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Three weeks of armchair travel
Nov. 21st, 2010 10:02 pmActually, two weeks, three weekends.
Two weeks ago, as I was declaring that, contrary to all expectation, there are places on Earth I have no desire to visit, journeys I have no desire to make, the Guardian travel section was waiting to be read, with Kevin Rushby's account of staying on a tall ship deliberately trapped in the ice of Svalbard (the online version also offers an audio-visual version). It's fascinating, but really not tempting (in fact, it feels somehow wrong, though that may just be my subconscious rationalising my wimpish reluctance to expose myself to those extremes of cold, even for the magnificent Arctic scenery).
The following (i.e, last) week's Travel supplement celebrated a more approachable North: we are, it seems, entering a three-year period of intense sunspot activity, and this is the time to see the Northern Lights. I could be lucky, and see them here in Durham (I know someone who saw them in Darlington, even further south), but there are so many lovely places further north, and we could help our luck along by visiting some of them. (I liked the suggestion that in Reykjanes in Iceland you could watch the lights from the warmth of a geothermal pool). Of course, it helps to go at a time of year when the nights are long...
The same issue has a 'Readers Recommend' list of City blogs (the Guardian tends to look down on blogs as an inferior, unmoderated form of amateur journalism: but is happy to fill its columns with features contributed by its readers, and, in this particularly meta example, a column in which readers recommend blogs. Oh - kay.) which looks worth closer study.
Finally, this weekend's paper returns to my natural habitat, and recommends a selection of bookshops around the world. Many of these are pretty obvious: Barter Books in Alnwick, for example, and Stanfords in Long Acre, Tea and Tattered Pages which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
samarcand used to tell me about when he lived in Paris, Powells City of Books in Portland where helenraven ran amok and bought 19 books in one go, the bookshop in a converted church in Maastricht. Some less obvious ones, too, including the Stromness Bookshop.
Two weeks ago, as I was declaring that, contrary to all expectation, there are places on Earth I have no desire to visit, journeys I have no desire to make, the Guardian travel section was waiting to be read, with Kevin Rushby's account of staying on a tall ship deliberately trapped in the ice of Svalbard (the online version also offers an audio-visual version). It's fascinating, but really not tempting (in fact, it feels somehow wrong, though that may just be my subconscious rationalising my wimpish reluctance to expose myself to those extremes of cold, even for the magnificent Arctic scenery).
The following (i.e, last) week's Travel supplement celebrated a more approachable North: we are, it seems, entering a three-year period of intense sunspot activity, and this is the time to see the Northern Lights. I could be lucky, and see them here in Durham (I know someone who saw them in Darlington, even further south), but there are so many lovely places further north, and we could help our luck along by visiting some of them. (I liked the suggestion that in Reykjanes in Iceland you could watch the lights from the warmth of a geothermal pool). Of course, it helps to go at a time of year when the nights are long...
The same issue has a 'Readers Recommend' list of City blogs (the Guardian tends to look down on blogs as an inferior, unmoderated form of amateur journalism: but is happy to fill its columns with features contributed by its readers, and, in this particularly meta example, a column in which readers recommend blogs. Oh - kay.) which looks worth closer study.
Finally, this weekend's paper returns to my natural habitat, and recommends a selection of bookshops around the world. Many of these are pretty obvious: Barter Books in Alnwick, for example, and Stanfords in Long Acre, Tea and Tattered Pages which
samarcand used to tell me about when he lived in Paris, Powells City of Books in Portland where helenraven ran amok and bought 19 books in one go, the bookshop in a converted church in Maastricht. Some less obvious ones, too, including the Stromness Bookshop.
