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e-Marginalia :: A Passion for Travel
Issue #2, December 21, 2003
http://www.e-margaux.com
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READ ONLINE: If you experience any trouble opening the links in your newsletter or you would prefer to read online, you may access e-Marginalia at:
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In this issue:
~ WELCOME e-MARGONAUTS :: Greetings from e-Margaux
~ MEANDERING MARGAUX :: Car Culture Shock, by George Davis
~ FEATURE STORIES :: Top Travel Tales
Dalton Highway, by Nick Lawrence
The Psychology of the Traveler, by Marta Steele
Listening in Silence, by Anna Chlumsky
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~ WELCOME e-MARGONAUTS :: Greetings from e-Margaux
Welcome back. It's been a month since our inaugural issue of e-Marginalia went live, and so far we've been thrilled to have so many website visitors interested in reading the intriguing travel stories we've selected for publication. It's been exciting and encouraging. Proof that travelers welcome "a new twist" on the tired travel reporting we've all become accustomed to. Hopefully we will continue to challenge and thrill readers around the world, inspiring exploration and adventure. Several quick news items, then on to the more interesting stories... First of all, it's once again time to submit your travel tales for publication. We've begun receiving and editing work for our February 2004 issue, and I would personally like to invite you to consider submitting your own travel story. What are we looking for? The stories we publish target the adventurous traveler. We serve people who seek "authentic" travel experiences, voyagers rather than tourists. Our clients and our site visitors marry discerning tastes and sincere curiosity with a willingness (indeed a need) to venture beyond the confines of the familiar and the comfortable. Good, honest, well-crafted prose combined with accurate, well-photographed images are the e-margaux.com staple. Our site visitors expect to be transported effortlessly and immediately away from the quotidian and into the magical folds of some far-off wonderland. The stories (and ideally the accompanying photographs) we select for publication will meet this important criteria. Think you might have the perfect tale to tell? Drop us an email and tell us about what you have written (or what you plan to write.) We'll offer plenty of feedback to help you refine your focus and craft a killer travel story. On another front, I'd like to send out a world-wide request for vacation rentals. We've begun to add some additional listings to e-Margaux.com (look at the four new properties in Italy) and are now ready to increase the number of listings available online. We want to build a unique network of rental properties around the world. Want to help us? Assist us in finding great properties to list and we'll reward you handsomely. Send an email to let us know you are interested in helping add vacation rental listings, and we'll contact you to discuss our incentives, etc. If you have a property you'd like to list, or if you know someone else who has a property that they rent short-term, contact us. We would love to hear from you. Okay, always too long-winded, I'll wrap up and "get on with the show". Thanks for reading e-Marginalia. I hope that you enjoy the new installment. Have a super holiday, and please forward this newsletter along to all of your friends who might be interested.
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~ MEANDERING MARGAUX :: Car Culture Shock, by George Davis
I wasn't a total automotive neophyte. I mean, I had driven rental cars all over France and Italy. During summer and winter holidays each year I had returned to the US and trafficked New York State’s highways and byways often enough. And I had owned vehicles practically since the day I received my driver’s license as a teenager. But American car culture had perceptibly evolved since I moved to Paris four years ago. Something had changed. Something was different in me, in everyone else, or perhaps in both…Okay, we all know that “being American” and “owning an automobile” are effectively synonymous. And I would have to have lived in a bubble to overlook the current trend, er… obsession with “bigger is better” automobiles in the US. But my regular visits and relative familiarity with current consumer patterns did little to prepare me for the turbulent re-entry I would experience as I readjusted to the American automotive mentality after my stint as an expat.
Ever seen a 1972 Toyota LandCruiser FJ-40? Arguably the coolest, chunkiest, gas-hogging-est prehistoric SUV, the FJ-40 series enjoys rare distinction as one of the longest running production 4x4s, manufactured continuously between 1960 and 1984 (or even longer if you want to count the Bandeirante, a clone manufactured in Brazil until 2001.) I’ve loved FJ-40s for as long as I can remember. Evoking a rugged safari lifestyle, they would have been featured prominently if J. Peterman had attempted an automotive catalogue.
Upon relocating to Santa Fe, New Mexico in the mid-‘90s, I promptly purchased two essentials, a motorcycle and an FJ-40. If I were prepared to submit the rational to the romantic, to swap a professionally promising Washington DC lifestyle for the “Land of Enchantment” uncertainties of blue sky Santa Fe, then it was only sensible to complement (supplement?) this quixotic move with the perfect transportation. I sought and bought the perfect steeds (certainly two Rosinantes are better than one,) a rocket-fast motorcycle and a 1972 Toyota FJ-40.
Ahhh… the LandCruiser. That two-tone wonder, more artifact than showroom restoration, could climb trees, or so I liked to claim. I never did much more than drive around Santa Fe feeling a bit like a late 20th century Hemingway, but I did use it to slog through a mountain snowfall or two, and I did manage to sell it a couple years later for more than I had paid for it. And I spent some time under the hood, tinkering and absorbing the vernacular that has served me well for negotiating with mechanics and playing chameleon among some challenging types of company.
It bears mentioning that my decision to sell that uber-SUV was hastened each time I pulled up at the gas pump. It was staggering to be reminded constantly that a smallish, two-seater could get fewer miles to the gallon than an eighteen wheeler! Perhaps I exaggerate, but the acquisition of a modern-thirty-miles-to-the-gallon-and-comfortable-and-quiet-on-long-drives-sedan compelled me, albeit begrudgingly, to thin my herd and pass the FJ-40 on to another dreamer with deep pockets and a shallow environmental conscience.
Click Here for Story:
http://www.e-margaux.com/en/story/car-culture-shock
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~ FEATURE STORY :: Dalton Highway, by Nick Lawrence
Most rental car agencies in Alaska put a special clause into their rental agreement, with the intention of protecting their vehicles from costly damage.It reads something like this: "Don't drive on the Dalton Highway, you idiot."
Okay, the term "idiot" doesn't actually appear on any of these clauses, as far as I know. But trying to rent a car to drive the Dalton Highway is almost as difficult as renting one to raft down the Yukon. Rental car agencies just don't allow it. And why should they? Any dirt road can damage a shiny new rental Daewoo, but at five hundred miles in length, the Dalton is special. Tires go flat with the regularity of freshly opened bottles of soda. Flying gravel quickly turns windshields into cratered surfaces resembling the moon. Frost heaves pound unfortunate drivers senseless.
Click Here for Story:
http://www.e-margaux.com/en/story/dalton-highway
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~ FEATURE STORY :: The Psychology of the Traveler, by Marta Steele
To speakers of English, the notion of travel ties in with labor, French travailler. But the French associate travel with being on the road, voyager, derived originally from Latin via or road. For the Germans, reisen implies the pirate’s brand of roving. Very early on the prototypical tourist Odysseus took the ultimate voyage, climbing, falling, sailing, violating local protocol, other times honoring it exquisitely, risking his life with huge gusto even as he admitted fear… remember the beautiful passage in Book 5 (l. 271), when travail subsides and calm voyaging replaces it: “neither did sleep weigh down his eyelids as he contemplated … [various constellations are named] .…” Seventeen days his voyage between Aiaia and Phaecia assumed this halcyon plateau before one of the most famous wild storms in literature, an “epic” description as paragon of the genre as the “Summer” segment of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. “Neither could his eyes close as he gazed in wonder around him.” How often these words occur to me, a reminder never to close my eyes when in new terrains, never to settle into the routine when I have removed myself from it, en voyage …
Click Here for Story:
http://www.e-margaux.com/en/story/psychology-of-the-traveler
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~ FEATURE STORY :: Listening in Silence, by Anna Chlumsky
Demetrius smiled ear to ear as he came rushing out to meet his long lost family from America. The sun shone high behind him, isolating each hair on his balding head in its rays. I heard the crackle of the warped gravel in the road, and observed the herding of sheep in the plot of land behind us. The crisp air of the Greek countryside played with his sleeves as he dashed towards us with open arms and embraced his cousin’s wife and daughters, whom he had never met before.I was traveling with my best friend, Chrystyna, whose mother had not been back to Athens for twenty years. Chrystyna, her sister, their mother and I would spend a week in Athens, they to reconnect with their family, with their past, I to escape the hopeless, self-pitying doldrums of a recent romantic dead end. A trip to the spot where western civilization had begun was to be the perfect remedy for my blues. I would feel the souls of all the people throughout history who had lived through my problem. Furthermore, I would do this with a friend that loved me very much.
Click Here for Story:
http://www.e-margaux.com/en/story/listening-in-silence
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