could run a scenic train through the valley. The trees are growing back now, the old railroad grade is a trail, and there’s some fish in the river. Of course, that’s a little lower down.

Finishing up a Wednesday breakfast and about to hit the road myself, I felt like the town felt: waking up from a long sleep, comfortable, clean, rested, feeling good … just not sure where I’m headed today.

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Doing the Duomo

Inside the library of Siena’s Duomo: frescoes to make you gawk like an idiot

It was our last day in Siena, and before we left town I needed to do the Duomo.

“Do” might seem an odd choice of words, as opposed to “experience” or “appreciate,” but each town in Italy has a list of things that must be seen, eaten, photographed, heard, or otherwise … well, “done.” You go to Rome, you do the fountains. In Florence, you do the Uffizi. Pisa, the tower. And I couldn’t face my neighbors or myself if my answer to “Wasn’t the Siena Duomo amazing?” were “Gee, I didn’t do that one.”

So the Duomo would be done. “Duomo” is Italian for cathedral, and each of these towns has one big central church called by that name. And in front of each is the Piazza del Duomo, or “Cathedral Square.” There are lots of other churches in every city, named for one of a trillion saints, and every gathering of seven or more buildings anywhere in Italy also has a church. But each town has but one Duomo.

I hustled over there, since we needed to split town that day. But you must understand some things about these Duomos — or Duomi, I suppose. First, they are very, very large. Motto, motto grande. Second, they were the headquarters of everything during the Renaissance. It was during this time, around the 15th century, that this part of Italy exploded with art and philosophy and culture, all supported by commerce, and each town showed off its stuff in the Duomo. The Siena Duomo is one of the finest around, known especially for the carvings in the marble floor, the frescoes in the library, several bronze statues, the marble pulpit, the high ceiling … it’s a mind-blower. The Duomo in Florence is bigger and has a much larger, more famous dome, but the Siena Duomo, in my best Memphis art-critic voice, whoops Florence’s bad for decoration.

Our guidebook said that nobody really knows when the Duomo was built, but it was somewhere around the 13th century. (In the Mid-South at the time, people were living in mud huts and shooting deer with arrows.) The builders put a new facade on the Duomo at the end of that century, then considered expanding it in a big way during the 14th. But after working on it for 20 years or so, two things happened: They realized the foundation wasn’t big enough — a problem, since the foundation took about a generation to make — and a plague killed three-fourths of the city. Tough to recover from that. To this day, there’s a big square beside the cathedral where you can see a very large, unfinished wall.

Inside Siena’s Duomo

Inside, it’s all about the artwork. The floors are one gigantic, incredibly detailed marble carving — in some places etched like a woodcarving and in others a mosaic of marble. They include scenes from the Bible and from the lives of various saints. The immense columns have bands of white and black marble (echoing the town’s coat of arms). Marble statues, some by Michelangelo and Donatello, fill every nook. Many of the original paintings went off to various museums in the 16th century or were lost, but in a library off to the side, there are frescoes that basically make everybody stand around and gawk like idiots. The colors are fresh, and the room is well-lit, so it’s totally inspiring to walk in there. The scenes — 50 feet tall or more — are painted as if you’re looking into a great hallway, and they show a series of events in the life of a local man whose family commissioned the library (they even had sponsorships back then!) and who eventually became Pope Pius II. There are dramatic scenes of nature and far-away places, and the whole thing invites you to look so long that your neck and back start to hurt.

Having now done the Duomo, I hustled back to the hotel with a revelation. It was a Monday morning, and Siena was back at work. We had been in town for a weekend, and I had complained about the crowds, the lines, the general chaos. But now the number of people in the street had been cut by 80 percent, all the shops were open again, cars buzzed through the streets, and it all felt perfectly normal, comfortable, and inviting.

Of course, we were leaving, bound for that nuthouse known as Florence. But Florence, like the Duomo, had to be done.

portlandpaul@mac.com