Five Great Road Trips From Around The World

by Kraig Becker on

Australian newspaper The Age has put together a list of five of the top drives from around the world. These scenic byways encourage drivers to get behind the wheel, explore, and, as the article says, take the long way home.

Some of the roads that make this exclusive list include the Hana Highway in Hawaii, which is lauded for its 80km of winding road, that includes 56 one lane bridges, that meanders past beautiful beaches and up and down rolling hills, with small ocean villages and spectacular waterfalls as a backdrop.

For something a bit longer and more epic, the Pan American Highway from Lima, Peru to Santiago, Chile is offered as a suggestion. This stretch of road is more than 3000km in length, a mere fraction of the 48,000km total distance of the Pan American, which runs from Alaska to the tip of South America. Running along side the Pacific Ocean for much of the way, this route wanders past the famous Nazca Lines and up into the high desert of the Atacama, all the while weaving in and out of small Peruvian and Chilean villages along the way.

The classic road trip is still one of the best ways to see any country, and each of these drives will not only show you the scenic side of the places they run through, but also get you immersed in the unique cultures of those places as well. So, jump behind the wheel and take in one of these amazing road trips for a travel experience unlike any other.

Great American Road Trip: Travel books for the road. 1 of 4: Sun After Dark

by Jamie Rhein on

I’m one of those people who haul books when I travel. I am ambitious, imagining hours of page turning. Usually, though, I barely crack a book. One advantage of riding in a car across a good portion of the United States, as I have recently experienced on my family’s road trip to Montana, is the hours for reading.

There are miles and miles and miles between Ohio and Montana, particularly if you head north to take in North Dakota.

On the way back, Iowa can feel endless. Indiana–dreadful. (Not to put down those lovely states, but at the end of a trip, even with stops, they seem bigger than they are.) As wonderful as scenery is, a book helps move the pavement along, particularly if the book is written by a person who is also on a journey. I brought four such books on my cross-country jaunt and recommend each of them. In the next three days, I’ll be posting on each one.

Here is the first one. I read this one through Minnesota and North Dakota.

Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign—Pico Iyer

An excerpt: “We travel most, I mean to say, when we stumble, and we stumble most when we come to a place of poverty and need (like Haiti, perhaps, or Cambodia): and what we find in such confounding places, often, is that it is the sadness that makes the sunshine more involving or, as often, that it is the spirit and optimism of the place that make the difficulties more haunting.”

Pico Iyer is one of my favorite travel writers and this book of essays does not disappoint. As he explains in the first essay, “The Place Across the Mountains,” the book is a result of his desire to travel to some of the poorest corners in the world in order to shed light on their importance and as well as add to the understanding about what poverty means.

Lest you think that this is a depressing missive that will leave you weeping over your backpack or pull-behind suitcase, chastising yourself for the delight you feel about your own travels when parts of the world have such problems, this is not the case. Iyer’s lyric quality is luminous in its prose and if nothing else, gives the awareness to the reader that hope prevails.

Sun After Dark makes a worthy book for the road because each essay is a stand alone piece. This means that if you put it down for a few days, you won’t feel lost when you pick it up again. The culmination of the essays as a group offers a variety of Iyer’s experiences that range from the fantastic to the simple.

It’s also a good book to share. Once on our trip, my husband didn’t have the books he was reading with him. I handed him this one because he could read an essay or two and it wouldn’t interrupt the flow of the other books he wanted to finish before embarking on another one.

One of the sections that hit a high mark on the unusual travel experiences spectrum is Iyer’s account of his visit to a Bolivian prison. Since Iyer had seen all that he had set out to see, more or less, the prison was at the tail end of his trip. This was one of those ideas that after wards makes one think, “What was I thinking?”

Also enjoyable are Iyer’s in depth accounts of his visit with the Dalai Lama and his time at the same Zen retreat center as Leonard Cohen. Along with the descriptions of the settings are insights into the workings of these men and Iyer’s own musings about how he fits into the scheme of existence.

As usual, no matter where Iyer goes, he sees the wonder and the beauty of humanity, even in those places that are troubling. This is a book to read if you like to think about where you are traveling, as well as, the mysteries and nuances of life.

Talking travel with professional RV roadtripper Adelle Milavsky

by Jerry Guo on

Adelle and Ron Milavsky, a lovely retired couple who live in Connecticut, have been road-tripping across Europe for years. They’ve written the definitive guide on RV trips, Take Your RV to Europe: The Low-Cost Route to Long-Term Touring and now here to share a few more tips about this rather under-rated method of travel.

You recently came back from yet another RV roadtrip through Europe. Tell us a bit about it. How far did you go? What were some of your best memories?

Over the years, we’ve spent more than a year touring Western Europe. Our latest trip was in April and May this year. We only stayed for six weeks this year instead of our usual 10 –12 weeks. We knew that it would be considerably more expensive this year because of the low value of the dollar. Because gas was as high as $10 a gallon, we only traveled in The Netherlands, Belgium and France with one stop in Germany.

In all we drove about 1500 miles. Our main stops were Bruges, Ypres, Waterloo and Gent in Belgium; The Hague, Amsterdam, and Keukenhof Gardens in The Netherlands; Metz, Nancy, Strasbourg, Troyes in France; and Aachen in Germany. Our bills from this six-week stay were still affordable. Our total outlay for six weeks of travel (not counting airfare) was about $3,000 more than what we would spend at home for food and entertainment. For our 42-day stay, gas costs us $1200, campgrounds just under $1000.
Why Europe and not the US for RV trips?

Once we had begun, we found RV’ing in Europe was even nicer than RV’ing in America. Distances are much shorter, most cities have campgrounds in or near them, and public transportation is good. All of this adds up to a great way to travel – no set itinerary, complete freedom to go where you want and a minimum of driving. And of course, no packing or unpacking between stops.

Worst experience while RV roadtripping? Best?

We’ve had some uncomfortable moments when we were lost (or rather, taken the scenic route). But in all this time, we’ve never had a bad experience, except for the memorable time we decided to take the “2.8 meter Tunnel” to Caen in Normandy, France and found that our RV was 3.1 meters high. (We knocked the cover off our air conditioner and it never worked again.) But we’ve loved our extended stays in all the big cities in Europe – including Amsterdam, Bruges, London, Paris and Rome. We’ve been to Roman ruins, medieval cities and castles, towns built into the sides of mountains, museums of all sorts, caves of neolithic paintings, cathedrals, zoos, wonderful gardens, historic homes and more. And countless open-air markets.

When did you guys get the travel bug? What’s your traveling background?

Before my husband, Ronald, retired, we had traveled the “usual” way to about twelve countries. Most were in Europe but we’d also been in China, Thailand and Korea as well as Venezuela. We stayed mostly in hotels, and ate most of our meals in restaurants. So we were “experienced” travelers.

In 2001 we bought a small motor home and traveled across the U.S. We fell in love with this style of traveling and decided that driving a motor home in Europe might give us a chance to really spend time there in an affordable way. Even better it would allow us to do something that we’d always wanted to do – go to the outdoor markets and buy food to eat at home as the Europeans do.

With gas so high, are roadtrips still affordable?

This way of traveling allows great flexibility. We used various published guides to European campgrounds, but there is a great deal of information available on the internet. We choose our next destination using three criteria. First, how far away is it from where we are now (we like to drive no more than a couple of hours per day). Second, what is interesting in that city? Third, is there a campground with bus service to the tourist area close by?

How can travelers take their own RV trip?

When we realized that how enjoyable and affordable it was to travel leisurely and extensively through Western Europe. Ron decided that someone (namely Adelle) should write a book about our adventures in Europe. So I did. Take Your RV to Europe was published in 2005 by The Intrepid Traveler. It goes into detail about how to ship and what to expect when you get to Europe. Any one who is interested, can go to our website and blog, where we publish our letters home detailing our experiences. Ron is working on a very informative web site that combines our experiences with an enormous number of links on the internet for information about the places we have visited.

Is it possible to rent a RV in Europea? US? How?

It is possible to rent an RV in many places in Europe. Renting costs from $124 per day in the “low season” to $194 per day in the “high season”. This year, renting an RV for six weeks from April 24 to June 4 would have cost us just about the same amount as shipping our RV both ways. But, if we had stayed our usual 12 weeks, the cost would have been approximately $13,000 for a comparable size unit. You can see why we chose to ship our RV.

What about shipping a RV to another country?

The price to ship a motor home is computed per cubic foot. In 2002, we paid $2000 for our 21 ft. rig, but now the cost runs a bit more than $3000. If you can stay in Europe for three months or more, shipping a small RV would still be the most inexpensive way to travel. That $6000 round trip for the RV translates into about $66 per day. Together with campground fees, that is $100 a day, but that includes both overnight accommodations, the equivalent of a rental car to travel in, and the possibility of eating “at home” which saves a huge amount of money.

Incidentally, there is one other big “reason” to ship your own unit if you can. Traveling in the UK with a rented rig where the driver is on the “wrong” side of the vehicle is very hard and can be dangerous. But in your own motor home, you are able to judge the size and shape of the rig. The hard part is not sitting in your accustomed position. It is easy to remember to drive on the left!

Final thoughts?

We have literally visited hundreds of cities and villages in Europe, and it’s been a wonderful experience. We think that other Americans should consider it.

Great American Road Trip: St. Cloud, Minnesota, yak meat and Hoopers’ Christmas Tree Farm

by Jamie Rhein on

When we pulled into the driveway of our friends’ house in St. Cloud, Minnesota, as part of our Great American Road trip to Montana, we didn’t have any plans except to visit. The last time we saw them was at our house in Columbus, and since then they had moved from State College, Pennsylvania to St. Cloud.

As with any visit, there’s always something new to find out. about the town where friends land. People who live there know the insider info that may not show up in a guidebook. Such was the case when I found out were were having yak meat for dinner.

I’ve been to Nepal where yaks seem as common as cows. While there, I never had yak meat. As it turns out Hoopers’ Christmas Tree Farm in Cold Spring, Minnesota has a herd of 60 or so yak making this the largest yak herd in the eastern part of the U.S. Who knew?

Our friends have toured the farm and loved it. John Hooper, the farm’s owner has worked with The Yak Company in China as a consultant. While there, he lived with Tibetans and, as a result, acquired an interest in Tibetan culture. My friend says that the ranch reflects this exchange.

Hooper sells his yak meat at various farmers’ markets in the area. We ate yak sausages, hot dogs and marinated meat. All quite delicious. Here’s a link to the page that tells all about yak farming.

Photo of Hooper and one of his yaks is by Lucille Guinta-Bates who was kind enough to email it to me.

Great American Road Trip: More road kill woes and how to clean a car

by Jamie Rhein on

The first mishap was when we nailed a possum in Illinois east of Chicago the first night of our road trip to Montana. The critter was lumbering across the interstate about 10:30 p.m. That was a sad moment.

Thursday, driving to and from Regent, North Dakota we had several sad moments. Honestly, there are some things that can’t be avoided.

I already posted about the two pheasants we hit. The chipmunk and the blackbird came later.

We didn’t hit them all at once, but over the course of several miles. Such is one of the realities of traveling on small two-lane highways–but this was ridiculous. Particularly when two raccoons made a mad dash in front of us as I was typing the previous sentence. The second one didn’t make it.

With each thump, I’m shouting out from the passenger seat, a strangled “Arggh!” Seriously, it was a nightmare. “That’s one way to damage a car,” I said.

“It’s not like I’m trying to hit them,” said my husband. It’s true, he wasn’t, and swerving too much is dangerous. He pointed out the deep ditch on the side of the road.

My son, the six-year-old wanted to stop for feathers and fur.

My daughter wanted to know why I’m making such an awful sound.

Turns out, I was onto something. While my husband was filling the gas tank in Miles City, Montana after dropping us off at a McDonald’s so our son could let off steam at the indoor playland, one of the pheasants was still with us. It had broken the grill a tad–just big enough to become wedged behind it.

Two truckers, noticing the predicament, exchanged their road kill tales with my husband and helped him figure out how to remove it. The windshield squeegee handle was somehow involved. I didn’t want the specific details.

When my husband showed up at the McDonald’s parking lot with the pheasant in a plastic bag with grand plans of showing it to our friend in Billings, I shouted, “Arggh!” and ran in the opposite direction. “No dead things in the car. Absolutely not,” I shouted from where I stood, still ready to flee if he stepped one foot closer. I hate dead things.

The pheasant was left in a garbage can in Miles City. There are a couple feathers in another bag behind the driver’s seat, but I’m trying not to think about them.

A woman told us, as she was sliding into her truck after hearing about our pheasant mishap, “Watch out for deer.”

The photo is of my son trailing his hand out the window for a moment to catch raindrops, one of the pleasant aspects of the day. Not pheasant–pleasant.