travel

The always-entertaining Strange Maps posted a spiffy entry about a 2005 map that shows how to duplicate Phileas Fogg’s Around the World feat in only 42 days. Jules Verne would be thrilled, I bet.

It’s still possible to travel around the world without airborne transportation, of course. And here also the travel times have greatly diminished since Phileas Fogg’s era. This map is a proposal for a round the world trip, only travelling by boat and train (as Fogg did), starting at and ending in New York. The trip would only take 42 days.

See “309 - Around the World at Twice the Speed of Fogg”.

Also, a belated happy birthday to HG Wells, who turned 142 on Sunday.

Richard Henry Dana (for whom Dana Point was named) wrote Two Years Before the Mast as a diary during a sea voyage. I’ve not read it yet, though I will definitely be checking it out soon, if for no other reason than the portrait it contains of early 19th Century California.

In the book, which takes place between 1834 and 1836, Dana gives a vivid account of “the life of a common sailor at sea as it really is”. He sails from Boston, around Cape Horn, arriving in California when it was a remote Mexican land, and San Diego, San Pedro, Los Angeles, and San Francisco weren’t much more than a few sheds. He gives descriptions of landing at each of the ports up and down the California coast as they existed then. In the book, he makes a tellingly accurate prediction of San Francisco’s future. He also gives a nice description of a society wedding amongst the “Californios.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Years_Before_the_Mast

The text is available at Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4277

“To him, L.A.’s worth a thousand pictures”

Schall crouched down, pulling a special green notebook out of the pockets of his khaki jeans. He noted the building’s location, the words on the sign, and drew a rough map of the corner. It was enough information to go on.

He replaced the pen in the notebook’s spine and stood up.

“Maybe we should make a picture now?” he asked in a sing-song voice, light with his German accent, and walked across the street to a position kittycorner from the building.

There, Schall waited patiently for the golden moment that he says comes every 15 minutes or so: an instant when even along a busy street the building can be photographed without cars or buses in the way.

It is a moment worth waiting for, he said, when the building can show itself off in proper splendor. “If you do it, you show some respect. You show you are not in a rush. It’s some respect for the building, I think.”

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