Two weeks ago we looked at a variety of windows from the outside.

Here are views from some views from the inside of various lodgings that we particularly enjoyed.

The Dashiell Hammett Room at Union Square Hotel, San Francisco

Budapest Apartment Window with view of St. Stephen's Square

View of Chicago River and lake from Westin Hotel

View from Le Case Hotel, Le Marche region, Italy

Le Torricelle View, Le Marche region, Italy

Steinerhof Pension, Salzburg

Rome hotel street view from room

View from Adobe Grande Villas, Sedona

East Winds apartment view, St. Lucia

Night view from Warwick Hotel, NYC

These photos are this week’s contribution to Travel Photo Thursday.  You can see travel photos from around the world by going to Budget Traveler’s Sandbox. Next week some windows (and maybe some doors) from Venice, Italy.

The Giveaway prize today goes to one person who comments, subscribes, tweets or mentions us on Google+. It is a copy of Running Away To Home, Jennifer Wilson’s account of her family’s return to her ancestral village in Croatia. I reviewed Running Away to Home here. (You can comment on this post or on an earlier post. Just do it before Friday 3:00 a.m. MST. If you already subscribe by e-mail and want an extra entry as a subscriber, be sure to tell me that in the comments. See complete rules here.)

What is the best view you have ever had from a hotel room?  And by the way, I have not yet posted the BEST view I had from a hotel room. That would have been in Greece, hanging right out over the water on the west coast of the Peloponnese, or perhaps in Switzerland looking across Lake Lucerne, or maybe that one that hung on the cliff in Santorini. Oh dear!! I’ll never decide. Are you more decisive than I am??

Disclaimers: Running Away To Home was provided by the publisher for review. All these photos are my property, and I will appreciate your respect for my copyright.

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

1. A Capitol Fourth, The Mall, Washington D.C.

What’s Special? You’re kidding, right? It is THE place to be–the seat of government, with an all-American entertainment program featuring John Philip Sousa marches and thousands of red, white and blue clad celebrants gathered on the grassy lawn in the middle of all those imposing marble buildings. Right there where the laws are made and administered and judged. And watching fireworks arc over the Washington Monument would give any patriot a thrill.

Although I’ve never been in Washington in person for July 4th, we never miss watching this celebration on PBS. The people in the audience can be as much fun as the show on stage. Jimmy Smits and Steve Martin headline this year.

2. Charles River,  Boston

Boston Fireworks on the Charles River

What’s Special? Mostly the magnificent Boston Pops Orchestra, but also the serene setting by the historic Charles River. The music is a tad classier, and so is the crowd, compared to Washington D.C., but it is still a heck of a show.

Now in its 38th year, Boston presents the famous Boston Pops orchestra on July 3 and July 4 and fireworks over the Charles River on the Fourth. For a real thrill, see the Boston July 4th show from the Charles River. I’ll be stopping over in Boston briefly in August, and loved our visit there a couple of years ago.

3. Macy’s Fireworks Celebration, Hudson River, New York City

New York City Fireworks on the Hudson River

Setting off fireworks from barges on the Hudson River is a long time tradition in New York City, perhaps remembering the fireworks of revolutionary battles with the British fought in this area. Back then New York City was a rural village with cobblestone streets, and you can still see the cobblestones on the very southern tip of Manhattan in front of the Fraunces  Tavern where George Washington gave his farewell address to the troops.  In 1976, the bi-centennial of the Declaration of Independence, one of the grandest celebrations in the land took place here, and the tradition continues.

Fireworks have been cut from a lot of city budgets, but Macy’s, who in the past have been firmly associated with Thanksgiving, because of the Thanksgiving parade, now own July 4th in NYC as well. Thank you Macy’s for one of the best events in New York, a city I love to visit.

4. Navy Pier, Chicago

What’s Special: Well, to tell the truth, I love Chicago, but the city is not funding any big fireworks shows this summer. Instead, people can trot on out to Navy Pier and see there usual 15 minute show. When I say usual–they do this fireworks display every night during the summer. It is a crowd pleaser, there will be live music, and the Pier’s  a cool place to be on a hot summer night, but it doesn’t hold a Roman candle to the extravaganzas in the other cities.

5. Big Bay
Big Bay Boom, San Diego

San Diego Fireworks on the Bay

What’s Special?San Diego has a gorgeous bay and the night views looking back toward the city or out across the lighted Coronado Bridge always take my breath away. Now add tons of exploding color being fired off from barges circling the bay–sounds incredible. View them from outdoors at Shelter Island or Seaport Village or grab a 9:00 p.m. reservation window seat at one of the hundreds of restaurants with views on the bay. Yum!

(If budgetary woes weren’t enough to slow down the fireworks shows, in California a judge questioned whether San Diego’s fireworks are environmentally safe. Only in California!The  latest ruling allows the big show to go forward in San Diego, so you can safely book your trip.)

Can you afford to get out of town for the long weekend?

Air fare just keeps going up-up-up and away as gas prices stay stratospheric, but CheapO Air lists special deals to four of these five cities. As you do your trip planning, check out the CheapOAir July 4th  flight/hotel combos for New York, San Diego, Boston and Chicago.

Finally, my favorite provider of travel bargains, Travel Zoo, sends a weekly newsletter with their bargains and on June 17 they listed a BUNCH of July 4th bargains.  If you don’t subscribe to Travel Zoo, do.

Don’t dispair if you can’t get out of town, the D.C. Capitol Fourth will be covered on Public Television, and you can curl up with one of the books we have recommended in the past.

True to their name, CheapOAir did NOT pay me to include this generous mention of them in this post. However, I will give them credit. Those are their fireworks photos above. The video comes from the folks at the Capitol Fourth, though. Travel Zoo and Peter Greenberg were mentioned without incentive, too. I just happen to like them.

Where will you be on July 4th? Do you have any special family traditions?

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Voices from the Grave

Destination: Chicago

Book: Voices from the Chicago Grave: They’re Calling. Will You Answer? 2nd Edition, by Scott Markus

A GUEST POST by Dr. Jessie Voigts

I’d like to share an incredibly scary book of ghost stories. Why so scary? – because they are TRUE. The book? [amazonify]1933272198::text::::Voices from the Chicago Grave: They’re Calling. Will You Answer? [/amazonify]2nd Edition, by Scott Markus, published by Thunder Bay Press.  Scott divides the ghost stories into 14 well-researched – and hard to put down – chapters (i.e., fine food and spirits, city haunts, Chicago’s darkest hours, our Mafia Town, etc.).  If you head to the accompanying website, you’ll see more information and thousands and thousands of additional photos.

Spooky Chicago

[Note from A Traveler's Library: The lovely thing is that you can actually visit most of these places when you travel to Chicago, and wait around for the ghosts, if you wish]

We were lucky enough to sit down and talk with Scott about his book, and work. Here’s what he had to say…

Wandering Educators: Please tell us about your book, Voices from the Chicago Grave.

Scott Markus: Well, it’s about eight years and three generations in the making.  In 1999 I combined two of my interests (ghost stories and filmmaking) to create a feature-length documentary called Voices from the Grave.  In researching for the video I found way too many great stories.  As great as video is, unless I planned to do a Ken Burns-length documentary series, Id have to make a lot of cuts.

I went to work exploring ideas for an extensive book on the topic with myresearch partner, Mary Czerwinski.  It was the first book I wrote and I wanted this one to be completely mine, so I decided to self-publish it without ever looking for a publisher.  That book was completed and available for sale in 2003.

The 2003 book came with a CD-ROM containing 1,000+ pictures.  The idea was to give the reader the complete picture of what the different areas are like without having to actually go there.  For the second edition of the book, the photographs and hundreds more are now on the web site.

WE: With the exhaustive research you put into this book, you must have been surprised by a few – can you share your favorites/most surprising tales?

SM: My first surprise was how ghost stories are accepted as fact.  When I firststarted researching, I thought the question was, Are ghosts real?  The answer came back, ‘Yes, and here’s where you can go to find them….’

Other than that, it was hard not to notice how many disasters have befallen the city.  Chicago boasts the worst single plane crash in American history (Flight 191 in 1979), the worst shipwreck (The Eastland Disaster), the worst theater fire (the Iroquois Theater Fire), and the list goes on.

Though events like that are obviously sad, Chicago’s history is really a popcorn movie: generations of notorious gangsters and criminals like John Dillinger, a rich Native American history, it was the backdrop of world events like the Worlds Fair and the ’68 riots, and the birthplace of invention with so many of America’s first industrialists calling Chicago home.

The biggest surprise to me about the project overall was how much a casual interest in ghost stories got me involved with American history in general, a topic that I never had that much of an interest in prior to writing the book.

Read More in Wandering Educators Book Review section…

Jessie Voigts

Dr. Jessie Voigts is the Publisher of  WanderingEducators.com and contributes each month to A Traveler’s Library. She has a doctorate in International Education, and is passionate about intercultural learning. She and her husband are Worldschooling their daughter, and enjoying every minute of it. She is also a nature photographer and lives on a lake.

The top photo is complements of Wandering Educators and Slim Pictures.com. The fog picture was taken by VMB . All rights reserved on both photos. Please contact owners before using.

Jessie: Thanks for an interview about a book that will be of definite interest to visitors to Chicago, one of my very favorite cities.

If you (reader) want more about Chicago, you might want to look at a post on an immigrant family from Ireland, and this movie about bad guys. Also this road trip thriller book visits Chicago. And keep an eye on the photos in the top right hand corner because the shiny “egg” that shows up once in a while is from Millennium Park in Chicago.

How about you? Do you like to visit ghostly places? Creepy cemeteries? Haunted Hotels? Possessed parklands? Weird restaurants?

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

On Galway Bay

Book: Galway Bay (2009)by Mary Pat Kelly, Grand Central Publishing

A GUEST POST by Kerry Dexter

“We didn’t all die. Some of us escaped, one reaching back for the next… we saved ourselves…”

Those words of Honora Keely Kelly, born in 1822 in the west of Ireland, form the core around which the ideas in the novel Galway Bay circle. Honora was a real person, whose words came down her family to her great great granddaughter, Mary Pat Kelly.

Taking readers back in time through her imagination, the younger Kelly begins when her great great grandmother was a young woman in a fishing family on Galway Bay, just on the point of meeting the man who would become her husband, Michael Kelly.

The year is 1839, in the ‘before times,’ the years before the Great Hunger. The harsh attitudes and uneasy relations between Irish people and the English who owned almost all the land in Ireland at that time come into play even as Honora and Michael marry, entangling her family and her older sister Maire with the local landowners while at the same time strengthening the bond between the two sisters, a bond that will be tested and tried but stay central through the story, as two women with differing approaches to life face hardship, hunger, joy, and that central fact of nineteenth century Ireland, emigration.

Irish Famine Memorial in Boston MA

Kelly sees the events of famine times through Honora’s and Maire’s eyes as wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, and members of a community whose differences and connections come into sharp relief as people face unprecedented hardship and hunger. One of the strengths of Kelly’s writing is her ability to make secondary and even passing characters vivid, while keeping the tale centered by Honora’s and Maire’s thoughts and experiences.

When they finally take the decision to set out for Amerikay, it’s not without regret and not without danger. Fetching up at the bustling port of New Orleans, they  head north to Chicago, where they believe Michael’s brother Patrick, a rebel leader in Ireland, has settled.

Patrick does return to the story several times, and to powerful effect, but in Chicago in the days before the War Between the States, the sisters are on their own as they and their older children find work, and friends, and prejudice and hardship aplenty as they face unsettled and changing conditions.

The story follows Honora and Maire and their children as their sons go off to fight in the war, and old friends and enemies from Ireland reappear in their new country, and as they face building lives in Chicago. They must choose what of the family life and old ways and old stories to keep what to change, and how to pass all that on.

World's Columbian Exposition: Ferris Wheel

Honora and her family visit the Chicago Exposition of 1893. Honora welcomes the prosperity and growing acceptance of Irish people, but she also thinks of those left behind, and she has the bittersweet experience of seeing Irish life in the before times shown as exhibits. As the story ends, Honora’s granddaughter, whose real life counterpart became Mary Pat Kelly’s cousin, asks Honora to tell her stories of the real Ireland, the one across the sea.

Will this book make you want to visit Galway, or Chicago? It might, although it’s certainly not a scenic travelogue on the west of Ireland or the history of the Second City. It will make you care about the characters and want to keep reading. As someone who’s been immersed in Irish history and stories most of my life, I’ll say that Kelly gets the facts right and the tone of the history right as well, which I’ve found is not all that common in fiction about Ireland. She also, in a subtle point, gets the cadence of the language right, and has a natural inclusion of words in Irish now and then also.

Galway Bay may or may not get you thinking about going to Ireland. It may very well get you thinking about your own family’s stories, though, what you’ve heard and what you’re passing along.

Kerry Dexter is an expert on the music of Ireland and Scotland, and many of the musicians of the United States as well. Follow her at Music Road. Thank you Kerry, for bringing your knowledge of Ireland to this review of a book that obviously touched you deeply.

The Photographs are used courtesy of Creative Commons and were obtained through Flickr. Click on the photos to learn more about the photographers.

Readers–are you gathering family stories? Where did your family come from? Have you ever traveled to Ireland to trace your own family?

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Book: American Fugue by Alexis Stamatis

I like books that are dense with ideas and expressed poetically. American Fugue by Greek author Alexis Stamatis fills the bill.  Here’s my review from Amazon:

American Fugue’s author Alexis Stamatis confounds  genres as he writes an innovative literary novel that combines with a thriller and a road trip book. The Greek author has an amazingly accurate finger on the pulse of America, and includes literary and cinematic and music references that nail pop culture as well as high-class culture. Beautifully written and a gripping story. Loved it.

The book also is a bit of Freudian self-analysis of the central character, a review of American literature and pop culture, observations on a Presidential election (Bush-Kerry), and a how-to study of the construction of a thriller.

Why does this book belong in the traveler’s library? Because as a road trip book, it contains sharp observations of  place and brings alive the locales.  When seen through the eyes of someone from another country, America looks slightly different, but still familiar.

“He”, the hero of the book, comes to America to forget. He has lost his mother to death, his wife has left him, he cannot speak to his father. He is a writer of thrillers but unable to get started on the next book, he flies to Iowa City for a writer’s conference. I won’t reveal what happens, but it is an interesting metaphor for “losing oneself.”  His travels take him from

• Iowa City, small campus town, where he visits Wal-Mart and watches a lot of American TV and rents a car at Avis to

• 

  Millennium Park with skyscrapers reflected in "Bean"

  Hannibal, Missouri, small historic town, where he visits Tom Sawyer’s cave and Mark Twain’s house and marvels at the Mississippi River,

• Chicago, where he visits the Art Institute, Millenium Park, Michigan Avenue and Lake Michigan,
• The countryside near Syracuse New York, a farm, woods, a lake.

• 

  A.P. Building, Rockefeller Plaza, Manhattan

  Manhattan, where we see the George Washington Bridge,  Hotel Chelsea (where many literary figures stayed), Brooklyn Bridge, Rockefeller Plaza, Brooklyn .

Not a bad sampling of American places, and his descriptions of his surroundings are convincing. Until he got to the countryside farm of a retired musician who had many Native Americans living in the woods around the farm in teepees.  The Native Americans were Navajo. Navajo do NOT live in teepees–they live in hogans. The teepees bothered me greatly.  I finally saw  that Stamatis tends to lump all Native Americans together, and not realize the sharp differences between Indian nations. Perhaps the stereotype of all Indians living in teepees, was just easier.  After all, this book was written for his Greek audience, where it was a best seller, not for Americans. I could forgive this lapse, since the rest of his descriptions rang true.

The other part of the book, the thriller, pushes you to keep turning pages, with puzzles created on each page.  And underneath the bad-guys-lurking typical thriller, the main character, the writer, is both trying to discover himself and becoming the main character in a new book.  He says:

He treated himself as if he were some important character in the play of life,…he used in his stories an “elevated” reality with his hero entering a strange, hostile world where he had to apply all of his inventiveness in order to survive.  The dangerous new world was nothing other than the unbearable everyday reality, and the attempt to discover himself in it was the only way to survive. American Fugue, Alexis Stamatis

I highly recommend this book for a new view of America and as a complicated thriller novel. Enjoy the ride!

Photograph by Vera Marie Badertscher. All rights reserved.

After reading this book, I’d like to retrace his steps. Have you ever stayed at the Hotel Chelsea? It sounds very interesting. And I have not prowled the haunts of Twain in Hannibal, either.  Let’s talk about road trips.

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Movie: Public Enemies, with Johnny Depp and Christian Bale

This clip, not associated with the movie, comes from You Tube.

I am never sure whether to be amused or perplexed when bad guys become tourist attractions.  I guess the correct word is “bemused.”  While we sometimes give equal time to heroes–Wyatt Earp, for instance, in Tombstone, Arizona–I am at a loss as to why Billy The Kid draws people to a museum in Hico, Texas.

And now we have the reckless, not-too-bright, ruthless John Dillinger indirectly doing good for his home state of Indiana, his hideaway state of Wisconsin and Chicago, home of hoods. Wisconsin, particularly, betting the movie Public Enemies will be a smash hit, launched a tourism campaign that stops just short of calling Dillinger “Wisconsin’s Favorite Son.” “See bullet holes from the 1934 shoot out” at Little Bohemia (now a restaurant rather than a lodge). “Go ‘on the lam’ in Wisconsin,” the tourism touts recommend on a web site listing Wisconsin tours .

Chicago, of course has had mobster tours for many years.  Nearly as soon as the gunshot wounds healed from gang fights in the twenties and thirties, Chicago started cashing in on its reputation as capitol of crime.  Boosting that business, the movie gives us some nice glimpses of Chicago’s El and the Public Library.

And Indiana gets into the act because Dillinger was born there, so there state Archives will run special exhibits this summer.

My own town of Tucson does its bit for Dillinger’s fame with yearly Dillinger days at the Hotel Congress.  The gang was staying there when a fire smoked them out and law officers discovered their heavy suitcases were packing lead (so to speak).

A little pouting here, because the Public Enemies film makers truncated the Tucson story, leaving out the fire. Worse, they did not film in Tucson.  However, if you visit the downtown Congress Hotel, you’ll be seeing it pretty much the way Dillinger saw it.  The old switchboard with its tangle of wires sits behind the lobby desk. In the sparsely-furnished rooms you will not be watching TV (although you can watch at the seating area at the end of the hall) but you can make phone calls on one of those old black dial telephones. You know, the ones that can serve as a weapon in a pinch. And you can still stay at the hotel, across fromt the railroad depot.

Is Public Enemies, the movie, going to stick around long enough to give a tourism boost to Wisconsin and Indiana and other places that celebrate the public enemies? Maybe.  After all Johnny Depp plays Dillinger.  And the movie does have style. Someone tweeted, “Do you remember when we dressed so well? Me either.”

Actually, I am old enough to remember when men wore hats, before John F. Kennedy killed the hat industry by going bareheaded.  However, it still seems strange to see killers in fedoras and topcoats.  The car talk, comparing the horsepower of old flivvers provides a lot of fun.  The street scenes are well done and the bank interiors are gorgeous.

But, personally, I wish we could find out where Melvin Purvis came from, so I could pay him tribute.  Why should not somebody be celebrating the G-man who finally stopped Dillinger’s spree of killing and robbing?

The movie is really about Purvis and his methodical chase.  Viewers not carried away by the glamor of Johnny Depp, the actor, will see that Depp plays the supporting role of psychotic, heartless gang leader.  Inevitably, the FBI gang, headed by another unbalanced individual, J. Edgar Hoover, beats the Dillinger gang.

What do you think of the movie, if you have seen it? And what do you think of the American tendency to idolize anti-heroes? Let’s talk.

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