I’ve been spending the past week in a series of river towns along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. The first stop was Alton, Illinois, which is one of those “Where’d you say again…?” American towns that surprises you with a dozen things you didn’t know. First of all, it’s a big eagle-spotting destination. I just missed it, but that shot at the top is not an uncommon site if you visit at the right time of year.

Alton was founded in 1818, started a steam flour mill in 1831, and reached 4,000 people by 1837. Soon a thousand steamboats had docked there—a real metropolis in those days.

It’s got some odd claims to fame, including being the spot where the famed Lincoln-Douglas presidential debates took place and the place where the first state penitentiary was built. Lewis and Clark spent five months here before taking off on their expedition west. Much later a new pioneer was born here: Miles Davis.

Here’s the really trippy one though: Alton was home to the world’s tallest man: Robert Wadlow. He was already six feet tall at eight years old and he eventually topped out at 8 feet, 11.1 inches. That’s my 5′ 11″ frame next to a life-sized statue of him in a park. Naturally everything he wore and used had to be custom-made and he had what would now be called endorsement deals and was a spokesperson for a shoe company. His feet did him in though: the poor guy died at a young age (22) from an infection that set in from a chafing brace on his ankle.

See more at the All Around Alton, IL site.

[Eagle photo by Keith Wedoe for the Alton Regional CVB]

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Some of you long-time readers may remember that when we launched the Perceptive Travel Blog on March 21, 2007, one of the original contributors was UK-based travel photographer Steve Davey.

Eventually, Steve had to move on to other obligations, but he still helps judge the Perceptive Travel Remarkable Photo Contest and he also wrote about Debre Damo monastery in Ethiopia for the magazine.

While we were sorry to lose his wit and fabulous photos on the blog, we’ve continued to follow his travels with interest, including the photo tours that he leads all over the world with the support of Intrepid Travel.

The good news is that his latest offering looks really interesting, and we thought we’d share it with our readers.

The “Impressions of Ladakh” photo tour is scheduled for 12 – 27 July, 2010 starting in New Delhi, and Steve will lead a small group (12 people maximum) through this wild mountainous region on a trip that offers….

“A unique opportunity to improve your travel photography, whilst exploring the highlights of Ladakh in the company of a professional travel photographer.”

It’s a wide-ranging itinerary, with notable monateries and towns, the Tak Thok Tse Chu festival and Dharamsala, the home of the exiled Dalai Lama and the government of Tibet in exile.  Note that:

“This tour will be travelling through some difficult territory, and much of it will be at altitude. It will be a more physical trip that others which Steve has run, and a reasonable level of fitness and mobility will be required. If you are concerned about this, please contact Steve to discuss your situation.”

If you’re interested, contact Steve and tell him his old Perceptive Travel blogging friends sent you!

According to Lonely Planet author and editor Don George 

‘every traveller has some unforgettable food story – a larger-than-life feast, a mind-bending immersion in a rural market, the homemade, heart-opening treat shared by a stranger on a claptrap train, an adventure on the trail of an edible exotic. In all these tales, food is an agent of transformation, taking travellers to a deeper and more lasting understanding of and connection with a people, a place and a culture. And if they’re really lucky, it tastes good too.’

And with that in mind, he is looking for submissions for a new Lonely Planet anthology called  A Moveable Feast: Life-Changing Food Encounters Around the World.

So if you’ve got an original, unpublished (true) tale of travel and food, why not email it to Don George at  don.george@sbcglobal.net with Food Anthology in the subject line. 

Length is from 1,000 to 3,000 words.

Deadline is April 19.

All submissions are on speculation.

To get an idea of the type of writing they are looking for, check out this Lonely Planet anthologies – The Kindness of Strangers,  By the Seat of My Pants, and Tales from Nowhere .

 A Moveable Feast will be published this fall.

As Liz was kind enough to mention a few days ago, I have a story in Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010. It’s about my quest for the spiciest food I could handle, excerpted from a week-long series that ran on World Hum last year.

As if that wasn’t wonderful enough, there’s going to be a reception for the book at one of my favorite bookstores anywhere, Idlewild. Idlewild is dedicated to travel literature,  and it organizes its books by country. So if you’re going to, say, Mexico, you’ll find essays, novels and guidebooks relating to Mexico, all shelved together.

I have never once managed to get out of Idlewild without dropping serious dollars, and so I’m sure that I will once again leave with a lighter wallet on March 31st, when I’ll be there to read from my story, along with three talented co-contributors: Valerie Conners, Megan Lyles, and Elisabeth Eaves. Idlewild Bookstore is at 12 West 19th Street, near 5th avenue. The event is at  7 p.m. I hope to see you there!

(By the way, Idlewild was the commonly used name for JFK Airport, which itself was derived from the name of a golf course that was paved over to make way for the airport. It was re-named one month after President Kennedy’s assassination.)

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Looks like it’s a winning season for the Perceptive Travel writers.

First there was Tim Leffel with his First Prize  NATJA  Award in the category of Travel Writing on the Internet for a Perceptive Travel story  Unbalanced in the Sinking City.

He has since won a  Silver in the Destinations category of the annual Solas Awards sponsored by Travelers’ Tales Publishing for the same story as well as a Bronze Solas Award in the “Doing Good or the Kindness of Strangers” category for a story called The Collision (which was also awarded a  second prize in Transitions Abroad’s annual narrative travel writing contest). Talk about award winning!

Then there was  Alison Stein Wellner with her The Heat Seeker story (originally published on World Hum) being published in the Traveler’s Tales Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010 anthology due out this month.

And now there is Sheila Scarborough with her newly won SXSWi Social Media Award at the recent South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) tech conference in Austin.

Given Sheila’s enthusiasm and energy in regards learning and teaching others, especially the tourism industry, about social media, this award is well deserved.  For Sheila’s take on social media, head on over to Sheila’s Guide to the Good Stuff and Tourism Currents.

Way to go Sheila. Hope you can hear the long distance clapping.

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