Fall is calling me to take a road trip, but my schedule isn’t opening up enough to allow many long stretches of highway blacktop bliss.

Well, I can either pout about it or blog about it, and we all know how that’s going to end….

Herewith, some of my favorite US scenic highways and byways, for those of you with a bit more automotive freedom than me:

• Virginia – The Colonial Parkway connects historic Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown through lush, quiet woods and pretty views of the James and York Rivers. Unfortunately it’s closed right now between Williamsburg and Jamestown (a boater crunched the Powhatan Creek bridge) but other parts are open.  The annual Yorktown Victory Weekend celebration is this month (October 17 and 18, 2009) with special walking tours and musket demonstrations.

• Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee – I wouldn’t take the Natchez Trace Parkway if you’re in any kind of a hurry; the speed limit is 50 mph for most of it, and the whole point is to gaze at scenery (along with a large number of waddling RVs who have the same idea) Native American mound-builders may have trod this path as long as 2,000 years ago, and you can still see part of that original trail at the Sunken Trace, milepost 41.5 in Mississippi. Let me tell you, that spot is kinda spooky at dusk, and the un-bug-sprayed will be chewed alive by voracious Southern mosquitoes.  You’ll swear you can hear them laughing derisively at your feeble use of DEET.

• California – The Pacific Coast Highway. Like, duh, dude! Spectacular especially along Big Sur on California 1, near San Francisco (you’d better pay attention at the wheel, because for heaven’s sake, no one else is) but there are plenty of other gorgeous sections.  Don’t miss our detailed guest post about the PCH from Jamie Jensen, author of the Road Trip USA guidebook:  highlights of the Pacific Coast Highway.

• New Mexico – Did you miss this year’s Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque? No matter; there’s still a good excuse to travel to this part of New Mexico, and that’s the Jemez Mountain Trail.  It goes very roughly in a circle through stunning mountain country between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and if you start in Santa Fe, you can end the day in funky Jemez Springs, soaking in the town’s bathhouse or eating at one of the restaurants. I’ve written here on PT Blog about Valles Caldera and Bandelier National Monument, both on the Trail.

• Florida – The Interstate running down the middle of Florida (I-75) is, of course, a crashing bore most of the way, but between Gainesville and Ocala you can travel the parallel Highway 441, the “Old Florida Heritage Highway” and actually have something to look at.  Check for gators and bison at Paynes Prairie State Preserve, stroll the shops of old town Micanopy and get literary at author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ Cracker home in Cross Creek (in town there’s a restaurant serving gator tail, frog legs, cooter/turtle and live blues music.)  In Florida, you go north to see the South.

• Texas – Indulge me while I plug a local Austin area/Hill Country drive that starts a few blocks from where I live;  Ranch Road 1431.  Heading west from just north of Austin in Round Rock/Cedar Park, you escape the ‘burbs into open country with pretty views and quick detours for Flat Creek Estate Winery (I’m partial to their “Super Texan” Sangiovese,) birdwatching in the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge and Pie Happy Hour 3-5 pm at the Blue Bonnet Cafe in Marble Falls.  To head back towards Austin, take Highway 71 out of Marble Falls and work in a stop at Poodie’s Hilltop honky tonk in Spicewood, where there are “no bad days.”

If you pull up into my driveway real quick and don’t beep the horn, we can sneak off and get going before anyone notices, right?

Evening had fallen on the South Koster island, the westermost settled area in Sweden.  The Hotel Ekenäs had prepared a special treat for its guests in the bar:  fresh oysters that had been in the ocean just hours before, now arranged on platters, near the pool table,  awaiting shucking. I wandered over to have a look, and the delicate young blonde woman who arranged the oysters offered to show me how to do it. Or, I should say one way to do it, there are many different ways, apparently, to shuck an oyster.

I am right handed, so I put a glove on my left hand. I selected an oyster that just about filled the palm of my hand. I placed the slightly more curved side down, and closed my fingers around its bony calcified shell.

With my right hand, I inserted the knife into the small hinge of the oyster. (The narrow end of the oyster, just past its hinge, is called its beak, the broad end, its bill.) I was tempted to use my right hand to apply force. But no, this is not right, and in fact it’s quite dangerous, because your dominant hand can drive the knife right past the oyster and into the meat of your palm. Once the knife is properly inserted into the hinge, I used the fingers of my left hand, wrapped around on the dull end of the knife, to apply the pressure to the shell, and used my right hand to slightly twist. It’s not easy, and in fact, I can’t think of another time that I’ve used my hand in just this way.

After a while, the shell is loosened, and carefully, you insert the knife to separate the adductor muscle.  And then remove the top shell, tip it back and eat.  It apparently takes oyster shucker pros mere seconds to perform all these tasks (minus the eating), it took me about five minutes.

Other people were learning to shuck oysters once I was finished, so I watched them, sipping on a Swedish version of champagne. I was marveling at how hard it was to open up the shell, and I heard the young delicate blonde woman explained that the oyster was fighting against the knife, exerting some enormous amount of pressure. I knew, of course, that these were fresh oysters,  which means that they hadn’t been cooked, but some part of me had forgotten that that rocky shell that I was just prying at with a knife had in fact been alive until the moment I ended it and slurped it down.

And then I wondered when, exactly, it was that the oyster died. Was it only when I swallowed it?  I asked the blonde and she said it was when I separated the muscle from the shell, a relatively easy motion, in fact, the easiest part of the whole oyster shucking business. This is a widely held belief, that when the muscle is severed, the oyster is finished. Apparently, however, this isn’t quite true. The oyster is still quite alive when it goes down the hatch, as Mark Kurlansky makes clear in his book The Big Oyster : quoting a 19th century oyster scientist, he writes: “A fresh oyster on the half shell is no more dead than an ox that’s been hamstrung”.

The exact moment of the end is often more obvious than it is for the oysters on its half shell. But knowing the specifics of timing, and even the exact cause of death? It just doesn’t help with the moral ambiguity.

(P.S.: I’d been planning to write about something else today, but since the shuttering of Gourmet magazine was announced yesterday, and since that magazine ran one of my favorite essays of all time, Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace, I decided to write something about shellfish and food and endings instead.)

As Antoina writes in her essay Extreme Trains? Amtrak’s Empire Builder is anything but — that doesn’t mean it’s got nothing to offer,  pretty much every famous travel writer in the world has written at one time or another about the joys of train travel.

This past week, however, I’ve been reading a book about American train travel written by someone who is adamant that she is not a travel writer. At the very beginning of her book A Stranger on a Train, author Jenny Diski asserts her non-travel writer status, stating  ”I am not a travel writer in any reasonable sense of the word”. It’s almost as if she feels insulted by the idea, even though she is, in reality, writing a travel book which, ironically, won the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

True, it is no ordinary travel book. Recounting two journeys around the perimeter of the United States, it is also a trip in the deep recesses of Diski’s mind as we learn about her struggles with drug addiction and depression in her early twenties. It’s composition goes something like this – two parts memoir, part travelogue, one part celluloid western flashbacks, and one part people watching. 

The landscape and scenery is secondary not only to the cast of characters and events that take place along the way, but also to Diski’s addictive need to maintain her pack a day smoking habit.  In fact, most of the action, dialogue, and flashbacks take place in the smoking section of the trains, where it seems all the colourful and interesting characters  – a young Julia Roberts lookalike nursing a growing blood clot where someone had slammed a door against her head, the drunk Raymond who invites Diski to share his life, and the once-pretty Bet, with her cowboy boots and bereavement – dwell.

Somehow, Diski seems to make the idea of smoking your way around America appealing.  Of course, these days, there is no smoking section or carriage on any Amtrak train, so the opportunity, however tempting,  is lost.

Seems like just yesterday I was reviewing the  September issue of Perceptive Travel magazine. And yet, here I am again, sitting with my coffee on a Sunday morning reading great travel stories from the October issue. Just goes to show, time really does fly.

So what’s in the line up for October?

Besides the regular book reviews and music reviews which always make me want to rush out the nearest Borders and load up on books and CDs, there are  three feature articles to have you hoping around the world.

First up, regular contributor Amy Rosen heads to Hudson Bay to get up close and personal with polar bears. Polar bears are normally associated with snow and ice. But it turns out that these ones take their summer vacation snacking and napping on verdant grasses along the shores of the Hudson Bay in front of the Nanuk Polar Bear Lodge. Might sound a little close for comfort for some people, but with Amy’s descriptions of the polar bears looking like ‘sleepy giants in terrycloth robes, shuffling off to the kitchen for their first cup of coffee’, all I want to do is book a flight over and see for myself.

Meanwhile, Luke Armstrong, another PT regular, writes about Finding Maximón, or San Simón, a crafty Mayan deity or Catholic saint (depending on who you ask), while living down in Antigua, Guatemala. The search for Maximón led Luke and his travelling companions to Lake Atitlán in the Guatemalan highlands. As to whether they found the crafty deity, nowadays represented by a wooden statue usually smoking a cigarette whose house is changed yearly during holy week processions, you’ll have to read the article to find out…

Then new Perceptive Travel contributor Amy Carlson takes us to Japan for a journey of renewal along the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage trail. Along the way, she meets a local who, by flying an imaginary kite, provides Amy with a gift, a message of grace, greatly needed after a year of heaviness and weary.

And as usual, there is a great giveaway lined up – three pairs of quick-dry travel underwear from ExOffico. Read the review over at Pracitcal Travel Gear to find out more about this underwear. As anyone who has been on the road for a while will attest to, quick-drying underwear is a must. The winner picks the gender, style, and color.

Of course, you can only be in the win if you subscribe to Perceptive Travel magazine newsletter.

Happy reading…

If you took a poll, travel by train would probably be the single most popular form of transit. Every famous travel writer in the world has waxed lyrical about train travel, and most not-so-famous ones, too, yours truly included. Loving the rails might make me just one of the herd, but I can’t help it. It is the best way to see the world, even the smallest slices of it.

That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s always romantic. Or even comfortable. I was open-mouthed astounded recently when my husband put on a show called Extreme Trains, and the host fed his audience an image of Amtrak’s Empire Builder route – from Chicago to Seattle – that I, a veteran of that journey, have never seen in my life. I have ridden the Empire Builder more than 20 times, and you could look over, under, through, and across the train and never find that my experiences coincide with those depicted on Extreme Trains. Maybe in another universe.

This is a crappy show. Sure, it’s done by the History Channel and hosted by a real-life train conductor who knows his engineering. His presentation (reminiscent of those overly melodramatic volcano shows on the Discovery Channel that show some TV producers never learned that the drama of nature really does speak for itself) makes me think they dragged someone over from RAW World Wrestling. But presentation is only half the problem.

While host Matt Brown certainly has his facts down, his adjectives need correcting. I was interested when he talked about the history of the Empire Builder route, how the line was blasted through the unforgiving Cascade mountains outside of Seattle, and for all my times on the train I didn’t realize its schedule was designed to give passengers a daytime view of Glacier National Park’s beautiful southern peaks.

But then he gets to words like, say, “luxury.” Or “comfort.” Or “gourmet.” Take any of them and you’re talking a barrow-load of crap. Throw in his comment (made 3 times!) that Amtrak, especially the Empire Builder, is famous for its “on-time service” and I swear to your God that I spilled my soup.

I adore Amtrak. I revere Amtrak. Amtrak got me through college and back home again every Christmas, every summer, and sometimes spring break. I could afford it, unlike the plane tickets. It was more comfortable than Greyhound. And I can remember riding it my very first Christmas break, the day after my last physics and calculus finals, and thinking that the 24-hour journey was exactly what I needed to transition from the first exhilarating, giddy semester of college, back to the mountain home I loved and the friends I’d missed. If I dug around, I could probably find the journal entry that says that very thing.

My love for Amtrak and the Empire Builder goes beyond an affection for train travel. We have a relationship.

It’s a one-sided, old-fashioned marriage. “On-time service,” says the host of Extreme Trains? Our train once sat in midwinter, on a dark night, outside of Havre, Montana (one of the middles of nowhere out on the windswept prairie) for 6 hours while they tried to locate another engine that could pull us up through the Rocky Mountains. Obviously they couldn’t have thought that one ahead, although Amtrak did the trip every single day at the time. Since they had to remove our old engine, the electricity was off. That meant the heat was off. In Eastern Montana. At night, in the middle of winter. For 6 hours.

Such was my preparation and love for this train that I simply shook my head, pulled on my wool hat and ski gloves, and dragged the thick blanket back over my shoulders.

I once got on a train in Minneapolis, to go home, that was 36 hours late. Work that one out. Never once did I arrive back in Montana anywhere near on time. I think we did arrive only 2 hours late, once. It was a fluke.

And have you ever tried the food on Amtrak? Extreme Trains host Matt Brown went on about how high-quality it was, how the passengers were hungry, and how the Empire Builder was known for its excellent dining car service.

You bet the passengers are hungry. That’s because the food is pre-cooked, microwaved stodge that you can only buy a plate at a time (as in the plates are pre-arranged and shrink-wrapped), and there’s not a whole lot of it. And it costs a fortune. Being a lover of this train, and knowing it well, I always brought a big bag of crusty bread, cheese, salami, and chocolate. It made me popular, although not as much as the whisky flask my grandmother once sneaked into my pocket for the journey.

Extreme Trains proved to me, once again, how misleading travel shows can be. It shows why real travel writing, by real people having real experiences, is so crucial to the armchair or mobile traveler.

But it also does Amtrak a great disservice. The Empire Builder might be late, sometimes cold, and underfed, but it is a journey in the best tradition of train travel. There’s lots of room, even if you just buy a seat. I once took my harp back and forth, plonked in front of my feet, and had plenty of leg room (it’s a small harp). You meet interesting people, whether in your car or in the observation lounge. The trip takes you through views of America’s sprawled-out countryside that in a car might put you to sleep. It gives you access to towns all across the northern United States that nobody in a plane will likely ever see. It allows you to learn that almost every single small town in Montana has a bar named Stockman’s.

There are train journeys in Europe, both comfortable and elegant, with views that made my teeth tingle, that can never have the place in my heart that the Empire Builder does. They can’t touch the memories created by a journey that is like an old lover: doddering, tardy, cranky, with indigestion.

Forget ‘Extreme.’ The Empire Builder is anything but extreme. It is like the best of America: strong, solid, simple-hearted, and worth of loyalty.