Intro / Preface / Extra Words
It's been awhile! To be exact, it's been forty days since we last published. In that timespan, Brian had to traverse basically all of Asia or something and I elected to take my sabbatical. In light of both of us finally being back at home–and not going anywhere for quite awhile–we've cobbled together some of our favorite reads on travel. Hopefully these articles inspire you as you're likely planning your summer vacation.
Enjoy.
Heavy Rotation
The Bottomless Lake - John Prine
This is from the excellent In Person & On Stage album, and it's the story of a road trip gone hilariously wrong. Prine tells such captivating stories, and on this album he tells those stories before each song, and then the song tells a related story. Give the whole album a listen, it's delightful. –Calvin
Current Things
It’s official: The VW Bus is back, and it’s electric
THIS would be a heck of a way to travel. I was almost all-in on this, but then I saw the steering wheel. What is that? Why did you do that? What was wrong with the circular steering wheel? Why do car designers constantly do that kind of thing? It's like when car designers decided that knobs that went from red to blue (hot to cold) for AC wasn't good enough. It was good enough.
Anyway, rant over. This still looks amazing. – Calvin
The Real Dubai
I've been to Dubai a number of times and I've been working on the perfect description of the shinier, newer parts... something along the lines of "vegas without the sin city part". It is a wild place awash in investment money from petrochemicals and elsewhere that feels surreal and astonishing. But every time I'm there I demand one of our team dinners be in the back alleys at some little kebab place. I haven't been to the one in this article but my experiences were similar. It makes me want to see (and eat) more from that world. -Brian
52 Places to Go in 2018
This is an incredible list. I've been to or been near to about half of these. And the other half now make up my new travel bucket list. -Brian
Timeless Things
Isabella Bird
British lady wanders the world writing travel novels in the 19th century and among other things has a fling with a rocky mountain outlaw. -Brian
Random Things
Halfway Point
This is something I wrote a couple of weeks ago about to capture some thoughts I had during the first half of my sabbatical, in case you're interested. I did leave town for awhile, so this article loosely fits with our travel theme.
–Calvin
Business Time
The Fall of Travis Kalanick Was a Lot Weirder and Darker Than You Thought
For me, Uber opened up a whole new mode of transportation because I live in a city where there's not much in the way of public transport. And it also made our European adventures much easier because we didn't have to figure out how to hail a cab in another country; we just took out our phones.
In light of all the hubbub around Zuckerberg over the past month, we thought it would be relevant to revisit this article from Bloomberg about the former CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick. There will certainly be a movie about this at some point, but for now you can read this article if you're curious about how personal paranoia and bad leadership style can almost derail a company worth billions. –Calvin
I love technology (and science)
This Is What Commercial Airline First-Class Cabins Will Look Like in the Future
Being in the "front of the plane" turns very long (10 hour plus) air travel from something that is painful and needs to be endured into an experience that is fun and interesting that you want to do again and look forward to. Check out one vision of what that high end experience might look like as technology develops further. -Brian
Trash Fire
Misc Weird Lodgings
I stayed in a hotel in Norway that was a converted 100+ year old ceramics factory. My room key was attached to a ceramic firing made at the factory. The name, Gamlavaerket, apparently means "The Old Factory" in Norwegian. Character oftens mean cool when it comes to lodgings (temporary or permanent). Can character go to far though? You decide...
When you want to stay in a crane overlooking a container yard
When you want to stay in an evil villain's lair in the side of a cliff
Outro
That's it for our special travel edition. If you happen to care, we also finally updated the publication URL to our shiny new custom one, markasread.email, so that means we're officially cool now.
We'll be back again soon with another issue, and I promise it will take much less than forty days to hit your inbox.
Have a wonderful weekend.