If I could spend a day going all over the US, with instant transport from one place to another and an unlimited budget, here is where I’d go and what I’d do in 2012….some of these places I discovered in 2011, others I’ve known for a long time and one I’ve never visited….

Morning

Wake up at:

• The Down East perfection of the Pentagöet Inn, Castine, Maine or
• The homey Library Suite at the Prairie Moon Bed & Breakfast, Hutchinson, Kansas or
• A Southern grande dame, the King Edward Hotel, Jackson, Mississippi or
• A giant of literary history at the Algonquin Hotel, New York City

Breakfast at:

• Bah’s Bakehouse (muffins! scones!) near the Castine waterfront or
• Billy’s Downtown Diner (omelettes!) in downtown Bethlehem, Pennsylvania or
• The Homemade Cafe (pecan waffles! home fries!) in Berkeley, California

Spend the morning:

• Thinking and learning at the National World War I Museum, Kansas City, Missouri or
• Bodysurfing on the Na Pali Coast, Kauai or
• Marveling at musical craftsmanship at the American Banjo Museum, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma or
• Stepping back into the Revolution at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia

Lunch

Feeling seafood-ish for my midday meal at:

• Paia Fish Market, Maui (or these other places to eat in Paia) or
• Pike Place Market, Seattle, Washington

Afternoon

Afternoon spent:

• Shopping in gracious Savannah, Georgia or
• Heating up in a mud bath at either Dr. Wilkinson’s in Calistoga, California or the Bath House in Jemez Springs, New Mexico or
• Taking a Chicago Architecture Foundation docent-led river cruise past incredible buildings in Chicago, Illinois or
• Going for a swim in Wekiwa Springs, Florida or Barton Springs in Austin, Texas or the spring-fed pool at Balmorhea State Park in western Texas (I’ve always wanted to see Balmorhea.)

Mid-afternoon snack:

• Garrett Popcorn in Chicago (The Chicago Mix flavor, of course) or
• A Ted Drewes frozen custard at the original stand on Route 66, St. Louis, Missouri

Evening

Sunset:

• Key West, Florida or
• Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California

Dinner at:

• Brady Tavern, Tulsa, Oklahoma or
• The Old Lahaina Luau, Maui or
• Really, any BBQ joint in Memphis, Tennessee

Wrap it up with:

• WaterFire in Providence, Rhode Island or
• YOUR recommendation down in the comments! Give us some ideas, from anywhere in the US, for an evening activity.

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Guidebooks, travel tales, how to books, atlases, maps:: all of those make good reading for the traveler. Other sorts of books serve to inspire, recall, and illuminate travel too. Cookbooks, biographies, memoirs, stories real and imagined all have their place on the perceptive traveler’s bookshelf and with the winter holidays approaching, perhaps on the perceptive traveler’s gift list.

Musician Rosanne Cash didn’t set out to write a travel book, or an autobiography either, with her memoir Composed. Her vivid images of place and stories of experiences in different landscapes linger long after reading her words, though. A walk to the place she was living as a young woman in London, a road in winter in Tennessee, making her way through Manhattan streets on 9/11, taking her sorrows to the sea shore: whether central to the story Cash is telling or mentioned as background, her sense of place stays in mind. “For me me music has always involved journeys,. both literal and metaphoric,” she writes. So does her prose.

Brette Sember is a traveler as well. Her lens through which to remember and share her travels is food. In The Parchment Paper Cookbook she offers recipes for Thai lemongrass chicken, swedish meatballs, artichoke pizza, and baklava, none of which you’d usually think of to make with the parchment paper techniqu, which involves involves wrapping the food to be cooked up in packets. Sember offers tips and recipes for many sorts of international and all American dishes dishes to cook this way. Another advantage for the traveler occurs to me: should you want to cook for friends you are visiting, orif perhaps you are staying in a self catering place or in a hostel. when you cook in parchment there will be no pots and pans to clean up.

Visual art was the aspect of place and travel which interested Charnell Havens and Vera Marie Badertscher. That, and the life story of a Navajo in the American southwest, Quincy Tahoma. The two spent more than a decade following the often slender threads of memory and conflicting records and research concerning the artist’s life, while connecting with many who knew the man or owned his work. The result is their book Quincy Tahoma which is extensively illustrated with images of Tahoma’s paintings. Both story and image evoke the landscape of the American southwest.

Poetry and photography have their place in travel writing and reading, as well. Photographer Andy Hall has brought he two together in his book Touched by Robert Burns. He asked a range of Scots to choose a favorite poem’s by Scotland’s national bard, and then set out to make photographs that not so much add to the poems and the written reflections as extends the ideas offered there and opens up new ways of seeing and thinking about them.

Fiction belongs in travel reading as well, with places from India to Paris to Oslo to the west of Ireland to Argentina to the Yukon and all points between playing part in well read stories. As it is coming on Christmas, for fiction I’ll point you to Philip Gulley’s gentle tale of the holiday season in small town Indiana, Christmas in Harmony.

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If you want to induce nausea in me immediately, you will say two little words: women’s magazines.

I wrote for women’s magazines for several years, and, with a couple of exceptions, count them among the worst experiences of my professional life.  I have been known to describe the editorial process at these magazines as a “sorority gang-bang”. I have been asked to repeat that phrase at dinner parties, especially those that involve other writers, because mentioning the phrase “women’s magazines” in a gathering of experienced writers creates something of a group shudder, followed by group therapy, often followed by heavy group drinking.

I don’t know why women’s magazines are so hard to work for, although the movie Mean Girls provides a partial explanation.

And while literary writing is quite different than the sort of stories that most women’s magazines are publishing, I can’t help but think that there is some kind of a connection between paucity of women’s bylines at the upper echelons of literature and how horrible women in media can be to one another, especially in situations that involve differences of power and prestige and the exchange of money.

But I live in hope that the new world of media, run more by writers themselves than by career editors, will be a better place for good writing and ultimately a better place for writers. That hope is fueled by the launch of an exciting new travel magazine, Vela.

Vela is written by women, but is obviously not a “women’s magazine” in the shuddering nausea sense, and decidedly not the territory of  “the gang tattoo of a Ya-Ya Sisterhood more interested in swapping stories about rough breakups and first periods and facial scrubs than in serious (male) literary writing,” as founder Sarah Menkedick writes in the site’s manifesto.  (If you doubt this could possibly be true, read Eva Holland‘s excellent essay about working, and working hard, in the Yukon. )

As Sarah goes on to explain:

The point here is not that this is a women’s site, by women for women, somehow female, feminine, or feminist in style. The fact that all of the writers are women is almost, almost incidental: it would be completely incidental if the publishing world did not create a situation in which women’s voices represent only a small fraction of the conversation.

Brava!  I’m looking forward to reading more.

Poets have a good bit to say about travel.

Should you happen to be traveling anywhere in the island of Ireland on 6 October, you’ll have a chance to notice this: that’s marked this year as National Poetry Day in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. There will be many poetry readings, some in English. some in Irish, in bookstores, libraries, pubs, schools, community centers and other places from morning through evening. From Cork to Galway to Donegal. to Belfast, Down to Dublin to Kerry to Cavan to Meath, Ireland will celebrate the voices of its poets.

Some of these events will include music, as well, and some of them may be broadcast on internet or terrestrial radio. For details on the events stop by Poetry Ireland’s Poetry Day web site.

Poets as travel writers? That’s a thought I’ve mentioned before here at Perceptive Travel. Songwriters, too. Follow the links to find out more.

image of Ireland courtesy of NASA

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My favorite travel book this year Cambodian Grrrl, by Anne Elizabeth Moore, which recounted her experiences teaching young Cambodian women about self-publishing zines in Phnom Pehn. In my review a few weeks ago, I noted that my one frustration with the book was not being able to see the zines for myself.

Well, problem mostly solved.  Check ‘em out here.

I say “mostly solved” because they’re still a little hard to read — these zines were obviously not meant for digital distribution! But they give you a good sense of what Moore was up to in Cambodia, and the enthusiasm of her students.