Solarpunk Travel

My partner and I have greatly enjoyed both hosting touring cyclists and guesting during our tours, so we made a podcast episode about it!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3460038

Fascinating story of a Danish traveler who visited every country on Earth, only by land and boat.

I collect transit cards from all the places I visit, and I just filled up my first display case! Looking forward to the next 20; what transit systems do you think I should try next?

EDIT: the transit agencies on display:

Luleå, Sweden (card missing, I didn't know at the time that I would want to collect them)

Stockholm, Sweden

Go-to card, Twin Cities of Minnesota

Ventra card, Chicago, Illinois

Breeze card, Atlanta, Georgia

Smartrip card, Washington DC

Orca card, Seattle, Washington

Hop fastpass, Portland, Oregon

Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Eau Claire, Wisconsin

La Crosse, Wisconsin

COTA, Columbus, Ohio

mykey, Indianapolis, Indiana

Citibus, Davenport, Iowa

Winona, Minnesota

Corpus Christi, Texas

Smart Ride, St Cloud, Minnesota

Paul Bunyan Transit, Bemidji, Minnesota

Tri-CAP, rural central Minnesota

Rainbow Rider, rural western Minnesota

My husband and I got married earlier this year and figured we would plan a honeymoon later once wedding stress had passed. Now we've started planning and being in the Midwestern United States has us feeling frustrated about travel options that aren't planes, as we do not want to use them.

I discovered the Amtrak Rail Pass yesterday and was wondering if anyone had any experience (or knows of a blog, vlog, etc) where somebody talked about their experience using the pass to do a city-hopping sort of trip/honeymoon/vacation using Amtrak, or the pass specifically. Cursory research didn't show me anything, but I did see that the pass was on sale from $499 to $299 in January, so I am going to keep an eye out and see if they do that again. If so, it seems like a (relatively) cost-effective way to do a longer sort of trip, hitting 6 or so cities along the way.

Any perspectives welcome!

I had to wait in line 2 hrs to get into the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco, but we saw it. The flower is named after its odor, which resembles rotting meat to entice scavenger insects into pollinating it. It smells truly foul. 8/10 experience, highly recommend.

Also, how do i make Alt text for an image post?

What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.

The opposition team is small but articulate. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s paradise.” Socrates and Immanuel Kant—arguably the two greatest philosophers of all time—voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective home towns of Athens and Königsberg. But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage:

I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.

If you are inclined to dismiss this as contrarian posturing, try shifting the object of your thought from your own travel to that of others. At home or abroad, one tends to avoid “touristy” activities. “Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.

One common argument for travel is that it lifts us into an enlightened state, educating us about the world and connecting us to its denizens. Even Samuel Johnson, a skeptic—“What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country,” he once said—conceded that travel had a certain cachet. Advising his beloved Boswell, Johnson recommended a trip to China, for the sake of Boswell’s children: “There would be a lustre reflected upon them. . . . They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China.”

Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is?