At about this time last year, a very large and extremely friendly house cat found himself alone on the streets of Brooklyn.

He could have been abandoned, or he could have slipped out when someone wasn’t looking, I don’t know. Either way, last winter was a brutal one in New York City,  so it is fortunate that this cat found his way to a marina, where he came across a TNR team — an acronym that stands for trap, neuter, release, actions meant to reduce a feral cat population.

He walked up to group,  meowed an introduction, and made it clear he was by no means a feral cat. In this way, he ended up in the care of the excellent people at the Picasso Veterinary Fund, one of the coolest animal charities anywhere.

They introduced me to this goofy but wily survivor of a feline.

We named him Henry, and he is spending this winter in considerably more comfort than he did last year.

I’m bringing all this up because, hello, my name is Alison and I am a cat person. (I greatly prefer this title to “crazy cat lady”. ) This is not an affection that I leave at home when I travel. In reviewing my travel photos from last year, I have noticed that nary a trip passes without me snapping the photo of some cat or another.

I’ve also noticed that I’m not the only person setting up the impromptu feline photography sessions. For instance, many, many people photographed this cat sleeping outside Tedeschi Winery in Maui.  Almost everyone made the joke about him having had a little too much at the tasting room.

I haven’t read many stories about this phenomenon of travelers photographing strange cats. I realize it’s deeply uncool. I don’t care.

So although there are many reasons to visit the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, I submit that cat people everywhere should not miss Cat Canyon, where you can observe bobcat and ocelot, pictured below. Obviously, these make great additions to any cat photography collection. Even your non-cat-loving friends will admire them.

This is the time of year when most writers would rather not be writing — and so there are a host of “best of” “worst of” and “insert-superlative-here” year in review lists appearing in blogs, magazines, newspapers.

I’ve read a bunch of them and believe this summary applies universally: 2011 was great, it sucked, but keep reading me/us anyway because basically I/we deserve congratulations for existing. Optional post-filler: here are the things I/we plan to do in 2012, it will be a heckuva year!

It’s all rather tiring.

But hey. I’m as averse to working in the last week of the year as any writer, so rather than trying to come up with some sort of a clever concept for repackaging old stories, I decided to enlist my favorite force in all the world: randomness.

Using a random number generator, I shall now pick a post by each Perceptive Travel blogger. First, I’ll randomly select a week of the year, from 1-52.  Since most of us only contribute once weekly, that should be criteria enough. If there happens to be more than one post from a blogger in that week, I’ll flip a coin.

So ladies and gentlemen, if you please: The Random Guide to Perceptive Travel blog’s 2011:

• Alison: Life Lessons from a Submarine in Groton, Connecticut.
• Brian: BKK Must Eats: Salmon Mania Roll at Zen Cucina in Bangkok, Thailand.
• Kerry: Singing Canada’s History: Maria Dunn in Alberta and other parts of Canada.
• Liz: Spotlight on New Zealand: Karangahake Gorge in New Zealand.
• Sheila: Dear Ms. Phone: Where the Heck Am I? somewhere in the world.

I should add that our Dear Leader (Tim) also contributes here –  however, since he lacks his own category in our navigation (right)  I’m afraid I’m way too lazy on a holiday week to try to figure out how to fit his posts into my randomness scheme.

But perhaps he will be mollified by my random selection of a piece from the webzine.  (Method: I randomly chose a month from 1-12, landing on November. Then counted the articles in the issue — 5 — and randomly selected a number from 1-5.)

The big random winner:

Goldi-Lox and the Three Bears in Western Canada, by David Lee Drotar.

And with that, let’s all move on to 2012. I’m sure it will be one heckuva year.

“Isn’t it beautiful,” I sighed, looking out at this scene from my table at Hotel Molokai‘s open-air restaurant, Hula Shores. My dining companion, a local, gave me a funny look, and agreed — in a way that made me realize she was just being polite.

Jaded, I thought, she sees this scene all the time.

I was wrong. The photos that follow were taken in the next 56 minutes, although things really started happening in the last ten minutes. I didn’t edit them at all — there are a few things I’d like to do with them in terms of composition — but the point I’m making here is about the color.

Everyone knows that Hawaii’s got some spectacular sunsets; fewer know why.

Conventional wisdom holds that spectacular sunsets come from air pollution, which isn’t really true. For the most brilliant colors, you need clean air. (You can prove this to yourself if you take off in an airplane at sunset on a hazy day — compare the colors you see from the ground, where polluted air tends to hang, to what you see at cruising altitude.) You also want a certain amount of moisture in the atmosphere to produce light scattering clouds, a cirrus and altocumulus are best.

The exception to the clean air rule is volcanic ash, which Hawaii’s also got — but only at high altitude. That’s what produces a “volcanic twighlight”, about 15 minutes after sunset — also known as an afterglow.

Read more about how to make a beautiful sunset here. But first look at what happened to this already lovely sky:

48 minutes later:

Four minutes after that:

And two minutes later:

Previously: Why tropical waters are so damned blue.

“Suffrage! Right to hold office! Show us first the woman who has independence and sense and taste enough to dress attractively…in shoes that do not destroy both her comfort and her gait.”

So wrote the New York Times in 1871, on the topic of women’s suffrage.  I had not realized that a woman’s wardrobe choices, including a fondness for high heels, had been at issue during the long fight for the right to vote in the United States. But shoes have been quite political over the course of human history. The quote above was on the wall in a special exhibit about shoes in the 1920s — the last stop on my tour of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.

This was not the first time that politics had come up at the museum, nor was it the first time that Elizabeth Semmelhack, the museum curator, and I discussed the total impracticality of high heels. (For the record, we were both wearing flats.) “High heels are entirely irrational footwear,” she said. “The higher a heel becomes,  the less it conforms with mobility.” On the other hand (other foot?), high heels and a woman’s sexuality have been intimately intertwined for centuries — they are routinely described, for instance, as “hot”.

So a conundrum for a woman in the late 19th century: should she sacrifice an important signifier of her one reliable source of power over men, that of sexual attraction, in favor of sensible shoes? Or should she keep her heels, retain that power, and provide evidence of  a “woman’s foolishness”?

Telling are the two stereotypes that women were sorted into, on the basis of the height of their heels, writes Semmelhack in Heights of Fashion, in her fascinating history of the elevated shoe: “The humourless, low-heeled frump and the empty headed, high-heeled flirt.”

My private tour with curator Elizabeth Semmelhack was another stop on my Toronto itinerary, and therefore part of the all-expenses paid trip which you can enter to win. See previous stories on this trip, including this one on a frequently overlooked museum in Toronto, and this one on my a romance with a hat. More details here.

This year, the only people I knew who remembered Pearl Harbor died. My grandparents were in their late 90s, and were among the very many who were not in Hawaii, nor in Oahu on that day – they were in not, in other words, immediately affected by the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7^th, 1941, although it would of course shape their lives as it did everyone else’s at that point in history. I am sure that they did not need to be reminded not to forget.

But the attack on Pearl Harbor does not live in my memories. Or, to put it another way, the first memory I have of the attack on Pearl Harbor is in my junior high social studies classroom, when we were learning how to describe the reasons why nations go to war: systemic causes, proximate causes, immediate causes. Pearl Harbor was the correct example to give on the essay portion of the test defining “immediate causes for war”, the reason why the United State entered World War II. And since that war was waged against the forces that were busy annihilating most of the other side of my family in Poland at that precise moment in time, my feelings about Pearl Harbor were similar to Winston Churchill’s reaction upon hearing news of the attack: “So we have won after all!”

“You are here.” A few days before the 70^th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, I visited the newly renovated Pearl Harbor Visitor Center, at the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument in Oahu. The slate blue water of the harbor was calm as I walked beside it, reading the placards describing the attack. It was late afternoon, the soft air was losing its heat, the blue skies just a little cloudy, the palm trees swaying and the succulent shrubbery glistening. I stopped in front of a large photograph taken on the morning of the attack, raising my eyes from the shapes identified in the billowing smoke as Battleship Row, Dry Dock #1, The Nevada to the scene in front of me, and darting back down again. My position in the photograph was marked with “you are here”. It was filled dark shapes that could have been small trees or perhaps a knot of people, crouching. The sky was not filled with wispy clouds filtering the sunlight, but with debris, the larger pieces marked as “bursts of antiaircraft fire”.

I passed on to other placards, photos showing black smoke with the only spots of bright the turrets of the ships enflamed. More than 3,500 people were dead or wounded. A photo of a mass, temporary flag draped grave. A photo of a dead body of a man, in shorts and a t-shirt, face down in shallow water near the beach at Kaneohe Bay. A Navy casualty.

There was a gun on display inside the new exhibit of the visitor center, found to have been fired that day at enemy aircraft, by servicemen under attack. Those without guns threw wrenches. There was also a gas mask on display, the likes of which were issued to every person on Oahu in the days after the attack, when martial law was declared, with the instructions to have it with you, always. There was description of barbed wire strung up along the beaches. What was not pictured, I could easily imagine.

It is of course correct to describe the attack on Pearl Harbor as an immediate cause of war. But after my visit to Pearl Harbor Visitor’s Center, I understood that December 7^th, 1941 was also at its start a day like any other, a day when a wrench was tucked into a work belt, a gun slid into a holster, not just an essay answer or a symbol. What is still impossible for me to remember, after this visit, will now also be hard for me to forget.