I’ve lived in Trinity, Newfoundland, all my life — but only in my mind. ©John T. Andrews.
Sitting on a pretty hilltop on the Bonavista Peninsula of Newfoundland, there’s a little bed-and-breakfast in the quiet, seaside village of Trinity. I stayed there one night, in the summer of 2007, surrounded by meadows and the Atlantic Ocean. The room I occupied had polished-wood floors, a down comforter on the bed, and a small desk in front of a window that faced the cliffs on the opposite side of the bay. At night, with the window open, I could hear the sea and feel the breezy air.
In my mind, I’ve lived in that house all my life. The Trinity locals know generations of my family and me by sight. When I ride my bike to the fresh market every other day, they greet me by name. They’ve read my many books of romance fiction, all set on this eastern coast of Canada. I hang my just-washed laundry out on a line to dry, and I drink my morning coffee while sitting on my front porch steps.
But I’ve also lived my whole life in Scotland. I’ve lived it in Patagonia and in the Arctic. Because when I travel, I find that I can easily re-imagine things, especially me. Continue reading →
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Written By Candice Gaukel Andrews.
Posted in: Travel.
Tagged: Adventure · adventure corner · adventure travel · Arctic expeditions · Atlantic Ocean · Canada · explorers' corner · Newfoundland · patagonia · remote · Scotland · Travel
I saw the IMAX film Hubble last weekend and was astounded anew by the human propensity for exploration. As astronaut Frank Borman has said, “Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit.”
But obviously we don’t have to fly into space to embark on journeys of adventure and discovery. As those images from space show so poignantly, we have a rare and amazing planet that we could spend a hundred lifetimes exploring and not begin to tap all its wonders.
While I love to travel best of all, it’s also gratifying just to sit down with a map and ponder and dream. Or to pick up an engrossing piece of armchair travel literature like Stanley Stewart’s Mongolia odyssey, In the Empire of Genghis Khan, or Jill Fredston’s Rowing to Latitude, chronicling her sculling expeditions along some of the Arctic’s most pristine coastlines, or the one I’m reading now, The Places In Between, Rory Stewart’s account of his 2002 walk across Afghanistan.
That’s why I was excited to find Explorion, an online “Library for Adventurers.” The site is a stirring repository of information by and about the earth’s greatest explorers. Continue reading →
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Written By Wendy Worrall Redal.
Posted in: Miscellaneous.
The Spirit Bear lives only on one spot on the map: the Great Bear Rainforest. ©Candice Gaukel Andrews.
If the caves near Lascaux, France, are any indication, it seems that our kind has been interested in depicting the directions for how to get from here to there ever since 13,500 B.C., when a Cro-Magnon decided to paint an animal migration route on his stony walls.
And ever since that time, we’ve regarded maps, for the most part, as “factual” tools. After the Greek philosopher Anaximander of Miletus drew the first global map in 550 B.C., our earliest cartographers were thought of as the knowledge-holders of the world, depicting all we knew of land and sea.
As new facts came to light, the maps were changed. In 1290 A.D., for example, the Hereford Mappa Mundi put Jerusalem at the center of the world. And in 1507, the word America started making its first appearances on maps: Martin Waldseemüller published the Universalis Cosmographia and named the land after Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci. Continue reading →
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Written By Candice Gaukel Andrews.
Posted in: Miscellaneous.
