Recently I marked my second anniversary of moving to Berlin. So I guess I’m particularly well-disposed to my adopted city at the moment, which is why I admired Nick Kulish’s piece about literary and artistic Berlin in this weekend’s New York Times.
Kulish, the Berlin bureau chief for the Times, knows the city well and I felt captured not only the odd, biting humor that Berliners are known for in Germany but also the fact that a very good case can be made for this formerly divided city being perhaps the most artistically vibrant and important in Europe.
Jayne Clark visits that other Mayan coast in Mexico — the Costa Maya, not to be confused with the Riviera Maya — and the town of Mahahual in this weekend’s USA Today.
Recently, the Washington Post announced that it was canceling its travel blog in favor of publishing more original content on the newspaper’s travel page throughout the week. I took this to be great news, not least of all because the travel blog seldom had anything interesting to say (no pithy dispatches from travel staffers on the road, it read like a bunch of writers sitting in the office everyday). This weekend, the Post gives you a primer on hiking the Appalachian Trail and journey through Brittany by an American expat in France, Robert Camuto.
I usually stop reading any travel story that begins in an airport or on an airplane (“I looked out the porthole to see cars the size of toys…”). I’m glad I didn’t in Camuto’s case, because it took a good stab at capturing one of France’s more rugged regions. Would have been nice to meet a few local characters, though…
It’s been five years since I was last in Belfast, so I was interested in Bert Archer’s piece about the Northern Ireland capital in this weekend’s Toronto Globe and Mail. His conclusion: Belfast is an undiscovered European capital that has put a lot of distance between itself and the Troubles, the recent shootings there notwithstanding.
Moving over to another Canadian paper, the Vancouver Sun publishes an interesting profile on The Nicest Travel Writer in the World — Rick Steves. Who knew Steves was an advocate for legalizing weed?
Back in the US, the San Francisco Chronicle gives us a dispatch by Edward Guthmann from Jackson, Mississippi as he travels through the city in the footsteps of its favorite literary daughter, Eudora Welty. Cliched as they are, I’m a sucker for the literary footsteps story — Steinbeck in Salinas, Lawrence in Taos — and once even added my own very minor contribution to the genre.
Also in the Chronicle, former Travel Editor John Flinn praises ExOfficio’s quick-drying nylon briefs. As far as I’m concerned, he’s just following Gadling’s own resident nomad Tynann, who endorsed these undies last year.
Finally, do you remember when the South Florida Sun-Sentinel produced an improbably good travel section (improbable because it’s not a major metro paper) and was an oft-pitched publication for adventurous travel writers? Sadly, those days are long gone. Last year, the Sun-Sentinel laid off long time Travel Editor Tom Swick and since then as become a real snooze fest if you’re interested in anything outside of Florida — this weekend’s section offering the most updated proof.