Long before recent events had cruise shipsgrounded, on fire or broken, cruise lines were charged with polluting the environment via their diesel-burning engines. Addressing the concern of environmentalists, many cruise lines chose to plug in those ships when in port, using cleaner shore-side power when possible. Still, looming new environmental standards have cruise lines scrambling to find fuel that will satisfy requirements. Caught in the middle, one lawmaker has chosen to support the cruise line that brings hundreds of jobs and millions in economic impact to his state.
Maryland governor Martin O’Malley is lobbying on behalf of Carnival Cruise Lines with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), looking for a waiver from the new rules to keep the cruise ships coming to the city.
At stake are 220 jobs and $90 million a year spent by cruise passengers and companies that support cruise ships. New rules require cruise ships to use fuel with no more than .10 percent sulfur content starting in 2015, something cruise lines say cannot be done.Unable to find a source for fuel that will produce acceptable results, cruise lines have tried to satisfy the requirement in other ways. Averaging sulfur content across fleets, including those ships with zero output when plugging in is one option being explored. Developing and installing a new type of pollution scrubbers on ships that would meet or exceed air-quality standards is another.
On one side, EPA insists that the requirement could significantly reduce air pollution along the coast and far inland. But the cruise industry warns of potential cutbacks in cruises and job losses because of higher costs associated with EPA standards compliance. In the middle, choosing jobs over the environment, O’Malley’s position is clear.
“If jobs are at stake, the governor is going to go to bat for those jobs,” said O’Malley’s press secretary, Takirra Winfield in a Baltimore Sun report.
If you’re the outdoorsy type, it’s hard not to enjoy car camping, as long as you find a destination and campground that are compatible with your interests and needs. Not that I’m speaking from experience, but … let’s just say the romantic, roughing-it weekend my ex and I had planned in southwestern Colorado a few years ago turned into pitching a tent in a trailer park populated by elderly snowbirds.
If you’re carless, or want something more adventurous/rigorous/off-beat, or safe for your bad back, I’ve got a few alternatives for your consideration. The good news is, the price points for these adventures ensure there’s at least one that will fit your budget. Depending upon where your travel plans are taking you, some regions even specialize in these types of camping trips. So get online, do some research and don’t forget the sunscreen. Happy Trails.
Hut trip
There are hut systems located all over North America (as well as in other alpine terrain worldwide); perhaps the most famous are Colorado’s 10th Mountain Division Huts. Whether you’re a novice hiker or a backpacking machine, there’s a hut hike suited for you. Tip: book well in advance. You can sometimes find last-minute beds, but this type of trip really requires advance planning.
Pack trip
If mountains are your thing, get on a horse or mule and take a pack trip. The Sierras, Rocky Mountains, and Cascades in particular are known for their alpine scenery and well-regarded pack trains. Tip: there’s no reason you can’t do a pack trip if you’re a novice rider, but you need to choose the right outfitter and destination; many trips are for experienced riders (you can even bring your own horse sometimes).
Sea kayak
I love sea kayaking, but I’m too novice to attempt a big paddle on my own. When I was living in Seattle a couple of years ago, I found an outfitter who, for a reasonable price, took me on a private paddle out to one of the many deserted islets off of Puget Sound’s Whidbey Island. We camped, watched bald eagles, gorged on a Marionberry pie picked up en route, and what do you know? He taught me how to read a tide chart well enough to give me the confidence to try this type of mini-excursion by myself.
Water taxi
Some coastal, riverfront, or lakeside destinations offer water taxis to get you to and from your campsite. Although Kauai no longer offers this service for return hikers coming off the famous Kalalau Trail, there are plenty of other exotic options. I once took a water taxi from Picton on the South Island of New Zealand, in order to embark on a two-day hike of the gorgeous Queen Charlotte Track. Bonus: a pod of dolphins kept pace with us the entire ride out.
Shuttle it
Sometimes, it’s just not practical or possible to do a backpacking or camping trip with a car. In a couple of weeks, for example, I’m going to do Colorado’s West Maroon Pass, which is a roughly 11-mile hike over the Elk Mountains, from Crested Butte to Aspen. Since I’m going it alone, I’m arranging for Dolly’s Mountain Shuttle to bring me back. This Gunnison Valley-based airport shuttle addition also offers summertime returns for hikers coming off the Pass. At $60 a seat (as long as they have more than one passenger), it’s worth the price to not have to sort out the logistics of a car swap or transport. Best of all, you can take a nap after all that walking.
We were locked out of the humble home where country music legend Loretta Lynn grew up and were about to leave Butcher Hollow when someone pulled up in silver Chevy Silverado pickup truck. A trim man with neatly parted gray hair wearing a pair of jeans and a red-checked shirt stepped out of the truck and introduced himself.
“I’m Herman Webb,” he said, shaking my hand.
It took me a minute to realize that this was the brother of country music stars Loretta Lynn and Crystal Gale. But how did he know that we wanted to tour the home they grew up in?
“You were just down at the grocery shop,” he explained, sensing my confusion. “They called and said there was someone here to see the house. I live just 500 feet down the road there, so here I am.”I like old school country music but I’m not so hardcore that I would ordinarily seek out the childhood homes of well-known country music artists. Loretta Lynn, however, is another story. Even if you don’t like country music, you have to love her life story.
The daughter of a coal miner, she was the second of eight children who grew up poor in a place called Butcher Hollow in Van Lear, Kentucky. (It’s pronounced and sometimes spelled Butcher Holler and is named after her mother’s family whose surname was Butcher.) She got married at 15 and had three children by the time she was 19. At 29, she was already a grandmother. Not exactly a textbook formula for success, but after moving out west she was discovered at a talent show in Tacoma and went on to record 16 number one hits, winning four Grammy awards and countless other accolades along the way.
Three of her siblings, sisters Crystal Gayle and Peggy Sue, and brother Jay Lee Webb, also pursued careers in country music, though none were as successful as she was. But despite her fame she never forgot her humble roots. Indeed her most recent album is called Van Lear Rose and her best-known hit, “Coal Miner’s Daughter” is all about growing up in the Van Lear coal mines area.
Butcher Hollow is a destination, not a place you just happen to pass through. We were on our way back to Chicago after touring Hatfield-McCoy country in West Virginia and Kentucky and I convinced my wife that an excursion to Lynn’s childhood home was a worthy detour.
We got hopelessly lost but with a little help from some friendly locals we finally found Millers Creek Road, which meanders down to Butcher Hollow. It’s a narrow road that passes through this isolated community of trailers and modest homes. We passed a number of abandoned or burned out homes and shops, and in some ways, it almost seemed like a ghost town until we stopped into Webb Grocery, a small shop filled with Loretta Lynn memorabilia owned by Herman.
The narrow road leading down to the house is overgrown in places, and I kept stopping to get out and look at things that caught my eye: an old white school bus with “Kentucky” written in cursive script and a multicolored flag serving as someone’s curtains; a modest home with a cluttered front porch and a “God Bless America” sign; and a small home that was dwarfed by three huge satellite dishes. The nearest Starbucks, I later confirmed, is an hour and 20 minutes to the north in Huntington, West Virginia. Butcher Hollow is about as off the grid as you can get east of the Mississippi.
After a few minutes of small talk with Herman, 78, on the front porch of the old wooden cabin the family moved to when Loretta was a toddler, he put on one of his sister’s albums and we stepped into the house. The first floor has just two rooms, both with double beds, and a kitchen. (The attic bedrooms are off limits to visitors.) I was immediately struck by how tiny the place is, especially for a huge family, and by the fact that there was graffiti all over the walls.
“I can’t control what they do when they get ahead of you,” Herman explained.
The home is perched on a hilltop and is filled with period antiques the family actually used. Every inch of wall space that isn’t filled with family photos or memorabilia is covered in graffiti – people have signed their names and the date they visited the place or written other messages, like “Welcome to Butcher Holler” to mark their visit.
A trio of teenage girls turned up and Herman led us around the home, telling stories and pointing out the significance of various items on display.
“This is the best piece of furniture I got,” he said in his raspy, Kentucky twang, made horse by a lifetime of work in factories as a painter and welder, grasping a swing positioned in what was once his parent’s bedroom. “This swing was on the porch when I was a little kid.”
He pointed to a photo of his parents and said, “That’s mommy and daddy sittin’ in this swing in nineteen and fifty one. My dad died in 1959, at 52. Mommy remarried but she never did have no more kids.”
Herman told us that the town fell on hard times after the Van Lear coal mine closed in 1948.
“This used to be a thriving town,” he said. “We had plenty of stores, even a stoplight.”
The family moved to Wabash, Indiana, in 1955. Loretta and her husband didn’t care for Indiana so they gravitated west to Washington State where she was discovered. Herman said he returned to Van Lear for good in 1975.
“I don’t know why,” he joked. “Guess I was just homesick.”
A cousin lived in the place into the 70s and Herman started fixing it up, so he could open it to the public in 1986. The house had no electricity or running water, and everyone had to use an outhouse out back when nature called.
“We didn’t have much money,” Herman said. “But neither did anyone else we knew and there was always something to eat.”
He said that they learned how to forage for edible plants and berries on hikes around the surrounding hills. Herman played in a band called the Country Nighthawks; he played the “git-TAR,” but was never able to quit his day job.
“We played a lot of gigs but I could never go too far, because I couldn’t quit my job and we needed the money,” he explained. “But I still play now and again.”
His sisters still come back to Butcher Hollow for visits, and he enjoys visiting with tourists who come to see the place, especially since his wife died of Lou Gehrig’s Disease seven years back.
“This old stove, tea kettle and cabinets here are all the original things we had,” Herman said, leading us through the tiny kitchen. “That churn behind you – I’ve churned buttermilk in that, beat butter, I’ve done it all.”
He showed us a moonshine container, his dad’s coal mining helmet and a host of other items and after showing us around the living room, took a seat on a couch. As much as I enjoyed seeing the house and this unique little forgotten corner of the country, the real treasure in visiting Butcher Hollow was having a chance to meet Herman, who seemed to be in no hurry to go home.
After a nice long chat, we said our goodbyes and on the way back out of town I saw a bumper sticker on a parked car down at the grocery shop that read, “Y’all Been to Butcher Hollow?” I’ve traveled all around the world in the last four decades but I can’t remember ever getting a richer, more authentic slice of a fast vanishing culture than what we experienced in this forgotten little hamlet in the hills of eastern Kentucky.
Hell yeah, I’ve been to Butcher Hollow and I plan to come back around someday too. Hope to see you there.
They have stolen my lunch while hiking in Costa Rica, and broken into my backpack in the streets of Kathmandu. They have danced on my roof all night in Bolivia, and an orangutan managed to steal this man’s shirt off his back. In Peru, one even crawled into my sleeping bag, even though I was already sleeping in it.
Nevertheless, even once you realize they’re mischievous little thieves, it’s hard to not be drawn to them. There’s just something about their pudgy face and long, dexterous tail that makes them too hard to pass by.
Which is why I found myself – despite all past encounters with the cheeky little devils – kayaking the waters of a Thai island with the specific intent of sharing a beach with monkeys.
%Slideshow-702%On the island of Koh Phi Phi, “Monkey Beach” is only a 30-minute kayak paddle from the developed shoreline of Ao Lo Dalam, a crescent of white sand where budget backpackers binge on buckets and snowbirding Swedes slather on sunscreen.
For a fistful of baht that amounts to about $5, you can rent a kayak from a makeshift activities stand and paddle your way towards the primate-filled cove.
It was at one such stand where we received the first warning.
“You bring kayak back in two hours,” advised our smiling, black-haired rental agent, his skin tanned to the point that it meshed with his black shorts.
“And watch out for monkey. They steal your food.”
Thirty minutes, one bottle of water and two dozen photos later, the white sand of Monkey Beach crunched beneath the kayak as I slid the vessel onto shore. We hadn’t even opted to bring food, since past encounters taught me it was nothing but trouble, and instead nursed our waters in the mid-winter heat.
On shore, spindly green vines dripped down from the jungle and turquoise water lapped at the coast. No monkeys could be seen scuttling about the shoreline, but the telltale hum of a long-tail boat told me things would soon change.
As if on cue, the moment the long-tail boat rounded the corner and pulled its bow up onto the sand, the trees came alive with the rustle of mischief. Despite their inhabiting an undeveloped beach, these monkeys encounter over a hundred visitors a day, and they’ve come to learn these visitors mean food.
With my kayak tucked into a protected corner of beach, and not a loose item or scrap of food laying anywhere about it, I was more than happy to sit back and watch the thieving carnage unfold.
Humans, they say, have the most developed brain of any animal and it’s one thing which separates us from monkeys. That argument could be a tough sell, however, to anyone watching the scene on “Monkey Beach.” Spilling off of tour boats, visitors will try to photograph the monkeys, they will chase the monkeys and perhaps even try to pet them.
A lobster-skinned British man thought it might be fun to feed one a banana. Not only was the plantain aggressively swiped from his hand, but as he sat stunned at the speed with which the food had been swiped, another monkey had made off with his camera.
One monkey stole an orange soda and drank it in front of the crying child who was suddenly without an orange soda.
Nevertheless, most people were still wrapped beneath the spell that everything monkeys do is cute.
As in, “Look Honey, the monkey decided to play with our camera and is now chewing on the memory card that has every photo from our trip on it. Isn’t that adorable!“
Things turned a bit more dire, however, when one of the four-legged hoodlums stealthily snuck up on a woman still seated in her kayak. With the bow of her boat facing out towards the water, she casually appeared to be enraptured by the tropical panorama.
Even though common wisdom says you should “never turn your back on the ocean,” there should be an addendum to include “unless the beach behind you is covered in monkeys.”
As this poor woman kept to herself and enjoyed her moment of peace, this stealth monkey gradually snuck up behind her and playfully pounced on her back. The ensuing scream, which shot across the jungle, was so piercing and high-pitched it was probably heard by dogs in Malaysia. Unfazed, the monkey then climbed atop the woman’s head, opting to play with her curly black hair.
The screams continued, and while the monkey eventually bounded back into the jungle, by the time it was finished colonizing her cranium he had left bloody red scratches on the woman’s back and neck. Rabies can be a serious business when it comes to monkeys in Asia, and luckily, it appeared, the woman would be going home with scratches instead of bites.
A horseshoe of onlookers gathered around the woman, and a dry-witted Aussie was the first to chime in.
“Bloodthirsty little buggers aren’t they?”
A trickle of nervous laughter went about the crowd, and while the woman would be fine after her oceanfront mauling, it was a reminder that wildlife needs to be respected, even if it’s in a cheeky place with a name like “Monkey Beach.”
Want more travel stories? Read the rest of the “Vagabond Tales” over here.
You don’t have to leave the Midwest to catch a glimpse of the Roman Coliseum, the White House, the Kalahari Desert and the fabled windmills of Mykonos. Nope, all you have to do is take a road trip to the Wisconsin Dells, one of America’s delightfully tacky resort towns, where you can travel the world without venturing very far off the Wisconsin Dells Parkway.
I’ve lived in Chicago for years but have somehow managed to avoid visiting the Dells, the region’s quintessential summer weekend getaway place for families, until I finally experienced the place in all its tawdry glory while on a camping trip at nearby Mirror Lake State Park. Sophisticated city types mock places like the Dells, which is chock-a-block with mini-golf, wax museums, water parks and every conceivable type of tourist trap imaginable. But I have a soft spot for tourist traps. You could even call it a morbid fascination.
So I found myself cruising the Dells honkytonk strip on Memorial Day, notebook out, jotting away like a visitor from another planet. I wanted to take in a lumberjack show, while eating a “lumberjack meal” (whatever the hell that is) at a place called Paul Bunyan, but alas, I was told the lumberjacks don’t report for duty until the weather gets warmer. (Aren’t lumberjacks supposed to be tough?) How about a BigFoot zipline tour? Not for $89, I thought. The Polynesian Water Park, the Timbavati Wildlife Park, a 50-foot-tall Trojan Horse roller coaster and the “Top Secret” Upside Down White House all peaked my interest but I was too cheap to pay to bring my family of four into these places. (And why are there directions on the White House website for a place that is supposed to be “top secret?”)
I read in the local newspaper that tourists spend more than $1 billion dollars a year on these and other Dells attractions. But based upon my informal calculations, made while walking down Broadway, arguably the tackiest street in the Midwest’s tackiest town, I’d estimate that tourists spend at least two or three billion on fudge in the Dells each year, maybe more. Perhaps a local person can confirm this for me, and dear readers, please feel free to weigh in on this phenomenon in the comments section, but are there really five – count ’em five – fudge shops on one side of this street? I don’t know if I was hallucinating, but in between lengthy, illegible missives on Captain Brady’s Showboat Saloon and a Feed-And-Pet-the Deer- joint, there is this comment in my notebook: “Four – no five fudge shops! On one block!”
I don’t know if any academics have ever delved into the phenomenon in a dissertation or published paper, but I’d like to know what came first – the fudge or the tourists? Do people want fudge while they’re on vacation or do they simply indulge in the stuff because it’s there? No clue, but if you want fudge, by all means, consider the Wisconsin Dells for your next holiday. You’ll be spoiled for choice.
Aside from the fudge, I’ve noticed that tourists also like torture museums, and the Dells has a sorry example of one of these places as well. I’ve seen torture museums in all kinds of touristy places all around the world. Most of them are obvious tourist traps, but when found in places where torture was once widely practiced, they at least make some sense. Now I’m not an expert on the criminal justice system of Wisconsin, but as far as I know, torture has never been a regular part of the Wisconsin Dells experience. That is, unless you consider sitting through hokey magic shows, “duck tours” or the Wisconsin Opry Dinner Show torture, which some might.
I took my kids to Circus World in nearby Baraboo, more of an old-school indulgence than the contrived, new fangled attractions of the Dells, but didn’t spend a dime on any of the tourist traps in the town. Next time, I plan to visit the Lost Mayan Temple, ride the Trojan Horse roller coaster, take in the lumberjack show and have some fudge, preferably while dressed like a gladiator inside the Roman Coliseum. If anyone knows which of the Broadway fudge shops is the best, please drop me a line.