Sometimes the stories pile up like an old-fashioned logjam, and the year begins with stints of writing about the year past. So the 2002 typing started with Rio de Janeiro and Ireland, although I took the trips much earlier. Fine reveries both, but I was office-bound, which isn’t always a good thing.
A cartoon on the wall of my cubicle depicts one prison cellmate telling the other, “More and more, I’m hearing the call of the open road.” I can understand the feeling.
Finally, the road opened up in the dead of winter, and it was the road (or roads) leading from San Francisco to Yosemite National Park. Snow only enhances the beauty there. Bitter cold puts roses on the cheeks of the attractive outdoor types who crunch over the trails and walkways. Visiting chefs set wonderful tables during the Vintners’ and Chefs’ Holidays at the Ahwahnee Hotel. I normally dislike winter weather and all the places, like Aspen, that celebrate snow and ice. Yosemite, that vixen, managed to broaden my point of view. So it wins my award as best destination to visit in January if you can’t make it to the tropics.
My editor, Randy Curwen, the baseball fan and golf-hater, played right into my hands in February. He wanted a story on the home of the world-champion Arizona Diamondbacks. The weather was lovely. The town has several interesting features, such as a terrific art museum and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin. And I managed to squeeze in a few rounds of golf. Phoenix was the 2002 winner of my best reason to root for Arizona, Florida or California baseball teams. However, this year, instead of visiting Anaheim, I’ll probably end up on a tropical island. Baseball fan that he is, Curwen still has an instinct for ideal travel destinations, and he’s loath to assign yet another article on any sort of Disney property. Go, Giants!
Pretty soon it was spring, and St. Barthelemy beckoned. Great sand. Great ocean. Handsome people. Handsome rich and famous people. I checked out some St. Barts accommodations for Carolyn McGuire, who hates to have any Caribbean hotel go unchecked. I gave them high marks and decided St. Barts is the best place to see David Letterman in his jogging shorts.
My permanent assignment has, for a long time, involved visiting all 55 of the national parks and writing about them. Hey, said a perceptive reader, there are 56 national parks. You forgot that one between Cleveland and Akron. No, we didn’t forget about Cuyahoga Valley National Park; we didn’t even know about it. Seems it took on the new label without any public announcements. It was pleasant and historically significant for its segments of the Ohio & Erie Canal. Cuyahoga certainly deserves recognition as sneakiest park in the whole Department of the Interior. Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota turned out to be more forthright and best place to sit and wait, and wait, for a muskie to bite.
June brought another delightful Carolyn McGuire idea, because there happened to be a new cruise experience that needed to be checked out. Festival Cruises had launched its brand-new European Stars on a circle tour of Mediterranean ports. Most of the passengers got on in Genoa or Naples. Europe and northern Africa whirled by at the rate of one docking per day. The handful of Americans and Brits on board encountered language barriers on every deck. As a result, we spent one gala evening in the ship’s theater, watching the ventriloquist’s dummy most fluent in Italian.
I left the ship in Barcelona, nicest city in the world pronounced with a lisp, and continued on to Naples, where I lost my heart to the city’s charms and my wallet to a pickpocket–almost simultaneously. It’s the best city in which to become a crime statistic.
There were more national parks and more cruises last year, including almost a full month in Alaska. The parks–Wrangell-St. Elias and Lake Clark–are so remote that I had to fly there in little airplanes driven by the cockiest pilots in the United States. Two Alaskan cruises became necessary, because McGuire wanted to compare a small ship to a big ship. Small ship, the Yorktown Clipper, had the year’s best food afloat.
After that, I dropped in on the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park, winner of the best national park housing award, and Hot Springs National Park, where old bathhouses have been carefully preserved. That park was deserving of best park scrubbed behind the ears.
Some of those national park and cruise stories won’t appear until this year, so they are eligible for nomination as most challenging articles to be typed while the weather outside is frightful.
Have a good one.
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Meet the staff
Robert Cross got his byline in the days of stiff newspaper tradition, but rangers of the National Park Service and other friends know him as Bob. He has been to most of the parks by now, writing an ongoing series.
Last year, he managed to drop in on two of Alaska’s least accessible parks, Wrangell-St. Elias and Lake Clark, plus a few others. He still found time to cruise the Mediterranean, visit the Caribbean and reply politely to all those who ask, “Gee, could I carry your bags?” His e-mail address is bcross@tribune.com.
