As I continue wandering the US Midwest driving from Chicago to Texas, I got my kicks finding a yummy surprise in Illinois on Old Route 66.

Maple sugar and “sirip” in Funks Grove, Illinois.

I’ve always thought of maple sugar products as treats from New England or Canada, but they are made right here on Route 66, just off of Interstate 55 between Bloomington (home of Beer Nuts!) and Springfield IL.

Debby Funk had plenty left to sell when I stopped by the tiny shop; she says the sap is collected around February here, which also surprised me because maple sugaring is a fall goodie in Rhode Island, an early spring goodie in Rhode Island, where I last bought maple syrup right from the maker. (Update: my New England-born husband set me straight on the timing for sugaring, so I guess February in Illinois does make sense and my memory was scrambled in correctly recalling our time in Rhode Island!)

Have you ever tasted the sap when it’s tapped straight from a sugar maple tree at the right time of year? It’s clear and incredibly sweet.

The Funk family has always spelled their product “sirip” or “sirup,” because they say that’s the traditional way to spell it when no sugar is added.

All I know is that my teenager and I drove along past the Illinois cornfields with big blobs of maple sugar candies stuck to the roofs of our mouth, grinning like idiots.

Technorati tags: travel, Funks Grove, Illinois, Route 66, maple sugar

When you pull off of the road in Griggsville, Illinois to find a gas station, you also find that the town is mad about purple martins. 

There’s a martin house in practically every yard, and the town center features a bunch of birdhouses on a pole plus a wall mural and water tower announcing that you’ve arrived in the “Purple Martin Capital of the Nation.” 

The Nature House, Inc. company is located here and they build purple martin birdhouses – the purple martin is said to eat upwards of 2,000 mosquitoes a day, which makes it a pretty nice neighbor on muggy, buggy summer days.  You can buy the products at Backyard Bird Company.

If I hadn’t pulled off of the Interstate right there, I’d have never known….

July’s issue of Harper’s Magazine contains a Letter from Michigan by Rebecca Solnit that starts out in the almost Soviet-style landscape of depressed, post-industrial Detroit. Titled “Detroit Arcadia: Exploring the post-American landscape,” the article moves unexpectedly to find emblems of optimism not in urban renewal, but in the city’s growing acceptance of wilderness and farmland in its midst.

Detroit was an emblem of the US’s manufacturing boom, particularly in the auto industry, and is now a symptom and a symbol of the industry’s American demise. “The city,” writes Solnit, “once the fourth largest in the country, is now so depopulated that some stretches resemble the outlying farmland and others are altogether wild. … Detroit is a cautionary tale about one-industry towns: it shrank the way the old boomtowns of the gold and silver rushes did, as though it had been mining automobiles and the veins ran dry, but most of those mining towns were meant to be ephemeral. People thought Detroit would go on forever.”

For her essay Solnit made repeated visits to Detroit, and catalogues the starting transformations of neighborhoods where beautiful old houses grace empty streets, next to empty lots where houses have been removed, “so thoroughly missing that no trace of foundation remains.” Strange pictures that could be from empty Nebraska farmtowns accompany a piece that paints the most comprehensive, thoughtful picture I’ve seen about urban Midwest America in a long time — maybe ever.

Detroit residents, what’s left of them, and the suburban residents who succumbed to “white flight” in the 1980s and 90s, point fingers to race, the auto industry, leadership, and hopelessness as causes for the city’s demise — it all depends on which category they see themselves as fitting into. But what makes Solnit’s Detroit portrait interesting is not the reasons for why, during the last two decades, “the city was falling apart, spectacularly and violently,” but what it is now doing to save itself.

Rather than focusing, as so many cities do, on tourism or bizarre concepts of urban revitalization or attracting new industry, Detroit has gone the Arcadia way: spurred by local politicians, Detroit residents are accepting the city’s “return to nature” and engaging in an urban greening that involves not tiny parks among busy streets, but acres of community gardens and schools that open out to working farms. This activity is the culmination of the vision of Jimmy Boggs, one of the city’s most influential leaders in the 1980s. “‘We have to get rid of the myth that there is something sacred about large-scale production for the national and international market,’” Solnit quotes him as saying in 1988. “‘We have to being thinking of creating small enterprises which produce food, goods, and services for the local market, that is, for our communities and for our city.’”

Harper’s specializes in trying to get its readers to look at the world in new ways. This article on Detroit is one of the most refreshing travel/environment pieces I’ve seen, although I’m not sure if its outlook is a little too optimistic. Still, Solnit’s conclusions leave me hoping: “Detroit is still beautiful, both in its stately decay and in its growing natural abundance. … This is the most extreme and long-term hope Detroit offers us: the hope that we can reclaim what we paved over and poisoned, that nature will not punish us, that it will welcome us home. … [Detroit] is a harsh place of poverty, deprivation, and a fair amount of crime, but it is also a stronghold of possibility.”

Wanderlust Magazine has to be the best travel magazine in the UK, and not just because I am their regular photography correspondent. It is a magazine for actual travellers, not a luxurious pseudo style guide for the sort of people who think that travel is a fashion statement and that the only locals they want to meet are wearing purple waistcoat, carry a tray of cocktails and calling them ‘baaas’.

In the latest issue they celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, writing about the overland trail from London to Katmandu. Other highlights include trekking in the Rif Mountains of Morocco, bear watching in Canada and an in-depth round up of Bolivia.

So why big up a UK magazine on an international blog? Well there is a great inducement for international subscribers to this great magazine. Wanderlust have just launched their Travel Photograph of the Year competition for 2007, and international subscribers are eligible. There are four amateur categories where you can win one of four trips to Australia, and a portfolio competition (which is open to both pros and amateurs) where the prize is a massize £5000. That is a colossal 10,000 American roubles! (Sorry - couldn’t resist), which is double the cash prize of any competing UK competition!

There are more details on the Wanderlust site. Good luck!

© Steve Davey 2007

One of the things that has always got to me about print journalism is the fact that it is all so damn commercial. It costs a lot to put out a magazine. The wages of all those Henriettas will add up and book publishing is no better - after all, someone has to pay for those long lunches. The upshot is that things either have to mass market (think Harry Potter and the Child Psychologists Pension) or appeal to advertisers. Then you just end up with PR guff about the world’s blandest places.

The internet has no such restrictions. There is virtually no appreciable cost to the internet, so online publications don’t have to appeal to anyone – except themselves. True, this means that much of their output is utter crap: the internet is awash with blogs that really should remain locked away in a depressive’s diary. Excruciating minutiae of day to day life of the Facebook generation, just waiting to be discovered, without effort or talent. Fortunately, there are some gemstones locked away in the deep strata of the internet. The problems is finding them. Using a search engine would seem like a good idea, but one of the new virtual growth industries is search engine keyword optimisation. Companies lecturing other companies on how to make their websites appear more interesting to search engines, so that punters are lured in. Here’s a tip: make the website interesting to punters and they will recommend you!

One such website is The Travel Rag, a collection of eclectic stories from the bad side of town. This is real travel, the sort that most of us do but few journalists seem to write about.

In Ganja, guns and sex in the city, Greg Samsa writes about the real Phnom Penh, not the Phnom Penh that tour companies visit for two days before heading off to Angkor Wat. This is a city where “Pizza is available with ’smiley face’ for an extra fifty cents, or ‘extremely smiley face’ for a dollar”.

Travel Rag editor Chris Ord goes seriously bush in Jungle Fever, a tale of tribes in Papua New Guinea and showing that you don’t need to deal with bugs to see the wild side of life, Leisha Grebinski writes about the freaks of London’s Camden Market.

Have a mooch and find some gems. This is a site for real travellers.