Passover, Holy Week, the turn of seasons, graduations, weddings… late spring is a time of reflection for many reasons. Here are three albums which are good companions along such journeys.

Donal Clancy’s album Close to Home is a meditative, thoughtful take on tunes from the Irish tradition, played on guitar. The guitar is, relatively speaking, a fairly new instrument in Irish traditional music. One of the things that means is that though he is working within the tradition, there is great room for exploration and creation. Clancy is a good man to do this. He grew up in southeastern Ireland, in the Gaeltacht area around An Rinn, the son of musician Liam Clancy of the world renown Clancy brothers. He was a founding member of the band Danu, played with the Irish American group Solas, returned to Danu, with whom he still performs, and recently recorded an album with his cousins Robbie O’Connell and Aoife Clancy. Close to Home, though, is a solo album.

“I like to think about the mood of the piece, to have that come through, rather than make the tune fit my playing,” Clancy says. “No flashiness or anything like that, the arrangements are straightforward, a relaxed and laid back tempo. I wanted to make a very traditional Irish sounding recording” It is that, but perhaps not what you may be thinking if you’ve been listening to groups such as The Celtic Women and Celtic Thunder.
Engaging stories told with a sureness of touch, all without speaking a word.

Carrie Newcomer is thinking about change and trust and making one’s way through the mysteries those things provoke in her album Before & After. Contemplative, poetically told, and with a dash of wry humor now and then, her use of words and music fits many sorts of reflective journeys, and suggests others. The title track, for example, invites thought about those moments where life turns on a dime: things change and they are never the same afterwards, whether the circumstance is a hit and run or Jacob wresting with the angel. In another song Newcomer brings in unexpected but exactly right images to frame the uncertainties of life’s journey and the questions that offers, and in another she trust and love in a trip through county fairs in her native Indiana.

Hanneke Cassel speaks through the sound of her fiddle — and occasionally, her singing voice — to reflect on travel, faith, history, and good stories. The Boston based artist has played western swing, Americana, and Irish music, but it is in Scottish tradition that she grounds herself — Scotland with a a taste of other places. “America is a Celtic country too,” Cassel says, and that comes through in the tunes she composes herself as well as the ones she chooses from other sources. Her album For Reasons Unseen offers the listeners a journey grounded in Scottish tradition, reaching out to American folk tradition and that of Ireland, and taking in a piece Cassel learned on one her trips to China.

Each of these albums includes reflection, joy, humor, as well as a few unexpected twists and turns. That makes all of them fine companions for spring journeys, whether those are physical trips or journeys of thought.

This man with the sadistic grin who’s about to (mockingly) gobble an otherworldly insect that escaped from Jurassic Park is Daan Joubert, owner of Okapi Shuttles and Tours and my guide for a three-day South African tour/safari last year. This photo was taken minutes after he’d finished changing our truck’s blown-out tire on a lonely stretch of road between Johannesburg and Kruger National Park, where cars zoomed by in an 80km zone at what seemed like an 100km-per-hour clip.

As anybody who’s been on safari knows, game drives are not all action and adventure. In between the pinch-yourself-to-make-sure-you’re-not-dreaming moments, like when a herd of languid giraffe amble past your vehicle so close you could reach out and touch them, or when you glimpse the elusive leopard bouncing from one boulder to the next along a narrow riverbed, there’s a lot of downtime. Hours go by without seeing more than (another f’ing) impala, a few stray warthogs, maybe a handful of birds. It never gets boring (at least it didn’t for me), but I went to bed every night with eyes that ached from scanning, scanning, scanning the bush for signs of life from sunrise to sunset.

It’s possible to tour public parks in South Africa by yourself in a rental car, but you’re missing out if you don’t go with a seasoned safari guide, like Daan, who helped pass the time during those warm afternoon hours when many animals were off napping in remote or otherwise well-camoflauged corners of the bush. Most of what I learned about Jo’burg, Kruger, and the mood of modern South Africa came from him.

We talked about a lot of things. Some of the topics were heavy, like his stories about what it was like during South Africa’s dark days of apartheid (he’s a retired cop, actually) and his anecdotes about the tough everyday lives of so many black South Africans. Others were lighter, like the “friendly” ongoing rivalry between residents of Cape Town and Jo’burg, particularly when it comes to sport.

“People from Cape Town always say ‘what do you have there? Nothing. It’s barren, dirty, and full of crime,” he said. “I always say, ‘what does Cape Town have without the C [sea]? Nothing: it’s just Ape Town. Do you get it? Without the “C”?”

I heard that one more than once during the trip.

He’s a quick-witted, likeable guy, that Daan, with setups and punchlines that rolled off his tongue as easily as they did Rodney Dangerfield’s (with some of them just as, ahem, lewd). When it came to the wildlife, it seemed like he had one-liners for every animal we saw the first morning. Here’s a few of my favorite ones–all educational, in their own way.

+ Hyenas (which Daan admitted is one of his favorite animals): “There’s just something sinister to them; satanic little creatures, aren’t they? I’d kiss them, but they bite.”

+ Impala: “You see that McDonald’s logo on his back? That’s the fast-food symbol for the lion.”

+ Blue Wildebeest: “They make nice jerky.”

+ Warthogs: “They are the religious animal: always on their knees to eat.”

(Warthogs kneel down to graze.)

+ Waterbuck: “After they painted the toilet seat, they were the first to sit down on it.”

(Waterbuck have a horseshoe-shaped ring around their butt.)

+ Vervet monkeys: “They have the biggest, most beautiful blue testicles you’ve ever seen.”

Right on the Wikipedia page for “People Who Don’t Like Casinos” is a picture of my face.

Really, they are simply not my thing.

I don’t get it.

One time, I played nickel slots in Atlantic City….hadn’t won anything after I put in 25 cents, so I stood up and declared that I was done.  It was too painful and stupid to keep putting money in a box for no apparent reason.

So, when I needed a hotel during a road trip through the Oklahoma City area, the LAST place on my list to consider was the hulking neon Riverwind Casino Hotel behemoth about three miles south of Norman (where I had a meeting the next morning.)

Riverwind is one of the many Chickasaw Nation casinos and gaming centers.

Thanks to a wreck on the Interstate right by the casino entrance, however, I was trapped and couldn’t investigate anywhere else, so I wormed my way out of traffic, parked and walked in to see about a room.

Wow, what a nice place!

The casino is slightly separated from the hotel building, and while you do have to go through there to get to the restaurants, it’s no smokier or noisier than any other casino.

The hotel, on the other hand, was quiet and felt rather plush, the staff was very friendly and efficient, and the room was a lot more upscale than I’d expected.

That bed? I could hardly haul myself out of that bed the next morning. Com-FY.

Free parking, a voucher for free breakfast, juice/coffee/tea always available in the lobby (plus fresh cookies!) and yes,  free and fast WiFi in a room full of plugs to charge my blogging gear.

Heaven.

I’d stay there again in a minute, and will quit turning up my nose at casino hotels.  The bill came to about US$100 – not far out of line for midlevel chain lodging along that part of the Interstate in Oklahoma.

Are there any casino hotels that you would recommend? Please let us know down in the comments.

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Saint Andrews is a seacoast town on the east of Scotland, north of Edinburgh, south of Dundee. It is often associated with golf. That makes sense as there are seven courses in the area, including The Old Course, which is often the site of the British Open. It’s said that Mary Queen of Scots played a few rounds in Saint Andrews in the 1500s, and that the game has been played in the area since the fourteenth century.

There is a good bit more to the town than its golfing connections, however. Parts of the movie Chariots of Fire were filmed on its seashore, and further back in time, Saint Andrews was the scene of violent conflict during the Scottish reformation. That is one of the reasons that Saint Andrew’s Cathedral now stands in ruins. The town center still retains much of its medieval character, however. helped along by the presence of the University of Saint Andrews. Many of the university’s buildings date from the 1400s. The university is equal to Oxford and Cambridge in academic rigor and reputation, and is the third oldest university in the English speaking world. It is looking forward to celebrating six hundred years of turning out graduates in 2013.

The quadrangle of Saint Salvator’s College, one of the oldest colleges which make up the university, will be the place for a celebration marking a milestone in the lives of two of its recent graduates this spring, as well. HRH Prince William of Wales and Catherine Middleton both graduated in 2005, he with a degree in geography and she with an honors degree in art history. It was in the relaxed and relatively quiet atmosphere of Saint Andrews that the two first met and got to know each other. As you may have heard, they will be celebrating their wedding on 29 April, at Westminster Abbey in London, with all the pomp, circumstance, and fanfare that goes along with a royal wedding.

The celebrations in Saint Andrews are likely to be a bit more informal. The folk at Ruby’s Chinese takeaway may remember their former customers, and the people at Ma Bell’s Pub may recall the couple stopping in of an evening, as well. At Saint Salvator’s, where both Prince William and Catherine studied, the quad between the ancient buildings will be the place for a ceilidh on the Thursday evening before the ceremony — a ceilidh (which is pronounced, roughly, KAY-lee) — is a celebration with music, dance, good conversation, and general merriment. On the Friday morning of the ceremony, fifteen hundred lucky Saint Andrews residents, winners of free tickets which were distributed by lot, will enjoy a wedding breakfast and music by Skerryvore and other musicians. Then they will get to watch the broadcast of the service from Westminster Abbey on big screens set up on the quad – and word has it they may even see themselves, as scenes of various celebrations are integrated into the broadcast program.

photograph of the quadrangle at Saint Salvator’s courtesy of the University of Saint Andrews

When you think of bike friendly cities in the United States, Portland, Oregon, usually is at or near the top of the list. So it’s hard to believe that this city that’s widely known by its airport code (PDX) lacks a travel guide specifically for cyclists.

And yet, when local cycling advocates Meghan Sinnott and Elly Blue were organizing the 2008 Towards Carfree Cities conference, they found they lacked a single, convenient resource to send attendees who—quite reasonably—wanted to know how to best approach Portland on two wheels.

The duo gathered the info, and since then, the say they’ve been getting requests for the info from PDX-bound travelers several times a week. The goal now is to publish PDX by Bike: Your Guide to Discovering Portland by Bicycle, and to have a continuously updated companion website.

This does seem like an ideal project for Kickstarter, which is a way of crowdsourcing the funding for creative endeavors. (If this sounds familiar, it’s because Liz Lewis has covered Kickstarter here a few times before, most notably when it was used to successfully fund The Global Citizen Project.)

PDX by Bike has but a modest budget: $2,000 for art and cover printing costs. If you pledge anything over $5 you get the guide. As is Kickstarter’s wont, there are escalating goodies with increased pledge amounts. The apogee $500 pledge gets you the bike guide, The Zinester’s Guide to Portland,  a waterproof Bike There! map or Walk There! book, a bag of locally-roasted coffee, and a custom guided tour of Portland with Meghan and Elly for two, which includes bikes and meals for the day. (Get a sense of what that a jolly day that would be.)

The pledge deadline is April 29th, 2011 at 4pm Eastern.  That’s nine days from today, so head over to Kickstarter to help make this one happen.