The Wander Year is Mike McIntyre’s memoir of his and longtime girlfriend, Andrea Boyles’ year of travel. In 2000, McIntyre, then 42, and Boyles, 40, covered 22 countries on 6 continents. They crossed the equator 6 times, took 45 flights and slept in 169 beds “plus one sand dune.” The trip cost $51,470. We’ve penciled in an itinerary, but we’re carrying a big eraser. If we sound a bit aimless, it’s because we pretty much are. There is no grand purpose or […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel

Part I – “Australia’s curious sense of disconnectedness” is about the Aussie people, a “beguiling fusion of America and Britain” – 11 Sept 2014 Part III – “Unaccountably overlooked and packed with unappreciated wonders” – is about Aborigines, earth’s oldest culture and stromatolites – earth’s oldest life form – 25 Sept 2014 In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson writes about the Australian continent’s vast emptiness. “You cannot say you have been to Australia until you have crossed the Outback,” declares Bryson. “It is […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel

The second of two reviews. See part I – click here In Pictures from Italy, Charles Dickens’ description of Napolitanos doing “everything in pantomime” illustrates his unsurpassed skill at animating a scene: …beggars rap their chins with their right hands… the conventional sign for hunger. A man quarrelling with another lays the palm of his right hand on the back of his left, and shakes the two thumbs—expressive of a donkey’s ears — [goading] his adversary. Two people bargaining for […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Italian Journey is a memorable picture of Italy at the end of the eighteenth century. Italian Journey portrays Goethe’s joy and struggle to satisfy his intellectual curiosity and commitment to understanding art. “With great objects [of art] around,” he said, the purpose of his trip was “to learn and to improve myself ere I am forty years old.” (He began the journey at 37.) Goethe traveled throughout Italy from 1786 to 1788. Upon arriving he declared his “delight that the language I always […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel

Zeteo is Reading Contributor Tucker Cox is currently traveling. He is expected to return next Thursday with his next post about great travel writing. He has a lifetime goal of visiting 100 countries on 7 continents. It might be said that he is now 87 percent of the way there. The photograph, of professional backpacker Andrew Skurka, appeared on a National Geographic website about “Today’s Ultimate Adventurers.” Tucker — though not featured on the site, and though (or because) he does more with […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel

Part 3 of 3 of Mark Twain’s memoir of his 134-day European  and Holy Land cruise in 1867, the biggest selling book in his lifetime. Every great travelogue imprints memories of sights, experiences and perspectives. The Innocents Abroad or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress has too many to mention. For example, there is the “true cross… found in every church we go into… and as much as a keg of nails that held it together.” Imprints of Twain’s views, especially of the U.S., do not leave us : Just […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel

  Part 2 of 3 of Mark Twain’s memoir of his 134-day European and Holy Land cruise in 1867, the biggest selling book in his lifetime .   So said Mark Twain in is classic, travelogue, The Innocents Abroad or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress. And while he and his companions indeed discover “half the world,” the reader learns more. Page after page of Mark Twain’s Innocents (like all of his books) illustrates his brilliant writing. Twain’s facility with language, his immense […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel