Quote: Ian Frazier ...

"For the traveler in the interior of North America the car is a companion with its own definite itinerary. If you're timid about your car you will drive sensibly on paved roads and stay every night in a motel. We all know that it's possible to drive from here to California and stay at more or less the same motel the entire way, in a landscape where certain elements never change. This might have been an interesting experience thirty years ago when it was still new. It might be an interesting experience if you were V. S. Naipaul just arrived here from England. But basically it's a challenge to one's powers of describing the humdrum. On the Great Plains -- and I'm sure in the rest of America as well -- you have to get off the paved road if you want to see where you are. I often found that the experiences I had were interesting in direct proportion to the risks I had taken with my car. If you're not getting stuck occasionally, sliding off the road, knocking your outside mirrors off, bumping your oil pan, you're not doing the job."

-- from "Carving Your Name on the Rock," in They Went: The Art and Craft of Travel Writing, 1991

Aswan, Egypt ...

March 2007. Sailing the Nile ...

Quote: Juan Ramón Jiménez ...

One would think
that the earth was the road
Of the body,
that the sea was the road
Of the soul.

-- from "Dream Nocturne," in Roots and Wings: Poetry from Spain 1900-1975, 1976

Midwest, Wyoming ...

September, 2008. Teapot Dome country ...

Quote: Stephen Douglas ...

"Men who travel should leave their prejudices at home."

-- from Douglass' Monthly, April 1859

Del Rio, Texas ...

January 2008. The Sunset Limited ...

Quote: Thomas Campbell ...

"'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue."

-- from "Pleasures of Hope," 1799

San Francisco, California ...

January 2004. My kind of place ...

Quote: Ogden Nash ...

Oh, some like trips in luxury ships,
And some in gasoline wagons,
And others swear by the upper air
And the wings of flying dragons.
Let each make haste to indulge his taste,
Be it beer, champagne, or cider;
My private joy, both man and boy,
Is being a railroad rider.

-- from "Riding on a Railroad Train," 1935

Pagan, Burma ...

January 1999. Fabled temples ...

Quote: Carl Sandburg ...

I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall pass to ashes.)
I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he answers: "Omaha."

-- "Limited," from Chicago Poems, 1914

Arco, Idaho ...

May, 2007. Forgotten gas station ...

Quote: Kenneth Grahame ...

The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today -- in the next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped -- always somebody else's horizons! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!

-- from The Wind in the Willows, 1908

Punta Arenas, Chile ...

November 2002. The tombs ...

Quote: Eudora Welty ...

"The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”

-- from The Wide Net and Other Stories, 1943

Seattle, Washington ...

January 2009. The greyest of airports ...

Quote: P.J. O'Roarke ...

"LIke most people who don't own Bermuda shorts, I'm board by ordinary travel."

-- from Holidays in Hell, 1988

Paris, France ...

June 2002. Champs-Élysées ...

Quote: Martin Amis ...

"The letter with the foreign postmark that tells of good weather, pleasant food and comfortable accommodation isn't nearly as much fun to read, or to write, as the letter that tells of rotting chalets, dysentary and drizzle."

-- from London Fields, 1989

Cobar, Australia ...

June 2008. Outback butcher shop ...

Quote: Alfred Viscount Northcliffe ...

"I wish the novelists who write about the islands we are passing would say a little more about the heat and perspiration, and a little less about the waving palms and the dusky queens."

-- from a description of the South China Sea, in My Journey Round the World, 1923

Greendale, Utah ...

September 2005. The end of the light ...

Quote: Jack Kerouac ...

" ... so I had sneaked into San Francisco as I say, coming 3000 miles from my home in Long Island (Northport) in a pleasant roomette on the California Zephyr train watching America roll by outside my private picture window, really happy for the first time in three years, staying in the roomette all three days and three nights with my instant coffee and sandwiches -- Up the Hudson Valley and over across New York State to Chicago and then the Plains, the mountains, the desert, the final mountains of California, all so easy and dream like compared to my old harsh hitch hikings before I made enough to take transcontinental trains ..."

-- from Big Sur, 1962

Singapore ...

October 2003. Fine dining ...

Quote: Earl Mac Rauch ...

"'Cause, remember, no matter where you go . . . there you are."

-- from The Adventures of Burkaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension, 1984

Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina ...

May 2003. A "Sarajevo Rose" ...

Quote: Paul Theroux ...

"There is not much to say about most airplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful."

-- from The Old Patagonian Express, 1979

Zurich, Switzerland ...

November 2005. From the church tower ...

Quote: Joachim du Bellay ...

"Happy he who like Ulysses has made a glorious journey."

-- from "Sonnet 31," Lei Regrets, 1555

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ...

May, 2004. The view from Sugarloaf ...

Quote: William Least Heat-Moon ...

"A traveler who leaves the journey open to the road finds unforeseen things come to shape it."

-- from Blue Highways, 1982