Really, no fooling, the deadline for this week’s Carnival of Cities blog carnival is Tuesday, April 1st at noon US Central time. The Perceptive Travel blog is hosting on Wednesday, April 2nd.

Please use the blog carnival submission form for your one (non-spammy) post about any aspect of any specific city.

Several other bloggers have kindly emailed me to offer to host after this week — I’ll certainly get back to you in a day or so when I dig out from a work pileup. :)

In a recent post, when bullocking Rolf Potts for calling Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love ‘emotional porn’ (and unforgivably belittling women in the process), I called the book “sappy and sometimes sloppily written.” It’s been a long time since I read it, so, being a constant self-editor and fact-checker, I had to go read it again to make sure I wasn’t just making that up.

It hardly held my attention the first time and much less so the second time, but what prompts me to raise the topic again is the much more important fact that Eat Pray Love isn’t travel writing. You could call it that, in the skimpiest sense of the word, since it involves the author spending time in a country other than her own, but to my mind that’s a pretty sloppy definition of travel writing itself. Eat Pray Love belongs in the genre reserved for spiritual journeys, such as The Celestine Prophecy or Conversations with God (though, to her credit, Gilbert’s book is far better than either of those). The spiritual aspect, rather than the emotional upheavals, is what has garnered Gilbert such a following in America, a country at the same time spiritually starved and defined by hard-edged, unloving and tight-fisted religion.

Literary taste is a very personal thing, with travel no less than with other genres. Travel writing, to me, is defined quite simply as writing with a strong sense of place. Much of adventure or self-discovery writing simply doesn’t fit the bill because there is very little of the ‘place’ in them. Same goes for Eat Pray Love. The only aspect of travel writing it fills is the fascinating characters she meets in each place and the great dialogue throughout the book.

Much of what is categorized as travel writing these days almost leaves the character of place out. Collections of essays that include stories of “look at me getting drunk or finding my soul or kayaking a random river away from home” leave me cold. And bored. Novels and memoirs of growing up in a place often have a much stronger travel (i.e., sense of place) aspect than many travel books.

If I want to recommend a book about my home state of Montana, I don’t pick from the travel genre. I push for Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky, every time, which not only captures the Montana spirit but is also sheer art in its writing. For Newfoundland, I’d go for Wayne Johnston’s novels and his memoir Baltimore’s Mansion.

If you want to dip yourself into America’s National Parks, you really can’t do better than Nevada Barr’s series of mystery novels with park ranger character Anna Pigeon (Nevada Barr is an actual park ranger). Who pretends to be interested in Russia without trying to dig out its soul in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy? (In Russia, one could contend, the ‘place’ is bleak enough that the soul, evoked so strongly in its classic novels, is the only landscape.) And few travels writers can dig into Israel the way Amos Oz does both in his novels and his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness.

People don’t read Eat Pray Love to discover what Italy, India, and Indonesia are like. So why does the travel writing community keep criticizing it for not being up to their standards?

I’ve got Midwest road trips on my mind.

While you’re cruising past the vintage advertising art or maybe the giant Hot Dog Man in Illinois, a quick cup of coffee might seem like a good idea.

You don’t want anybody dozing off on the highway (especially since hours of looking at cornfields can get a little, um, tiresome.)

Pull off of Route 66 or the Interstate — they are in parallel for a big chunk of Illinois — and grab a cuppa Joe at the Java Stop in tiny Dwight, Illinois.

Hey, the Peoria Peepers like it!

This coffee shop is actually two railroad cars stacked on top of one another and painted with a cool logo.

The little kitchen inside is stocked with coffee/smoothie-making paraphernalia, and also provided with air conditioning for the nice, friendly lady who runs the espresso machine.

The drinks menu is pretty extensive and the coffee is tasty.

Just across the street is a restored gas station; symbol of the heyday of Route 66 in these parts. Since there’s no place to drink your coffee inside Java Stop, you might as well wander over and take a look at the old pumps while you sip.

Chicago’s just 70 miles away….and you’re 50 miles from Normal.

It’s always stunned me, the amount of trash airline passengers produce. And how disgustingly, rudely sloppy they are, stuffing used cans and tissues and bits of plastic wrap and old newspapers so far down in the seat pocket that you’d need a slim jim (you know, the cheap bit of metal that a tow truck driver charges you fifty bucks to get into the car you’ve locked yourself out of) to dig it all out. And scattering food and more plastic and random cans and plastic water bottles all over the floor. In the past I’ve been staggered more by the level if piggishness people show when they’re traveling, but in the last couple years it’s just the sheer amount of waste airline passengers produce that gets me.

Think about it. On a transatlantic flight you get cans of drinks (or bottles, if so inclined and the airline offers it) plus plastic cups to pour the liquid in, as many mini water bottles as you want, more plastic cups for that, snack trays wrapped in hard plastic containers with crinkly plastic encasing plastic cutlery and a sandwich (that might not be plastic but tastes close enough), and then you’re offered plastic cups of juice or water to keep you hydrated throughout the night.

Is the airline industry trying to singlehandedly keep the chemical - plastics - petroleum industry afloat?

Patrick Smith of Ask the Pilot blog has been noticing the same thing: “Take the number of trays, cups, soda cans, snack wrappers and discarded reading material produced during the average flight and multiply it by the 40,000 or so daily commercial departures around the world,” he says. “In the U.S. nearly 2 million people fly daily. That’s a minimum of 2 million plastic cups alone, just in this country.”

Considering that there are states and cities in the US trying to ban plastic grocery bags because of their environmental and aesthetic impacts, this amount of unnecessary plastic trash seems insane. On a recent flight to New York, Smith points out, “each passenger got a lidded plastic tray and, even though the small roll-up sandwich could easily be eaten by hand, a plastic knife and fork wrapped in a plastic envelope. Forgive me for not having a scale on hand, but my snack consisted of approximately 7 ounces of petroleum-derived plastic and 3 ounces of actual food.”

It seems that Virgin Atlantic is one of the few airlines with a dedicated mission to reduce and recycle the bottles, cans, and newspapers used in the cabin every flight. Some American carriers have recycling programs, but they are hampered by actual places to dump the recyclables at each end of a flight.

It’s time for airlines, as well as travelers, to remember the first precept of environmental consumption: reduce. Then reuse. Then recycle. You do not have permission to give yourself an earth-happy, self-righteous glowing feeling if you’ve used ten hard plastic cups per flight, no matter how many times they’re recycled.

And for a start, don’t be a slob. You can bloody well pick up after yourselves.

(Tip: Due to the presence of nasty toxins in plastic water bottles, such as pthalates and bisphenol-A, I gave up using them a while back. It’s cheaper and easier and better for your health to carry a lightweight lined aluminum bottles like a Sigg and refill it from fountains. After all, much of that bottled water comes direct from municipal sources anyway. Why pay extra for it?)

I stumbled across Jon Haggins awhile back, when I found his video about Norfolk, Virginia.

Today I felt like getting a little more exotic. While poking around for a good travel video, I found Jon’s enthusiastic take on the North African country of Tunisia (it’s on his GlobeTrotterTV3 channel on YouTube.)

I just love finding random people who are holding up a camera and letting it rip!

For those reading this post on RSS/feed readers, or anyone else who can’t see the video box below, click here to go to the Tunisia video on his YouTube page.