New York City is so full of world-class museums that even a resident can miss some of the best art the city — and the planet — has to offer. The Frick Collection is by no means unknown, but when faced with the sheer quantity of New York distraction and entertainment, it’s an easy one to pass over in favor of larger museums. If you’re interested in art, though, that would be a serious mistake.

Although I’ve lived near New York City for nearly 7 years, I’ve always skipped the Frick in favor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. When I finally visited recently — at the request of a friend visiting from Europe — I realized I’d found a rival to my favorite place of New York City solace, the Public Research Library.

The history of the Frick Collection is one that makes the heart swell with impassioned belief in noblesse oblige. Henry Frick (1849-1919) was an industrialist and steel magnate who made his fortune through hard work and the partnerships of the like of Andrew Carnegie. He was an enthusiastic and discerning art collector, and when he died left his 5th Avenue mansion and its priceless art collection to the City of New York.

Noblesse oblige aside, Frick’s philanthropy is almost enough to make one believe in trickle-down economics. Until, that is, you learn about some of his business practices and his role in causing the 1889 Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania, which killed 2200 people.

However. None of his personal history, good or bad, detracts from the art he collected together and left behind. The grand rooms, where the Fricks once ate and rested and welcomed guests, are preserved to give visitors a sense of the mansion’s former ambience, and to better display some of the world’s best-known artists.

Vermeer is one. For anyone who’s spent time in the presence of a Vermeer painting (or closely watched the movie based on one of his works, The Girl with the Pearl Earring), his sense of light is immediately recognizable, even from across the room. The Frick Collection holds 3 Vermeers, which, with only 35 in existence, makes it home to almost 10% of the world’s Vermeers.

Many of the other names in the collection are also immediately recognizable. There are plenty of fat, happy, seductive Boucher babies and youths (which leave me pretty cold and unimpressed, never having understood the attraction of pudgy, shiny cherubs), but there is also a painting by Giovanni Bellini depicting St. Francis receiving the stigmata, backed by his rocky cliffside hermetic retreat. It is believed to be one of the best pieces of Renaissance art in America, and stays with you long after you walk away to view the two impressive Titian paintings flanking it.

Even more compelling is the El Greco portrait of St. Jerome. El Greco is one of my favorite painters. This work immediately draws your eyes to its position above the fireplace in a wood-paneled living hall full of expensive, rare, and beautiful objects.

There’s more: Renoir, Pieter Brueghel (another favorite of mine), and Hans Holbein, whose portraits of mortal enemies Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell left me long in contemplation. They are facing each other in the library, separated by a fireplace, as close as they likely were when Cromwell confronted More in the Tower of London.

When I visited there was also a special exhibition of four stunning full-length Whistler portraits, including his Harmony in Pink and Grey: Portrait of Lady Meux.

This is not a museum for young families. Children under 10 are not admitted, as the museum wishes to keep the house and its works as open as possible. Children under 16 must be accompanied by an adult. It also has no cafe, which is always an unfortunate oversight in a museum. We spent just over 2 hours viewing the art, and a cup of tea by the restful central fountain room would have gone down nicely.

It is, however, a museum for contemplation and appreciation. Next time you’re working up a quick New York itinerary, make sure to include the Frick Collection in your visit.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Hawaii’s admission into the United States, in August of 1959.

Here’s the lengthy process that was required, starting roughly in the year 1900 (from the Hawaii.gov Web site.)

It probably seems like a nice warm-and-fuzzy story with a few palm trees, beaches and adult beverages thrown in.

Heck, you can even buy a T-shirt or coffee mug to celebrate statehood.

That’s what I thought until I began to read more about the history of how the Kingdom of Hawaii was forcibly annexed as a territory and the monarch Queen Lili’uokalani was overthrown in 1893. The long quest to gain statehood was stymied at many turns, leading some to assert that fear of Hawaii’s multicultural society sparked Mainland racist resistance to admission to the Union.

The statehood celebrations last month were pretty low-key, and the more you know the history of the islands, the more you understand why.

The good news is that when you know where you came from, you have a better sense of where you’re going. The rebirth of Hawaiian language and culture in the islands is a very positive sign for a more complete reconciliation.

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“Although we were living a very comfortable version of the American Dream, we felt sickened by this kind of devastation and the waste that fueled it. In traveling to the Little Houses, we were also seeking an antidote to what ailed us, the way medieval pilgrims might have sought healing at a sacred shrine.” In ‘Little Log Houses for You and Me,’ an essay for Brain, Child magazine, Kimberly Meyer tells the story of taking her husband and three daughters on a journey ranging all over the Midwestern United States, through Kansas, Minnesota, and South Dakota, ending at a knobbly farm in the Missouri Ozarks.

Like many travel essays, hers is focused on a pilgrimage: to visit all the houses that writer Laura Ingalls Wilder fictionalized in her Little House on the Prairie books. What she ends up looking for, as evidenced in this quote, is something else, not just an escape back to a simpler time or a search for a simpler life in the here and now, but an explanation. Why is humankind so restless? What is it in us that craves to roam, and to settle, and to roam again? Are all wild, unsettled places destined eventually for Wal-Marts and concrete and TGI Friday restaurants?

Having read my own Ingalls Wilder books to shreds when I was a girl, I sympathize with Meyer’s obsession. The books are elegantly written, portraying the dramas of pioneer life in the best way possible: with love and simplicity and a rare grasp of language and storytelling. The Ingalls family (Wilder was Laura’s married name) were part of the mass white settlement of the frontier, a surge in the late 1800s that shoved the Native Americans further away from ancestral homelands and plowed the prairie under in the name of agriculture and civilization.

The concept of pilgrimage has always fascinated me, especially when it relates to a beloved author. It’s hard to believe that stunning writers such as Jane Austen, Willa Cather, and Fyodr Dostoevksy weren’t shaped deeply by their environments, both physical and social. In those who’ve grown up in the wilderness, or who came of age on a still-young frontier, such as Cather and Wilder, the sense of place in their books is as deep-set as the characters themselves. I see it in the writing of my own mother, who grew up on a several-hundred-acre wheat ranch in Eastern Montana. Her work, like that of Cather and Wilder and Ivan Doig, shows a sensibility for land that is ingrained and almost unconscious, and which shapes a book or essay more forcefully than any plot. It’s what makes many such novelists better observers and writers of ‘place’ than your average travel writer.

A pilgrimage such as Meyer’s is one that many of us repeat over and over in our lives. It’s an extension of the need to travel, the wanderlust. Who are we and what are we looking for are always the questions we face. In societies full of materialism, environmental devastation in the name of progress (‘progress’ by whose definition, I always wonder), ‘why is the world the way it is’ has become another. Traveling to the homes and settings of writers we love asks even more: what inspired them? Why do I fall in love with their stories over and over again? If I spend enough time standing on this spot, where they penned their best works, will I sense something of what created the person?

Pilgrimage, like more general travel itself, is often a quest for deeply personal answers. In her essay Meyer talks about the attraction that pioneer life has always held for her, but that this journey has also shown her how much she needs to teach her children. Life can be romantic in fiction, but the reality is often more difficult, whether you’re talking right now in China or 100 years ago in Kansas.

Meyer’s essay reminded me, once again, that travel is necessary for understanding, and for humankind to mature — an eventuality I still hold out for. Whether we step sideways to a culture completely foreign to us, or forward to see something of what we may become, or back to see how we got to where we are — what made us, for better or worse — it is the traveling itself that feeds our perspective and makes us, we hope, better people, more committed, somehow, to the place beneath our feet. Wherever, and whenever, that is.

In the author note at the end of her essay Meyer adds another thought to her pilgrimage, about the importance of taking road trips with your children, and of taking them camping. “Our trips,” she says, “have ended up shaping the vision we have of ourselves as a family and also deepening our understanding of this flawed but beautiful land.” As a traveler, especially a traveler with children, you couldn’t ask for more than that.

(Brain, Child is a literary magazine “for thinking mothers.” While all its content is related, somehow, to motherhood, its subjects are wide-ranging, diverse, sometimes brutally honest, and of exceptional literary quality. I recommend you find a copy and read Meyer’s travel essay for yourself.)

Tim Leffel here, the editor of Perceptive Travel and the man behind the curtain with this associated blog. I’m a few hours late in introducing our newest contributor here at the blog: Alison Stein Wellner. We go back a ways, to when she interviewed me for an intriguing story for Inc. Magazine titled, “How to tell a good vacation story.”  Inc. ended up killing it before it ran, but it did eventually see the light of day here on TheStreet.com. We got to talking about her travels, i got her advice on a trip to Honduras I was taking (she had just come back from there), and we traded tips on the world of freelance writing. Now much later, here we are.

I’m honored to have someone with us who has written for the likes of Robb Report, New York Magazine, Fast Money, and a slew of airline mags and newspapers. But she’s been a blogger for a long time too—a good one at that. I hope you enjoy her posts and if you want to see more about Alison, look to your right for her bio page. – Tim

“It’s Surprising to Remember the Old Dreams Again.”  So read the caption for a collection of old post cards on display at a Qing-era post-office museum, in a town outside of Shanghai called Zhujiajiao. The apt poetry of it arrested me, and in fact, stopped me in mid-giggle.

Now, I’m not generally one who is overly amused by the postal service, but this is one of the museums in China where the English translations have not been done  with a great deal of finesse.  “According to literal recordation, the history of the postal delivery system and organs dates back to over 3,000 years ago”,  I’d just read, and photographed, and texted to some friends back home.  It was as I was composing some quip about proper postage for organs that I was confronted by the surprise memory of old dreams, atop a display of sepia-tinged postcards of sketches and black and white photos of the architecture of the Qing dynasty, the last imperial rulers of China.

That would have been the heyday of Zhujiajiao, this little suburb that I was standing in, locally known as a “water town”, for its network of canals that the buildings and narrow streets all hugged. The waterways were the lifeblood of merchants, primarily rice merchants, and it became a town where one could live the good life. After the mid 19th century, rice became less profitable than silk and tea traded in Shanghai, and Zhujiajio’s glory days, which stretched from the 14th century, went no further. Today, you can see the remnants of the old dreams – in the detail of the curved tiled roofs, in the intricacy of the wooden lattice work that covers windows and balconies that look out on the grayish waters of the canals.

But the canals are now only occasionally trafficked with boats carrying tourists, and the houses are filled with retirees playing mah jong. When you stand on one of the town’s many bridges(for which it is domestically famous), and contemplating purchasing a bag of goldfish to pour into the canal (for good luck, although, judging from the gray tinge water, to the sure doom of the fish),  you can see the fluttering of laundry out the window.

It’s especially interesting to stroll the streets of Zhujiajiao, because while it’s something of a tourist attraction it’s also still a place where people live. And it’s a place where the good life has been and moved on. And that is totally not what you feel when you first arrive in Shanghai — in the whoosh of that high-speed mag lev train from the airport and warren of its highways lit up at night like a pimped out car,  and the 360 degrees of skyscrapers and the lithe women so fashionable that a Parisian would feel frumpy – when you first arrive in Shanghai, everything feels so new, it’s almost as if it hasn’t happened yet. The past, and its pesky problems and unfulfilled promises are somewhere back from where you came from.

It’s not a feeling that holds up too long – it can’t possibly, in a city of 20 million people.  But that utopian shiver comes back here and there, and most especially at the Urban Planning Museum in People’s Square. The key exhibit is the scale model of Shanghai’s urban plans, approximately the size of a tennis court. In the dramatic lighting, you can walk over it and around it like a God. The plan is so massive and so complete (and so much has already happened) that it’s hard to believe that anything could stop this totalitarian capitalist creative country from doing anything it so desired.

That sort of irrational sentiment needs a corrective, and so it was good to visit Zhujiajiao, and to remember  that here, as anywhere, history is long, and filled with dreams of the good life that have ended many times over.  The surprise — if there is one –  is that the old dreams keep repeating.

I’ve been a little hard to find on the PT blog lately, and I feel badly about it. The semi-good news is that my excuse is a new business, and we launch this week.

My partner Becky McCray and I are starting Tourism Currents; it’s an online learning community and membership site for tourism professionals who are interested in social media.

How does a woman in Texas (me) and a woman in Oklahoma (Becky) go about starting a business together?

A lot of Skype video calls and shared Google documents, that’s how.

We did get together in person last week, though, in Dallas (that’s about the halfway mark between our homes.)  I was so pumped afterwards that I made a pit stop for a late lunch in Waco, and used Utterli to record this audio post from my cell phone in the Taco Bell parking lot.

‘Cause I know how to have an exciting time in Waco!

(If you can’t see the audio player box below, here’s the URL directly to the recording.)