Travelling with Cultural Baggage

One of the challenges of travel is having to bring myself with me. If the trip is going to be more than passive entertainment, I have to try to erode my preconceived notions, prejudices, blindspots, and cultural programming.

This week I felt shock when I first saw the scene pictured at the top of this post. I had to remind myself I was in southern Spain, and not South Carolina.

Maybe this is just bad taste fancy dress. Then I saw whole families dressed up.

Let's Play "Which Button Do I Press?"

Question 1: Which button do I press to dispense hot water? 

A Japanese hotel room is an oasis from the complexity of navigating Japan. I can kick back, have a nice cup of tea, and calmly plan my next adventures.

Or can I?

Wabi-Sabi Lessons for Imperfect Journeys

"Wabi-sabi represents the exact opposite of the Western ideal of great beauty as something monumental, spectacular, and enduring. Wabi-sabi is not found in nature at moments of bloom and lushness, but at moments of inception or subsiding. Wabi-sabi is not about gorgeous flowers, majestic trees, or bold landscapes. Wabi-sabi is about the minor and the hidden, the tentative and the ephemeral: things so subtle and evanescent they are invisible to vulgar eyes." [Source]

I love to hike up Japan's mountains, but I will never climb Mount Fuji. I love the trails of New Zealand, but I'll never walk the Milford Trail.

I'm unimpressed by brochure-speak and heavily saturated travel photographs. I don't have a bucket list, I generally avoid over-loved A-list destinations.

I don't seek "the perfect trip."

Zen and the Art of Casserole Assembly

Oh, the things I wish I'd known when I was young.

Take the ingredients for a basic bake pictured at the top of this post. They look simple enough but for me they represent small lessons learned over decades.

Travel Gear: Buying the Wrong GPS

Whether it's investments or stuff, I'm a buy-and-hold kind of person.

I'd had my handheld GPS (a Garmin, function-key-driven GPSMAP 6OCSx) 8 years when I lost it on a trip in January 2015. I was not ready to replace it because it still performed well relative to current units.

But now I had no GPS. I decided to stick with Garmin because I have sets of Garmin maps, and am impressed how rugged my GPS had been. It has survived immersion in water and many falls onto hard surfaces.

I looked at Garmin devices positioned for hiking and narrowed my choice to two units:

A touch-screen unit: Oregon 600. 

A function-key-driven (non-touch-screen) unit: GPSMAP 64S.

I decided to try something new and settled on the touch-screen unit, the Oregon 600.

Over the course of a two-month trip, February through April 2015, I decided my chosen GPS is unfit for serious hiking.

So, where did I go wrong?

The Other

 Woolworth's lunch counter (Smithsonian)

I tried to build a coherent picture of my seatmate as I rode Amtrak from Cleveland to New York.

The obvious stuff: 40-ish, black, heavyset, financially on the edge. I got the financial bit as he talked on the phone about his imminent move to a smaller apartment.

He clicked away at his laptop, editing, re-editing video segments of silently dancing young women, fishnet leotards, backsides wiggling at the camera.