The TripAdvisor App on Facebook

I signed up for the TripAdvisor app on Facebook years ago.  I just went there to see if I could find some kind of sign-up date or something, to no avail.

At any rate, since my stated travel goal is to go “everywhere,” I figure that this would be a pretty good way to track.  I count a place as somewhere I’ve been if I’ve stayed overnight there, or if I’ve visited someone who lived there, or if I visited some kind of local attraction there.  There may be other criteria, but those are the main ones. Continue reading “The TripAdvisor App on Facebook”

My Travel Memories: Rock City, Lookout Mountain, Georgia

I have divided my travel into two eras:  Before 1977 and Starting with 1977.  The Before 1977 era is the era when my family and I traveled pretty much exclusively to South Florida and North Carolina, nearly always by car, rather than by plane.  Even though we started traveling other places starting with 1977, I still have traveled between my home and South Florida many times since then.  Four of these trips were by car, and the others were by plane.

I am currently trying (going from memory and with very little documentation) to stick to destinations that I first visited in the Before 1977 era. I may be mistaken about this next one, which is Rock City.  Rock City, is apparently technically “Rock City Gardens,” though I have never heard anyone use that term.  Rock City is both on and in Lookout Mountain, since Lookout Mountain is both a mountain and a town on the mountain.  The town is on the Georgia side of the border between Georgia and Tennessee, but it looks to me like the actual park is on the Tennessee side of the line. Continue reading “My Travel Memories: Rock City, Lookout Mountain, Georgia”

My Travel Memories: Mammoth Cave National Park, Mammoth Cave, Kentucky

While trying to remember all of the places we stopped at on our way to Florida, there are places that I returned to as a teenager or adult and places I haven’t been in over 30 years.  Mammoth Cave National Park is one of those places I haven’t been in over 30 years.  In fact, it might even be closer to 40 since I have been there (if we ever find all of our photo albums I should be able to place dates on our visits).  As a result, I have only the vaguest recollections. 

It was a cave.  That part is pretty obvious.  We went at least twice, because on our second trip, we did the same walk as on our first, and then my dad went off and did an adults-only tour without me and my mom (he told me later that he had seen some bats, which made me kind of jealous because at that point in my life, bats were something that happened to other people). 

All I really can concretely remember of the cave are two parts that are now politically incorrect.  One is an area called “Fat Man’s Misery.”  I’m pretty sure that only really stuck with me because I remember asking my parents what it had to do with Batman.  You see, I thought the tour guide had said, “Batman’s Misery.”  The other was “Lost John,” a mummified body in a glass case.  Lost John died in the cave over 2,000 years ago, and the combination of minerals in the cave mummified him. 

You can still go on the tour that we took.  It is now called the “Historic Tour,” though Lost John is no longer on display.  He has been interred in an area of the cave where they do not allow tourists.

(originally posted May 25, 2015)

My Earliest Travel Memories

I have long said that I want to go “everywhere.”  I know how I made this decision.  Part of it was because of my parents’ National Geographic subscription. Every month for as long as I can remember we would get a new issue with beautiful full-color photographs of the world and, once I got old enough to read, fascinating descriptions of the places and the people who lived there. 

The other part was my parents’ landlords.  When they were first married, and prior to having had me, my parents rented an upstairs apartment in a couple’s house.  We would visit them every New Year’s Day and every year they would have photographs of the places that they had traveled.  Far from being bored, though, I loved it.  The wife was a musician and she would buy a small hand-held instrument at most of their destinations.  They were on windowsills and bookcases and on top of the television.  And every year I would think, “I’m going to go there someday.”

Unfortunately it took me until I was 11 to actually start checking places off of that list.  This is because for most of my childhood, travel meant driving from Chicago to Florida to visit my mom’s family.  We would stop at some destinations on the way, but most of the time was spent at my cousins’ house doing basically the same things I did at home, only with cousins.  We’d go to the supermarket and cook dinner at home, and visit my mom’s old high school friends, and sit around and watch television.

One thing that was differentiated home from the cousins’, though, was that my cousins’ house was just a block away from the Intracoastal Waterway.  My cousin’s son is only a year younger than I am and we would go down and watch the fiddler crabs and the boats.  This was in the 1970s, which was when the manatees were really in decline; my mom would tell me about seeing them when she was in high school and lived in that area, though.  The area of the Intracoastal Waterway that my cousins lived near had lots of mangrove plants when I was little.  I didn’t even realize that people lived on the other side of the mangroves until I was much older. 

My last visit to the Waterway was after my mom’s funeral.  My dad and son and I walked down there.  The mangroves were long gone and much of the land where my cousin and I used to watch the crabs had been paved over.  It was so different from how it had looked in my childhood and yet it still felt a bit like “home.”  Suddenly, my son, who was a kindergartener, said, “What’s that?” and pointed out into the water.   It took my dad and me a while to see what he was seeing.  It was a small pod of dolphins.  Probably there were two or three of them, it was hard to see at that distance.  And, of course, this was before everyone had a camera on their person at all times, so no one got a chance to photograph them.  Even if we had tried, it is likely that they would have been just a little blip on the surface of the water, since they were about 600 feet (just shy of 200 meters) away by my calculations.  I’ll never forget it, though.

(originally posted April 25, 2015)