You never know what you’ll find on a road trip.

Did you know that architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s only skyscraper was built in 1956 in Bartlesville, Oklahoma?

Today the soaring, slender Price Tower with its distinctive verdigris-copper-clad exterior houses an exhibit area, a swanky restaurant and an upscale hotel.

We admired the exterior during a jaunt through northeast Oklahoma (after a little Chisholm Trail history) as part of our ongoing Midwest Road Trip tour of the “Square States.”

All kinds of goodies out in the wide open spaces….

Technorati tags: travel, family travel, Frank Lloyd Wright, Oklahoma, skyscraper, architecture, Price Tower Arts Center

(This review refers to the UK edition. High Tea in Mosul will be released in the US and Canada August 1st, 2007.)

“The true story of two Englishwomen in war-torn Iraq” is the subtitle of this fascinating and often poignant narrative. It’s another excellent book that seeks to tell a personal story from inside a conflict zone, and in the process forces its readers to see the realities of war for everyday people. While covering the Iraq war in 2003, Australian journalist O’Donnell stumbled across two ordinary Englishwomen who had extraordinary stories to tell.

Pauline and Margaret, from Lancashire and Durham respectively, each moved to Iraq from their native England with their Iraqi-raised and English-educated husbands about three decades before O’Donnell met them for the first time. “Pauline and Margaret came to call this country home in similar ways,” says O’Donnell, “meeting and falling in love with Iraqi men who were studying in … England in the 1970s. In those days, Iraq was among the wealthiest and most modern of the Middle Eastern states.” From cross-cultural meetings of minds in industrial England to the women’s nervousness about acceptance by their husbands’ extended families and ancient traditions, O’Donnell tells the women’s stories with care and meticulous detail, integrating interview-style pages and a little drama with straight narrative.

It’s the details that make the book. While Pauline and Margaret both expected cultural differences and traditions, little things like the inability to find good potatoes — a staple of the English diet — never crossed their minds. O’Donnell uses her journalistic and research skills to their fullest in this book, taking her time to tell the women’s stories, including their thoughts and opinions about the choices they made and the challenges they faced. They both claimed luck as being on their side in initially adjusting to life in Iraq: the marriages of many of their Western friends failed, sometimes because the men changed when they returned to Iraq, reverting to stricter, religious-dictated traditions, sometimes because the family wouldn’t accept the newcomers, and sometimes because the women simply found the differences in habits, expectations, and little things like plumbing too hard to adapt to.

Pauline and Margaret’s candid tales of their lives under Saddam Hussein can do much to re-balance the world’s view that Iraqi life pre-US invasion was always stunted at best and horrifying at worst. Their honesty refuses to gloss over life in a dictatorship, but it also refuses to magnify its personal effect on them.

But Pauline and Margaret are only part of the story. Given equal weight is Mosul itself — a city often overlooked in the daily updates from war-torn Iraq — and the impact of war on its population. From Biblical days through the Ottoman empire, to the wealth of oil and the rule of Saddam Hussein, and finally through the appallingly short-sighted mistakes made by the US occupation, O’Donnell presents a city that is beautiful, proud, rich in ancient tradition and culture, educated, and finally almost completely destroyed by war.

For centuries Mosul was a center of religious culture in the Ottoman empire. Its growth and stability was often threatened, but never destroyed, by power struggles and invasions. During the 1980s and into the 1990s it grew into a modern city until, like most of Iraq, its basic supply chains were crippled by economic sanctions. But it wasn’t until 2003, post-invasion, that power lines were consistently cut, hospitals and schools closed, and professionals fled the city in droves, leaving a frightened and helpless population. Like much of the country, Mosul had fallen not to a foreign power, but to a vacuum that gangs and religious fanatics rushed to fill. Kidnappings, especially of professionals and their families, became common, as did execution and extortion. As of the book’s end in 2006, Pauline and Margaret had both left, and the city had little to hope for.

O’Donnell’s journalistic tone sometimes halts the flow of High Tea in Mosul’s narrative, but her expertise becomes invaluable when chronicling the descent of Mosul into anarchy and violence following her initial visit in 2003. She’s an outsider, and so can’t give Mosul life the depth and richness that a native or long-term ex-pat could, but the native couldn’t untangle the mess that followed occupation as well as this clearsighted journalist did. And she uses insiders’ knowledge to make some sense of the situation:

“‘The governments in the West, in London and Washington, thought it would be just like Desert Storm, quick and easy and all over in no time,’ Pauline said as she looked back on how the debacle developed. ‘Everyone in Iraq knew it would end up like this, with people coming from abroad to exploit the chaos, and people here fighting each other … Everyone here could see it. … Those who wanted to come back from overseas and become the new government couldn’t see it because they didn’t understand the nature of the people, they’d been gone for so long and didn’t know what Saddam had made of people here, how they hated him, hated each other, hated themselves. … It was people who didn’t know taking advice from people who didn’t know.’”

O’Donnell watches the deterioration of the city and people’s lives from a distance, but she can’t help inserting a personal note of anger and despair. In the end, she, like any native, is left asking only ‘why’: “Like most Moslawis, Saleh and Khalid [Pauline’s neighbors, vegetable sellers anonymously warned to stop buying vegetables in a nearby town or face death, no reason given] have left the dictatorship of Saddam behind, wishing it good riddance. But now they live in a society terrorized by the anonymous, for reasons they cannot be sure of. … Every second of every day entails precaution and forethought. … Today the people of Mosul are yoked by another tyranny, but this one goes by the name of freedom.”

The headline story in today’s issue of Salon is Katharine Mieszkowski’s article “You are now free to pollute about the country,” on the rising environmental consciousness among air travelers. It seems that everywhere I turn these days there’s a heated discussion about travel, environmental awareness, and carbon offsets. The three bloggers for this site belong to a forum at Travelwriters.com that recently had a heated discussion about the environmental ethics of flying for travel writing.

We’ve heard a lot about the environmental impact of travel in recent months, from World Hum’s recent interview with Leo Hickman (regarding his book “The Final Call,” about the often unseen costs and effects of travel), to Plane Stupid’s campaign to end cheap flights in the UK. Mieszkowski’s piece is not an expose or coverage of breaking news, but rather an excellent summary of where air travel falls in the debate of environmental awareness and consumer decision-making so far.

It’s no news that Britain and the rest of Europe are far ahead of America on environmental issues, from requiring chemical companies, for the first time, to prove that their products aren’t harmful to humans, to the increased support for high-speed, integrated rail networks. Mieszkowski focuses on a major consumer-environmental issue Britain in particular faces, which is the expectation of cheap flights. She asked Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler and Rough Guide founder Mark Ellingham to weigh in: ‘”In Europe, and especially Britain, we have become addicted to cheap flights, heading off to Rome for the day or Prague for the weekend,” writes Ellingham in e-mail. “Many people buy these as casually as booking a restaurant. I consider this ‘binge flying’ and I don’t think it’s sustainable behavior.”‘

It should also be no news by now that our environmental problems are a by-product of waste, an excess of consumerism as Steve so eloquently pointed out in a recent post. People not only expect to be able to heat and cool their homes — no matter how large or energy-inefficient — at will, they expect to be able to fly anywhere, whenever they want, for an affordable price.

That said, as Mieszkowski points out, air travel makes up a very small percentage of worldwide carbon emissions (if cheap flights continue, this could rise drastically as populations in China, for example, earn their way into the middle class), and of that the majority is business travel.

It’s easy to pick on people who are flying somewhere for a few days’ vacation, or travel writers sitting on an exhaust-spewing plane on the tarmac for hours, but Mieszkowski also notes that travel increasingly has a beneficial environmental side, too: rainforest loss is one of the largest contributors to CO2 emissions on the planet; when tourism rather than agriculture or ranching become a viable option for a local economy, those rainforests tend to stay put when they would otherwise be slashed for land use.

The problem of air travel impact isn’t an easy one to unravel. Britain might be focused on cheap flights, but here in the US we don’t always have a lot of options. I make an 11-hour drive to Tennessee every year for the National Storytelling Festival, after finding that flying was not only more expensive, it was also a lot more hassle. If a train were available, even if it took longer, I’d be on it like a shot. But train travel is something that just refuses to take off in the States. I wish it would. In my college days I took Amtrak, 24 hours each way, from my university town to my hometown, every Christmas and summer, simply because it was cheaper and a lot more pleasant. But now it would take me over 48 hours to get to Montana from New York, not counting inevitable delays and dismissing the added cost of getting a bed instead of a seat. So I fly. It’s a miserable experience, as flying often is these days, involving four airports, and is almost twice the price of flying to London. If it were cheaper, would I go more often than once a year? Definitely, yet I think of myself as a person dedicated to the environment.

It’s perhaps the future impact of increased air travel that we need to worry about, which is why cheap flights are, as Ellingham noted, unsustainable. That’s not just about the carbon emissions — Patrick Smith of the Ask the Pilot blog has been hammering away recently at the plane-choked skies and runways that are creating delay disasters at major airports like JFK.

In truth, what we need is another way to think about the problem. Getting tourists to reduce that “binge flying” is a good start, although focusing on reducing business travel would have a much greater impact. My spouse alone makes a transatlantic flight at least every six weeks if not once a month, and smart business practices could cut most of that out (I’d sure miss the miles, though!). But that doesn’t change the fact that flying itself is just an inefficient way of shuttling people from one place to another. As with the problem of worldwide energy consumption in general (where the huge environmental devastation of coal mining is glossed over when presenting shiny, supposedly “clean-burning” coal power plants), there are no good answers.

Today my teenage daughter and I are launching the minivan on our US Midwest Road Trip.

I’m honored to be a Day One panelist speaker at the BlogHer blogging conference in Chicago 27-29 July, so we’re turning that event into the travel writer’s mondo assignment and exploring the Midwest going and coming from central Texas.

Yes, Sainted Husband and my young son will meet us in Arkansas on the way back, and they have a full schedule of batting cages and water parks while we’re gone.

The method to my 2000-mile driving madness is improving my pathetic lack of knowledge of the American Midwest, or what one of my colleagues referred to as “those square states.”

OK, they’re not all square, but I just don’t know my Missouri from my Iowa, and it’s time to fix that.

We’re going to follow part of the old Chisholm Trail for the first couple of legs: Austin to Fort Worth and the cattle Stockyards, then north across the Red River (just like the Longhorns of yesteryear) to visit the Chisholm Trail Museum in Duncan, Oklahoma before stopping overnight in Osage Indian country. We’ll stay at Osage Hills State Park in sturdy little log cabins built during the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

(This is cross-posted on the Family Travel blog; click here to read the whole post.)

There was a great article last week in the UK’s Guardian travel section, Brits abroad: good fun or good riddance?

The upshot of Harry Ritchie’s piece is that the easy availability of cheap flights to the Continent makes hitherto less accessible places like Rome and Barcelona more attractive to “young Brits in replica football tops or T-shirts advertising the stag weekend. The ones who have begun to arrive in Rome by the thousand, since the growth of cheap flights to the Italian capital - now arriving at Ciampino airport at the rate of up to 14-a-day from Britain.”

The article’s a good read, but the best part is the comments, such as:

“Brits may never win any football trophies wherever we go in Europe or indeed the world, but we sure show ‘em how to guzzle ten pints of lager and pester the local females while wearing plastic boobs and day-glo pink wigs.”

Apparently it’s a pack mentality that distinguishes the Brit yob from the stereotypical loud, insensitive American:

“Americans can be really annoying and loud but they for the most part do not travel in packs of 20 singing football songs and then yelling at bar staff when they don’t have Tennants on tap (always in English of course.)”

Another guy defends the crass American:

“Don’t blame the Yanks this time. The Brit yobs are, by far, the most obnoxious tourists in Europe. Their American equivalent go to Mexico to vomit and brawl.”

Nice.

Then another commenter really tosses a bomb:

“You can next write about the polite tourist of a slightly-further-up-class who go on pedophile-sex-holidays in the Far East.”

Ick.

One person did have a theory for why certain nationalities end up in certain cities, using American students in Florence as an example:

“Florence (and I would imagine Rome) tend to attrack more middle-aged British cultural tourists than stag dos. However, they attract gaggles of American 19 year-olds on study and travel abroad programs who are so thrilled that they are able to drink legally the way they can´t at home that they simply are unable to control themselves. (Not that it´s an excuse, in my opinion.)”

That’s what I like about online journalism; you read a good article and then wander into the comments, and if the right people are there it’s like stumbling into a raucous but entertaining cocktail party.

Technorati tags:  travel, British tourists, American tourists