Let’s Go Map Guide: Florence
By the time you’re ready to buy a map, you don’t need any convincing. You’ve already decided to go to Florence, and you want to know how to get to all those places that attracted you there to begin with. Here’s a laminated map conceived in such a way that five different grids fold to a flat, 4-by-8 1/2-inch cover that wraps neatly around 28 pages of text. One grid zooms in on the Pitti Palace-Ponte Vecchio-Uffizi corridor; the text does likewise. In other words, this map-and-guide combo provides the greatest details on the places you most want to visit, yet doesn’t neglect the larger context of outlying areas, or the fact that you’ll want to eat, shop and maybe even rent a bicycle while you’re in town.
World Status Map
You don’t want to go to Sierra Leone, says Pinkerton Global Intelligence. Continued fighting in parts of the country means that those who travel there do so at “Extreme Risk.” That bold-faced warning, written across a red background, identifies one of several danger zones listed in the security company’s May-June 1998 map, which costs $6.95, folded version. You can get fresher information from the State Department itself, for the price of a phone call. But the Pinkerton map is not without its virtues. It’s worth $6.95 (postage and handling included) to have — all on one sheet of paper — U.S. addresses and phone numbers for foreign embassies and a chart that lists each country’s requirements on travel documentation, immunizations and arrival or departure taxes. (703-525-6111)
BOOKS
“America’s Best Historic Sites”
(Chicago Review Press, $14.95)
Its flame has long since gone out, but the glow from this small lantern raised in warning still lights the American imagination. You can see that lantern, one of two that Paul Revere told the churchman to display, in the museum at Concord, Mass. From the Old North Church to Alcatraz, B.J. Welborn tells, for example, exactly why it’s better to walk than try to drive Boston’s Freedom Trail; calls the film at Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site a “top-drawer, three-hanky documentary”; and details hours, days and directions for visiting Utah’s Promontory Summit, where the last spike in the transcontinental railroad was hammered into history.
“Romania & Moldavia”
(Lonely Planet, $16.95)
And you thought this kind of book wouldn’t have a sense of humor. Here’s a color photo of the fast-food joint Wam, whose symbol is the golden arches turned upside-down. There’s gossip about Johnny Weissmuller: It seems that Tarzan covered up his birth in Timisoara, Romania, because claiming a Pennsylvania hometown would allow him to compete in the Olympics as an American. Meanwhile, back in Transylvania, there’s a wolf rescue project going on, and “Dracula’s castle” in Bran may never have been shadowed by so much as a visit from the Wallachian dark prince, Vlad Tepes.
VIDEO
Zimbabwe, Botswana & Namibia
They were tracking lions in Chobe National Park, talking about how these fierce felines tend to be afraid of people. “There is, I think, somewhere in the smell of man, something terribly aggressive,” said the guide. And they didn’t find any lions that day in the Chobe. This Lonely Planet video ($19.95) has a way of converting the “they” into “we” and putting you right there in the Land Rover, the day’s perspiration attracting road dust to every crease in your neck. We fly above Victoria Falls, sleep in a tent, tour a ghost town, go sand surfing and river rafting, exchange pleasantries with villagers, drive through a trough filled with a liquid intended to prevent hoof-and-mouth disease, and eat boiled worms dressed in peanut butter. And lions — we do see them, and they take our breath away.
AUDIO
“A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail”
Life’s too short to watch someone else’s home movies — unless that someone is Bill Bryson, maybe. The much-published and oft-publicized Iowa native shares his experiences — six hours, four cassette tapes and $25 worth of them — on the Appalachian Trail and on the male, mid-life, middle-American psyche. You can buy the hardcover book, also $25, but in doing so you’ll forfeit the author’s reading in his own, John Malkovich-in-a-ponytail voice, a feline almost-lisp, perfect for telling bedtime stories. And Bryson’s certainly is quite a story. It’s about a place and a feeling and an adventure and an attitude. Bryson packed well for the journey, and he had to leave where he was to get where he was going. But ultimately, it’s a peek in someone else’s diary — a well-wrought tale, but not a travel story.
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Toni Stroud’s e-mail address is tstroud@tribune.com
