Last year, a few remote possibilities suddenly filled up the calendar with startling speed. We always kick around a lot of ideas. Some result in stories, some don’t. Usually, most of them don’t. But 2003 proved to be the exception.
You may have noticed that Travel has been parceling out several series over the years: Wonders of the World, Great American Drives, Great Cities of North America, Our National Parks . . . . After we decided, seven years ago, to write about every single one of our 56 national parks, editor Randy Curwen and I talked casually about my visiting a certain park so remote that it was hard to believe it really exists.
That would be the National Park of American Samoa–a dot of land in the South Pacific, a U.S. territory only a smidgen east of the International Dateline. “Maybe we’ll publish that one last,” Randy said. Therefore, for years, I hardly gave American Samoa much of a thought. It became sort of a standing joke: If we ever near the end of the Our National Parks series, I would be compelled to go out to the land of tropical splendor and tuna canneries.
I also had a couple of Man-made Wonders of the World still on my plate, the Taj Mahal in India and Petra in Jordan. We left those undone for fairly obvious reasons. Early on, Randy and I waited to see if there would be a war in Iraq and how that would affect travel to the Middle East. There would be, and it did–negatively. In the subcontinent, we heard about enough acts of terrorism and sufficient animosities between India and Pakistan to prevent us from making plans for a look at the Taj.
“When the time comes, maybe we can do the Taj Mahal and Petra in the same trip,” my editor would say. “Oh, uh, right,” I’d reply.
Early last year and on into the summer, those “maybes” solidified, and I had to hurry up and arrange plane and hotel reservations, visa applications, itineraries, maps, vaccination renewals and background reading. The parks series actually did approach the finish line. Man-made Wonders no longer could wait for Indian and Middle Eastern peace. A slight lull would have to do.
In January, I found myself in American Samoa. A great beach, some swaths of greenery and the thrill that comes from traveling a long way to a strange place. My report on National Park of American Samoa will appear in an issue this year, and with that my seven years of covering national parks will at last come to an end. From American Samoa, I went to another country known as just plain Samoa–no relation, separate government, slightly different culture. Used to be Western Samoa, then Independent Samoa, now it’s Just Samoa. OK, OK, I told my local informants, I get it.
At Aggie Grey’s Hotel in Apia, Just Samoa, I watched the Super Bowl. The small TV was having a bad-reception day. It looked as if Tampa Bay and Oakland were battling in a snowstorm–old-fashioned football as they used to play it before global warming and domed arenas spoiled the fun. I pretended that snow actually did blanket San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium, and that provided a little relief from Just Samoa’s stifling heat.
Then it was on to New Zealand and automobile trips over both of its major islands. People drive on the left over there, so I saw most of the great scenery out of my right hand window–mountains, ocean, farms, vineyards, sheep, lovely little villages. No Hobbits.
Naturally, there would be less exotic interludes. For example, a trip to Las Vegas with wife and daughter, taking in some shows, checking out a few hotel/casinos and dining better than well. Hooray for Lutece, Aureole and Picasso (the restaurants), “O” by Cirque du Soleil, comics Rita Rudner and George Carlin (the shows). “Mama Mia!” wasn’t bad, either, if you like high school musicals. For the first time, I got to see the Eiffel Tower looming over the Paris hotel/casino and the Italianate audacity of Venice, the resort. Hardly anything in Vegas seemed to fit my 5-year-old memory of the town, where I had stopped briefly before heading out to national parks in Arizona and Utah.
April turned out to be one of those months that occasionally befall every travel reporter–sitting at the desk and writing about journeys past, while preparing for a totally unplanned assignment.
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In May, I flew to St. Petersburg, Russia, via Frankfurt–the start of a dream trip that I hadn’t dreamt about at all. But there it came, welcome but unbidden, the answer to some Travel section needs. I spent nearly a week admiring the beauty of St. Petersburg’s art and architecture and visiting a few places where history practically jumps from the walls. Czars! Revolution! War! Glasnost! Classical ballet! Not only that, St. Pete was celebrating its 300th birthday, so a lot of old palaces, churches, parks and museums looked terrific, and I got to see a few parades where clowns and balloons outnumbered tanks and rockets.
Then I moved on to Krakow, Poland (still the same unanticipated trip). My wife, Juju, met me there. Krakow turned out to be an excellent European city with a lively Old Town and a fascinating Market Square. Another pleasant surprise: Wonderful food, although a few side dishes came larded with . . . lard.
After a few days in Krakow, we flew to Copenhagen, one of my old friends. We couldn’t stay long, because our ship, the Regal Princess, would be setting off on a 10-day Baltic cruise the next afternoon: Stockholm; Helsinki, Finland; St. Petersburg again (a first for Juju); Tallinn, Estonia; Gdansk, Poland; and Oslo. I’ll have more to say about that adventure later in the year. But as of January 2003, none of this European jaunt had even crossed my mind.
Russia, Poland and the Baltic pretty much consumed the month of May. Most of June would find me at the keyboard again. I did take off a week to serve as a marshal at the U.S. Open. That required far more advance planning than any trip in 2003. The United States Golf Association insists that its member/volunteers commit nearly a year in advance. So I had plenty of warning before I set foot on the hallowed ground of Olympia Fields Country Club. It turned out to be a thrilling week for someone who follows golf and tries to play the game. But I still have no idea how the tournament site would look without the miles of broadcast cables, trailers, vendors’ tents, temporary VIP enclosures, a sprawling USGA-logo golf shop, TV towers and grandstands.
One afternoon, someone in the gallery looked at my marshal’s badge and whispered to a friend, “I know that guy, recognize the name. He works for the Tribune and he and his wife are always going to these crazy places.” I smiled. I said “Shhhh.”
A golfer was about to swing. Golfers detest surprises.
The next crazy place turned out to be Brown County, Ind., one of those all-American tourist destinations, complete with bucolic scenery, cute stores and Harley-Davidsons. I had been there before, but it was a long time ago. Juju hadn’t. She bought a horse’s feed bag to use as a purse. Juju wanted to see Indianapolis on the way home, and I obliged.
St. Petersburg it ain’t.
For most of the year, the staff kept an eye out for developments in Iraq, India and Israel. We were missing my two long-planned, then forgotten, contributions to our Man-made Wonders of the World series, the Taj Mahal and Petra.
Finally, late in the summer, India and Pakistan started to make nice, which meant I might be able to proceed with that journey to the Taj Mahal after all. My other assigned Man-made Wonder, however, would be Petra in Jordan. (Never heard of it? Keep an eye out for a future issue of Travel.) That one still seemed problematic. Jordan, a relatively peaceful country, unfortunately shares borders with two of the most troubled–the one Saddam Hussein once ruled and the one disputed and constantly disrupted by Israelis and Palestinians. As a forlorn employee of the Jordan Tourism Board once put it, “We’re between Iraq and a hard place.”
In the spirit of the Series Must Go On, we finally made plans for the India/Jordan trip–yes, all one trip. We figured we could fly past the trouble spots, land in Amman, continue on to Delhi and return with a stopover in Amman, using Royal Jordanian Airlines. Amman and Delhi are about five hours apart. Conveniently, the airline offers non-stop flights from O’Hare to Amman, so we would have to add another 12 hours for that.
We saw the Taj Mahal and a lot more. We saw Petra and a lot more. They are, without a doubt, Man-made Wonders of the World. Details later.
It took a year to do all that globe-trotting, not to mention visits to a couple more national parks, Theodore Roosevelt and Great Basin, the latter being the last I would visit in researching Our National Parks . For much of 2003, I found myself in a constant state of astonishment–never been there, never done that.
At one point, I visited Las Vegas again, partly because of scheduling and partly because nothing happening in that city could surprise me in the least.
But after I arrived home, Randy Curwen tricked me into attending a “meeting” that turned out to be a celebration of the fact that I had set foot in my last national park in the role of reporter. Some clown in a Smokey Bear costume (Al Solomon) came out of the woodwork. Colleagues in Features gathered for pieces of a huge cake decorated with a picture of Smokey Bear with my face under that ranger hat. We drank coffee, ate cake and trail mix (to carry out the theme), and socialized until it was time to get back to work and, in my case, wait for the next bombshell.
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Robert Cross has been campaigning to do a series on Great Cities of the Hapsburg Empire. E-mail him at [email protected].