My travels
Comments about travel are below the three maps showing and naming the non-US/Canada places I have experienced in the world.
where i have been
I was born in Iowa, grew up in North Carolina and Tennessee, and have spent most of my adult life living in Texas. I have traveled in every state except these: West: Arizona, Washington, Alaska Central: North Dakota, South Dakota, Michigan, Nebraska East: VermontI have traveled in the Canadian provinces of Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia.
The trips were mostly due to activities with the Boy Scouts, outings with my parents and brothers, trials and seminars as a lawyer, and family outings with my two wives and three daughters. Some solo trips were made during and after college to be with classmates for school breaks or to attend weddings.
The trips were mostly due to activities with the Boy Scouts, outings with my parents and brothers, trials and seminars as a lawyer, and family outings with my two wives and three daughters. Some solo trips were made during and after college to be with classmates for school breaks or to attend weddings.
Travel Musings
Produced below are some thoughts for Americans and Canadians traveling outside the United States and Canada.
Why Travel?What travel can do for the traveler. Ellen and I have traveled for three principal purposes:1. To see a natural or man-made object2. To be around people different from us3. To have a new body or mind experience Over the past fifteen years, 2. has come to predominate. We really do want to know about other cultures. If we go to Southeast Asia, we of course want to see Angkor Wat, but the main reason to go to that part of the world is simply to live among the people and eat and drink at their eateries, buy items in their stores, talk with them in the street, to see, hear, and smell their normal places of worship, work, play, gathering, and entertainment - to have some sense of their life. The search for experiencing culture is caused by, or in turn has caused, one characteristic of our way of travel, which is immersion. We spend several days in a place. The reason organized tours rarely see us, even when the organization and guidance a tour offers would be welcome, is that almost all tours stay in specific sites too short a time for our comfort. | What were our best trips?Where do we want to go next? We both love Paris and Mexico City. The answer I have long given to the best trip question has been Romania. For the first time in my life I had an understanding of the life of subsistence farmers - the way the majority of people lived for 3-4 thousand years until first in England, and then in the United States, manufacturing replaced farming. The shocking realization was that almost no one in Romania was desperately poor, as are so many people in the United States. On that trip, too, I first saw Roman ruins, and saw the timber-based way of life of the Saxon immigrants (12th century) into Transylvania. For Ellen, it was the ten days we spent in Hong Kong. (With complete Chinese political take over now, that would almost certainly be a less satisfactory experience today.) It was the powerful sense of living with a specific culture that most impressed her that trip. In selecting futures trips our old age (74 and 77 in 2026) is impacting our thinking. We are mostly pondering the new places of greater Southeast Asia, Northwest Costa Rica, Japan, and Central China, and back to Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize. | Proverbial reflections. 1. Do put in the planning, but it is better to book now than to delay departure. 2. Make plans that allow for cancellation up to a reasonable time before departure at a reasonable cost, especially flights. 3. Check out and consider both hotels and residences each trip you plan. 4. Use TripAdvisor liberally. 5. Always compare the deal at a hotel's Web site before booking with a third party. 6. Paying for a Business Class seat may sometimes be worth the high premium; e.g. the non-stop flight between places that are more than, say, 5,000 miles apart. 7. To initiate a trip, one approach is to simply go online to TripAdvisor and book flight(s) and place(s) to stay. This will work well with some large cities offering lots of things to do and that are easy to get around, e.g. New York, Paris, Mexico City, Beijing, London. Then, find your events. 8. In Europe, you can well master taking the trains, both subways and inter-city. 9. If your trip is 8 days or longer, think about booking a place with a washing machine at mid way, taking fewer clothes. 10. Don't buy souvenirs, buy only gifts. |
United States and Canada
Except for the Mexican cities of Reynoso, Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta, all of the below cities I saw on trips with my wife, Ellen Luby, during 1999-2026. The most common number of nights in a city is five, with only Amsterdam and Puerto Vallarta having fewer than two nights. A few times I have stayed in one city for ten or more nights. A number of the places I have visited on multiple occasions, including five or more times for Paris and Mexico City.
Where should you consider traveling for a foreign trip?
Each of us has different ideas about what is fun or interesting. I have listed some destinations, with the left entry and the top line as my picks for best or otherwise most desirable categories, especially for beginners. I think most everyone should seriously consider visiting some of these places:
cities of Paris, Rome, Mexico City, Beijing, Kyoto, London; (on beginning foreign travel, I would pick a city to stay 5 days before seeing an entire country)the locale where your immigrant ancestors lived; (both spouses need to buy into this; alternate the couple's ancestors)countries of Italy, France, China, England and Scotland, Japan, Mexico, Egypt, India; (I advise visiting Italy more than France, France more than China, etc.)regions of Central Europe, Scandinavia, Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, Central America; (I advise visiting fewer rather than more destinations on one trip)
art museums The Louvre and Musée d'Orsay in Paris, Vatican Museums in Rome, Uffizi in Florence, Prado in Madrid, Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; cultural museums Palace in Beijing, Victoria and Albert in London, Museum Island in Berlin, Tokyo National, Anthropology in Mexico City; monumental buildings at Machu Pichu, Taj Mahal, Hagia Sofia, Colosseum in Rome, Stonehenge, Alhambra; pyramids in Giza (outside Cairo), Monte Alban, Tikal (Guatemala), Tenochtitlan, Chichen Itza; natural wonders of Victoria Falls, Paricutin Volcano, Harbor of Rio de Janeiro, Serengeti Migration, Northern Lights, Iguazu Falls;
best food is in Provence, in and around Friuli [food and wine], Naples, Punjab, Bangkok, Oaxaca, Tuscany [food and wine], Brittany, West Bengal, Tokyo;
experiences of safari in Kenya or Botswana; cruise on Amazon basin, Mekong River, Norwegian coast; absorbing culture in Romania, Thailand, Germany; excavated cities at Angkor Wat, Pompei and Herculaneum, Derinkuyu (Turkey), Upano River (Ecuador). I have no insight to offer on beach life, scuba diving, mountain climbing, bird watching, boating, dancing, hunting, that are very popular with many persons. I have not visited all of the places I name just above, but I have extensively researched all of them. A few days before our fully booked trips to India and to Japan, we canceled due to my first cardiac event and the world COVID outbreak. I have fully planned trips to Botswana (including Victoria Falls) and to Southeast Asia, but those we have not taken.Finally, this list is for the 2020s and is of places to actually take a trip to visit. Mount Everest is a top wonder of the world, but I would not advise taking a trip there; Tibet once had a dynamic culture to see but that was eradicated by the early 21st century; Russia and Pakistan are not presently safe for travel, etc.
Each of us has different ideas about what is fun or interesting. I have listed some destinations, with the left entry and the top line as my picks for best or otherwise most desirable categories, especially for beginners. I think most everyone should seriously consider visiting some of these places:
cities of Paris, Rome, Mexico City, Beijing, Kyoto, London; (on beginning foreign travel, I would pick a city to stay 5 days before seeing an entire country)the locale where your immigrant ancestors lived; (both spouses need to buy into this; alternate the couple's ancestors)countries of Italy, France, China, England and Scotland, Japan, Mexico, Egypt, India; (I advise visiting Italy more than France, France more than China, etc.)regions of Central Europe, Scandinavia, Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, Central America; (I advise visiting fewer rather than more destinations on one trip)
art museums The Louvre and Musée d'Orsay in Paris, Vatican Museums in Rome, Uffizi in Florence, Prado in Madrid, Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; cultural museums Palace in Beijing, Victoria and Albert in London, Museum Island in Berlin, Tokyo National, Anthropology in Mexico City; monumental buildings at Machu Pichu, Taj Mahal, Hagia Sofia, Colosseum in Rome, Stonehenge, Alhambra; pyramids in Giza (outside Cairo), Monte Alban, Tikal (Guatemala), Tenochtitlan, Chichen Itza; natural wonders of Victoria Falls, Paricutin Volcano, Harbor of Rio de Janeiro, Serengeti Migration, Northern Lights, Iguazu Falls;
best food is in Provence, in and around Friuli [food and wine], Naples, Punjab, Bangkok, Oaxaca, Tuscany [food and wine], Brittany, West Bengal, Tokyo;
experiences of safari in Kenya or Botswana; cruise on Amazon basin, Mekong River, Norwegian coast; absorbing culture in Romania, Thailand, Germany; excavated cities at Angkor Wat, Pompei and Herculaneum, Derinkuyu (Turkey), Upano River (Ecuador). I have no insight to offer on beach life, scuba diving, mountain climbing, bird watching, boating, dancing, hunting, that are very popular with many persons. I have not visited all of the places I name just above, but I have extensively researched all of them. A few days before our fully booked trips to India and to Japan, we canceled due to my first cardiac event and the world COVID outbreak. I have fully planned trips to Botswana (including Victoria Falls) and to Southeast Asia, but those we have not taken.Finally, this list is for the 2020s and is of places to actually take a trip to visit. Mount Everest is a top wonder of the world, but I would not advise taking a trip there; Tibet once had a dynamic culture to see but that was eradicated by the early 21st century; Russia and Pakistan are not presently safe for travel, etc.