Alexandersmap

    Category: Travel

    • Plymouth’s National Monument to the Forefathers

      Plymouth, Massachusetts might not be the oldest European settlement in the United States, but you can safely say it’s where England got its foothold in America. They might have landed in Provincetown first, hit a few places along the Cape Cod coast as they looked for a better place to settle, and maybe they would have been better off if they’d landed in what would become Boston or Providence, but they landed here. And the great floodgates of immigration began, changing this continent forever.

      That narrative of settlement and conquest is… complicated. But you can make a good case that the Mayflower Pilgrims’ pilgrimage was driven by religious freedom and a desire for peaceful coexistence with the Native American population. They happened to settle in a place where the native population had recently been decimated by disease, making for a bit more elbow room to root themselves in the place, but let’s stay on point. That first generation tried to fulfill the mission as best they could.

      To honor those noble intentions, and to put a spotlight on the best virtues that we humans aspire to, the Pilgrim Society of Plymouth conceived of a huge statue that would dominate Plymouth Harbor. The original monument was supposed to be 150 feet tall and right on the water. Reason eventually took over and they moved the monument to the top of a small hill with a commanding view of the harbor, then shortened it to 81 feet.

      The National Monument to the Forefathers is believed to be the tallest granite statue in the world. There is impressive detail in the carvings and a sense of Victorian optimism about what we aspire to be throughout. The cornerstone was laid in 1850 and the monument completed in 1889. That’s a lifetime for someone in the middle of the 19th century. Throw in the Civil War and violent conflict with Native Americans as the country was settled ever westward and those ideals were challenged even as the monument was being built.

      Today the National Monument to the Forefathers stands in dignified silence, 132 years after the dedication ceremony and a year after the 400th anniversary of the settlement of Plymouth by those Mayflower Pilgrims. That big party got cancelled last year with the pandemic, the narrative of living up to the best of virtues is more challenging than ever as we Americans sort out just who we want to be, but the monument stands. Still waiting for us to measure up.

    • Let Me Live Until I Die

      “Lord, let me live until I die.” – Will Rogers

      This is the kind of daily prayer or affirmation I can get behind. Said daily as I open my eyes to a new day. Let me live until I die is a bold stake in the ground to make the most of every moment. And shouldn’t we celebrate the possibility of the new day? What’s the alternative, to dread the commute to work, or the work itself, or what we come home to afterwards? To distract your life with media and alcohol and empty calories? No, thank you! Let me live until I die.

      It’s easy to slip into the dark melancholy of the world. It’s easier to slip than it is to climb. But slipping only leads you to new lows. Far better to climb, as tough as it might seem, to reach new heights and see new vistas. To leap out of bed to see what we might accomplish in this new day seems a far more interesting way to wake up to the world than to hit the snooze button and hide under your pillow.

      Life isn’t easy, we all know that. But the world bows to those who climb to the top, look around and light the way for the rest to see. To be a beacon requires energy and an unquenchable desire to burn brightly. You can’t burn brightly if you’re drowning in misery. Get up and get out there, where the oxygen is. Be fit and passionate and embrace life in a full bear hug.

      To live is to move, to embrace, to laugh, to love, to explore, to learn, to dance, to take a chance and to grow. Get out into the world and make the most of living while we can. I’ll see you out there.

    • Collecting Volumes of Experience

      To gain entry into restaurants in Manhattan in the current state of the pandemic you need to show your vaccination card or a picture of it. Some folks also ask for your ID, which I’m happy to provide. I’d left the card in my hotel room, but fortunately had a photo buried somewhere on my phone. And I eventually found it in the mass of recent pictures – was that San Francisco? Los Angeles? Raleigh? Vermont? It seems I’ve been busy lately.

      During that search I stumbled on a photo of three birds pecking in the South Carolina surf at sunrise. I remember the moment, still less than two weeks ago, but the picture was lost in a crush of other photographs and memories (or is that .jpeg’s and memories now?). It occurred to me that I ought to hit pause again soon. And right on cue Thanksgiving arrives in America next week. More timely, and more different, than ever.

      Life comes at you in waves, and we’re a lot like those birds, waiting for something to chew on with the next one that rolls in. Sometimes you find that where you’ve landed is the perfect place at the perfect time for you. And sometimes you look around and wonder whether you’re on the right beach at all. The answer isn’t always obvious, and the real trick is to keep an eye on that next wave so it doesn’t wash over you.

      I’ve collected thousands of photos of moments like that moment with the birds. Small and large experiences captured in memory, both mine and in some data center in the Cloud. Scrolling through a few hundred photos looking for that picture of my vaccination card reminded me to spend a little less time planning the next landing spot and savor the one you’re immersed in now. It’s not always about finding a better beach, but simply enjoying the one you’re on, and appreciating where you’ve been.

    • Life is the Train

      “Our life is a constant journey, from birth to death. The landscape changes, the people change, our needs change, but the train keeps moving. Life is the train, not the station.” – Paulo Coelho

      Traveling by regional train is such a treat when you’ve been subjected to the indignities of air travel and commuting in the relentless grind of traffic. Taking an Amtrak from Boston to New York is not the fastest way from point A to point B, but my gosh it’s surely the best way. Give me the rolling scenery without the stress of distracted drivers and unpredictable traffic, thank you. Give me actual leg room in coach over whatever they think proper leg room is on a regional jet between any two cities in the United States. The train is the best way from here to there if the option presents itself.

      There are two options when taking the train from Boston to New York (or Washington beyond). The first is the Acela, the “high speed” option. The second is the regional train. The difference is in top speed the trains can travel at, and the number of stops the train makes along the way. For all the potential of the Acela, it only gets you there about 30 minutes faster. I’m quite content taking the regional most days. Sit on the port side going south for the coastal views and the sunrise, or the starboard side for the great view of the city as you make your final approach to Manhattan.

      Days blend into weeks, which blend into months. Years fly by and suddenly you can’t recall how many times you’ve done this particular trip. Last week I was flying up and down the East Coast, this week I’m doing a portion of that trip ten feet above sea level. In the last month I’ve been in nine states and when I land in my hotel room tonight I’ll have slept in 12 different beds. Clearly I’m inching back to my old nomadic lifestyle. With travel as with life, I’ve found that it’s usually far better when you’re taking the journey with someone than running solo. But most trips that’s not the way it works with business travel.

      The world changes, that’s not a negative statement, but a simple fact of life. And we must keep adapting to change, and keep authoring our own life story. To stay in one place seems a waste to me, when there’s so very much to see out there. Why not explore the world while you have health and mental faculty on your side? We’ve seen how it goes when you wait too long. Life isn’t fair, it will brush you back with a fastball and strike you out with a nasty curve before you know what happened to you. Get to it while you can, and don’t ever strike out looking.

      Travel by train gives you the time and mental space to think. To appreciate how far you’ve come, and not stress out about where you’re going. You’ll get there, just stay on the train. Life is like that, isn’t it? Stick with things, keep moving forward and things tend to work out for you. Trains and baseball analogies, all in one post. Isn’t it funny how far a rolling coastal view will take the mind?

    • Returning to November Stillness

      Walking along the edge of the woods through a thick blanket of fallen leaves, I noted the changes in the landscape since I was last home. New Hampshire is well past peak now, and recent wind and heavy rain coaxed some holdouts down in my absence. The hardscape is glaringly obvious now. November in New Hampshire offers a cold stillness that can be jarring for the uninitiated. But I love it for all that it offers.

      No doubt the pandemic made everything different for all of us. Collectively we might never be the same, but this is the natural state of the world, isn’t it? The one thing the pandemic did, aside from all the horrific stuff, was alter our perception of the world. For if there’s one benefit to what we’ve collectively gone through, it’s acquiring a heightened sense of change. We were forced to slow down and look around at the circle we placed ourselves in. And reflect on whether that was where we wanted to be.

      Bouncing across the country these last two months, I’ve savored some incredible regional food that’s as much a part of the uniqueness of a place as the language and landmarks. I’ve had sourdough bread in San Francisco, popovers in Vermont and biscuits in the Carolinas. Breaking bread offers lessons. The food tastes amazing whether you lean to the right or the left. We’re all human, we just forget that sometimes in our race to categorize others. There’s nothing like a face-to-face conversation to define the common ground between us. And this is one of the primary benefits of travel — getting out of your circle of influence into something wholly new. And seeing that we’re not all that much different from each other after all.

      When my son was two months old I went away for ten days on a white water rafting trip through the Grand Canyon I’d had booked for well over a year. As funny as it seems, I felt in that time away that I’d missed a lot of him growing up. But in going away, I learned to pay more attention to the moment-to-moment changes when I was back home. Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got until you’re gone. Returning to the stark woods of New Hampshire this November, I’m aware of the changes I’ve missed here. And the changes that have taken place within me while I’ve been away. In the stillness of November, I celebrate both.

    • Carolina On My Mind

      Dark and silent, late last night
      I think I might have heard the highway call my name
      Geese in flight and dogs that bite
      Other signs that might be omens say, “I’m goin’, I’m goin’”
      I’m gone to Carolina in my mind
      – James Taylor, Carolina in My Mind

      There’s a sense of place that feels right when you’re in the Carolinas. Something about the land that feels like home. Something about the people that makes you feel welcome. I can feel it when I’m in the region, it’s a place I could live in. Judging from the list of best places to live in the USA put out by a couple of publications, I’m not the only one to feel this way.

      North and South Carolina are increasingly thought of as home for transplants from the north. Those looking to retire somewhere that feels like home without the extreme weather, those who are young and aspire to build a great life for themselves in an up and coming place. Those who just want to be where the air is clean and the people are friendly.

      There’s no doubt that Raleigh, North Carolina is a trendy city. It often hits the top five on those best places to live lists, and why not? Great job market, great college scene, easy access to the outdoors and city life alike. Raleigh is one of those places you step into and feel like you could live in forever, should you ever want to move away from all that you’ve built around yourself in the place you call home already.

      The Warehouse District is a distinctly cool place with great restaurants, art galleries, breweries and coffee shops in old brick buildings. If you love sushi try O-Ku for delicious nigiri and sashimi, if you love tapas get yourself to the restaurant Barcelona (of course, the city in Spain is great too!) for a great selection of small plates. These are just two restaurants jammed full of people celebrating life for awhile in a place built for it. Raleigh is just one great city in the Carolinas with great vibes reverberating with people in the know. Charlotte, Greenville, Charleston, Winston-Salem, Asheville also get a lot of attention.

      On the opposite end of the food spectrum, go to Biscuitville for a uniquely tasty biscuit with a Carolina twist. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of opportunities to burn off those epic biscuits with great hiking and mountain biking in the area. The Carolinas deserve the attention they’re getting as a wonderful place to move to. But let’s keep that to ourselves, we don’t want to ruin a good thing.

    • Through Fields of Cotton

      Driving through the Carolinas on back country roads in harvest season, you’re struck by the endless miles of ripe cotton greeting you. With many crops, you look at it and wonder what it might be when you’re flying by at 50 MPH. Not so cotton. You know immediately what this crop is. You’ve been wearing it all your life. Ripe cotton waves back at you like a stadium full of home run hankies or laundry lines strung with tighty whities.

      Cotton fields echo. Deep down you know the labor history of this crop, know the historical advancement in picking the stuff from slavery to machinery and all it meant in between. Cotton and tobacco share similar echoes, but cotton reverberates a bit louder. As I understand it the crop was more labor intensive to pick, but also grew exponentially in demand. Cotton was one of the first commercial crops grown by European settlers in America. They grew it in both Florida and at Jamestown, Virginia in the first wave of settlements. The value of cotton in human lives demanded attention, and fueled generations of economic prosperity and more than a little oppression too.

      Driving through field-after-field of cotton you begin to feel the weight of it all, this essential crop for so much of what we wear and use in our daily lives. I wanted to shout to stop the car so I could walk through the fields, feeling the cotton plants (Gossypium) in my own hands. But we kept rolling through, and those endless fields soon felt like clouds rolling by your plane window. And I began to feel like we were flying through history.

      Cotton Firld

    • Into My Arms

      And I don’t believe in the existence of angels
      But looking at you I wonder if that’s true
      But if I did I would summon them together
      And ask them to watch over you
      To each burn a candle for you
      To make bright and clear your path
      And to walk, like Christ, in grace and love
      And guide you into my arms
      – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Into My Arms

      Some songs you hear take time to enter your rotation as “favorites”, but others grab you the first time you hear them. Nick Cave’s Into My Arms is the latter kind of song for me. And it’s one of those songs you don’t exactly play at parties, so I have no idea how other people feel about it, but for me it’s on that playlist I play for myself. I know I’m not the only one, you just need to look at the number of views on YouTube for this song in the many performances he’s put out there over the years to see it hits a cord for a lot of people.

      I heard an interview with Bono recently where he mentioned that Nick Cave played this song at the memorial service for Michael Hutchence in a darkened room. Bono was so deeply moved by this that the song stays close to his heart to this day. Listen to the song and imagine that moment, and you might never think of it the same way again either. It’s changed how I think of it now, hearing Bono’s story. Elevating it to a new place than before. Maybe my sharing it will change how you think of it too.

      This is a love song, first and foremost, but you know it’s more than that. This is a song about questioning it all, these stories that we all tell ourselves. And maybe acknowledging that there’s something special in the universe to have put a kindred spirit in this world and pointed us towards each other at just the right moment. Serendipity? Or something more? To say you know the answer to that only means you’ve embraced one story over another. The only story I trust in the story of today, just you and me and this crazy world we live in for now.

      Just another song on my Memento Mori playlist, as I march through this one brief life. You might think that’s a morbid thing, remembering that we all must die. I think of it as a reminder to live with grace and love in these days of light. And to celebrate our time together while it’s here. To remember, really, that we all must love.

    • Pier, 2 Piers

      The Apache Pier in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and the Oceanside Pier in Oceanside, California share two things in common. They’re the longest piers on the eastern and western coasts of the United States, respectively. And secondly, this writer managed to unwittingly stumble upon both of them with no prior knowledge of their standing in the world of wooden fishing piers.

      The Apache Pier in Myrtle Beach was build in 1994, making it a relative toddler in the world of wooden piers. By comparison, the Oceanside pier was first built in 1888 and subsequently rebuilt several times. Apache reaches out 1,206 feet into the Atlantic Ocean, while Oceanside juts 1,954 into the Pacific Ocean. If you’re wondering, Apache Pier is named for the beachside campground that owns it.

      I’ve written a bit about Oceanside recently. Myrtle Beach is new for me, and it seems like paradise for year-round golfers, with over 100 courses nearby. I’m not much of a golfer, but I appreciate a long, walkable beach in the offseason, and they surely have that in Myrtle Beach. The piers connect two places for me, if only as common ground. Latitude isn’t that far off, Myrtle Beach is at 33.6891° N, while Oceanside is at 33.1959° N. The gulf currents are of course opposite between the coasts, with warmer water reaching up to greet Apache Pier, while Oceanside Pier has cooler waters coming down from Alaska.

      I confess I rarely think about fishing piers. I live in New Hampshire, and we have piers too, but not piers that stick a thousand feet out into the open ocean. So it’s interesting to spend a bit of time with a couple of the big boys in lumber allocation. I may never write about fishing piers again, but I never thoughts I’d have two posts about them already. You just never know where travel and blogging will take you, do you?

      Myrtle Beach and Apache Pier
      Apache Pier
      Apache Pier
      Oceanside Pier

    • Towards Empty Spaces

      “Hiking is not for everyone. Notice the wilderness is mostly empty.” – Sonja Yoerg

      It seems counterintuitive that an otherwise social being would be so quick to seek out solitude and empty spaces. But that’s generally where you’ll find me when the opportunity arises. Let the record show that I love interacting with people. I just don’t want to have them encroaching on me all the time. And so it is that you’ll find me in places others might think of as desolate and wild.

      My favorite destinations have the fewest people in them. You can have your hippest restaurants and trendy neighborhoods, I’ll stick with wide open places, thank you. I’m happy to visit the world’s big cities, I just don’t want to live in them.

      I think nothing of it when I lose cellular coverage. In fact, I celebrate it! To be off the grid is increasingly difficult, and it may one day be impossible. But for now, I dance with my zero bars when I get ‘em.

      If all of this seems like a diatribe against population growth or humanity in general, well, that’s not the point at all. No, this is a celebration of elbow room and quiet hikes in hard to reach places. May we always have them, for I surely can’t be the only one seeking them out.