Sunday afternoon in the Tiergarten. A group of four shirtless guys sit on the grass, smoking pot and rolling a soccer ball in listless circles. Across the clearing, a man in a leather costume, with a mask and a long graceful tail, is pulling a two-wheeled cart. The lingerie-clad woman in the cart smacks him with the reigns and urges him to trot faster. At first, I took a small group of people...
Lawrence Millman is the author of eleven books, including Northern Latitudes, Last Places, An Evening Among Headhunters, and Lost in the Arctic. His travel articles have appeared in such magazines as Smithsonian, National Geographic Adventure, The Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated, and Islands. He has made 30 trips and expeditions to the Arctic and Subarctic, discovered a previously unknown...
After a childhood of river dreams inspired by readings of Huckleberry Finn, Jonathan Raban set out to travel the length of the Mississippi River from north to south in a 16-foot open aluminum boat. His journey took place in 1979. The waters he drifted down were much more dangerous than the river of his childhood imagination, but Huck’s urge to escape, to light out for the Territory before someone...
Nuremberg was once one of the wealthiest and most important trading centres in medieval Europe. And between 1050 and 1571, it was the closest thing to a capital under the Holy Roman Empire, seat of the imperial Diet. Despite this rich and multilayered past, the city is most persistently remembered for its close association with the Nazi party. It was Nuremberg that hosted the NSDAP rallies of the...
My friends called Bamberg “biertown”, and I would soon discover why. We took the high speed ICE train down to this beautiful town in northern Franconia a couple weeks ago. It’s less than four hours from Berlin-Südkreuz to Bamberg, but I’d never been to Bavaria before. My good friend Coach Helder Gomes was giving a seminar that weekend, which gave me an excuse to spend a few days exploring the...
In 1982, Jonathan Raban bought a wooden two-masted sailing boat and circumnavigated England in a slow, wandering, unhurried way. He called this manner of travel “coasting”: moving along with the tide, letting the wind decide the direction of travel, and living “on the shifting frontier where the land meets the water and the water shades into the land.” According to his childhood schoolmaster...
My last London day was a short one. We had a flight to catch that evening, but there was still time to shift the scope of my trip back to books. Our first stop was Exmouth Market, and a late breakfast with Barnaby Rogerson, the publisher of Eland Books. I wanted to get his thoughts on travel literature. But that’s the focus of my next Adrift on the Continent column in Outpost, so you’ll have to...
The centrepiece of this packed London weekend I’ve been telling you about was two days of music with The Church at Bush Hall. I travelled by thought with The Church long before I ever set out on the road for real. I still remember where I was when I first heard their music. “Under the Milky Way” was rising up the North American charts in 1988. I was 16 years old, and sitting in my dad’s car...
We had a packed agenda on this 3-day London trip, but as luck would have it, there was a two hour window of free time on Saturday morning. It was just enough time to hop a Hammersmith & City Line train at Shepherd’s Bush Market, next to our hotel, and ride it to Hammersmith, where we picked up the bus to Mortlake. I wanted to visit the grave of one of my travel heroes, the explorer Richard...
I flew over to London last weekend for a packed 3 days of events. It was good to be back in one of the world’s truly great cities. My last visit was in 2016. I’ve often wondered if I could live in London. It’s such a fascinating city, with so much history packed into every single block and alley. I’m most attracted by the overwhelming opportunity to attend literary events, to make connections in...