Gail Pool's Blog, page 14

Travel Quotation

"There you are!" cried the Toad, straddling and expanding himself. "There's real life for you, embodied in that little cart. The open road, the dusty highway, the heath, the common, the hedgerows, the rolling downs! Camps, villages, towns, cities! Here today, up and off to somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that's always changing!" ―The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

Book Review: Where the Pavement Ends

Where the Pavement Ends: One Womans Bicycle Trip Through Mongolia, China & Vietnam By Erika Warmbrunn, The Mountaineers Books, 2001, 249 pp. Why travel by bicycle? Because a bicycle is freedom; a bicycle is independence; a bicycle is self-sufficiency, writes Erika Warmbrunn. Because a bicycle lands you in places you didnt know you wanted to go, and shows you things you didnt know you wanted to see And there is also the sheer exhilaration: The flying abandon of a bicycle, legs pumping, body an...

Book Review: The Essential Lewis and Clark

The Essential Lewis and Clark Landon Y. Jones, Editor. Ecco Press, 2000, 203 pp. Long before Huck lit out for the territory, Lewis and Clarkdefined the territory, writes Landon Y. Jones in the introduction to his selection from the explorers journals. During their journey, and in their journals, Lewis and Clark created an epic, he observes, one whose effect on our collective imagination has made it, over time, the unofficial Odyssey of American history. The two Captains and their band, the Co...

Book Review The Essential Lewis and Clark

The Essential Lewis and Clark Landon Y. Jones, Editor. Ecco Press, 2000, 203 pp. Long before Huck lit out for the territory, Lewis and Clarkdefined the territory, writes Landon Y. Jones in the introduction to his selection from the explorers journals. During their journey, and in their journals, Lewis and Clark created an epic, he observes, one whose effect on our collective imagination has made it, over time, the unofficial Odyssey of American history. The two Captains and their band, the Co...

An Alligator Tale: When Predator Becomes Prey

My essay, just published in Cognoscenti: "An Alligator Tale: When Predator Becomes Prey."

I wrote this after a traumatic alligator experience in Sanibel, FL, last year--but it's not the trauma you'd expect. Please take a look!

Book Review: The Roads to Sata

The Roads to Sata By Alan Booth. Viking, 1986, 281 pp. To travel on foot is a lure for many people, whether they are pilgrims following in the footsteps of those who preceded them, or adventurers setting out on their own paths. As Patrick Leigh Fermor observed in his classic, A Time of Gifts, "On foot, unlike other forms of travel, it is impossible to be out of touch. Alan Booth clearly felt the attraction of this kind of journey. An Englishman who had lived in Japan for 7 years, was married...

Book Review The Roads to Sata

The Roads to Sata By Alan Booth. Viking, 1986, 281 pp. To travel on foot is a lure for many people, whether they are pilgrims following in the footsteps of those who preceded them, or adventurers setting out on their own paths. As Patrick Leigh Fermor observed in his classic, A Time of Gifts, "On foot, unlike other forms of travel, it is impossible to be out of touch. Alan Booth clearly felt the attraction of this kind of journey. An Englishman who had lived in Japan for 7 years, was married...

Travel Quotation

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware." ―Martin Buber

Book Review: Sailing Alone Around the World

The Voyages of Joshua Slocum Collected and Introduced by Walter Magnes Teller. Sheridan House, 1958, 1995, 401 pp. I was born in the breezes, and I had studied the sea as perhaps few men have studied it, neglecting all else, wrote Joshua Slocum, the first man to circumnavigate the globe on his own. Sailing Alone Around the World is his engaging account of that extraordinary 3-year journey, which takes in the world but is dominated by two characters: Slocum and his 37-foot sloop, the Spray. Af...

Maps as Travel Writing

This detail from the Spitsbergen map, above, shows the Seamorce, or walrus.