Category Archives: National Parks

Traveling is good for you – physically, mentally and spiritually

By Chris Meyer

Here’s an updated  blog version of an article I wrote for Health Connections magazine

Everyone likes to get away. It’s fun and it can be good for you – physically, mentally and spiritually. Yes, you can return from an exciting journey with a new fitness regimen, new appreciation of a foreign culture, and a refreshed outlook on your daily existence.

It’s no wonder figures as diverse as St. Augustine, Hans Christian Anderson and Mark Twain have recommended travel so highly. And modern-day studies back them up.

Summiting Half Dome is a physical and spiritual high.

Summiting Half Dome is a physical and spiritual high.

PHYSICAL

It’s cliché to say that you need to burn off those extra vacation pounds. But it doesn’t have to be that way. If you’re a gonzo traveler like me, you will be burning calories trying to pack in as many experiences as possible. That’s a given when I’m backpacking, but it can also work on more civilized excursions, where the food is more tempting than the dehydrated variety.

A walk through Rome’s wonderful maze of ancient passageways, piazzas, and fountains reveals new discoveries at each turn. It also burns off some serious pasta.  The legs will definitely feel it on a climb to the top of the St. Peter’s Basilica dome.

Cruise ships, sometimes maligned as floating palaces of overindulgence, now offer spa cuisine and state-of-the-art gyms.  (See USA Today’s Best cruise ships for fitness junkies.) Royal Caribbean International is bringing celebrity chefs specializing in healthy food aboard its newest ships. England’s Jaime Oliver, who has crusaded for healthier school lunches, will offer hsi take on Italian and Biggest Loser” chef Devin Alexander’s Solarium Bistro aims to pack a lot of taste into few calories. So why not jump-start your fitness regimen with the ocean in full view?  Everything is convenient and even walking around the track in the fresh sea air is a pleasurable way to get the blood flowing.

Trails connecting the villages of Italy's Cinque Terre bring beauty and exercise together.

Trails connecting the villages of Italy’s Cinque Terre bring beauty and exercise together.

Ashore a plethora of active options await, from trekking between vintage European villages to kayaking picturesque Caribbean coastlines. Runners cruises offer training, expert advice and an island 5K race.

A healthy, local, organic food movement is in full bloom in Hawaii. From restaurants to farmers’ markets, fresh and delicious choices abound. It’s easy to bypass the luau and Spam after burning some serious calories on the kayaking trip to the secret waterfall.

Agriturismos connect you with the Italian roots of what is sometimes called the slow food movement. Plus, you can see traditional methods of producing wine and olive oil, and even take a turn in the kitchen, learning how to prepare fresh food that healthily delights the taste buds.

MENTAL

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” -St. Ausutine

I love books that mentally transport me to another place. But actually being in there is transformative. All senses are involved. Talk about mental stimulation keeping the brain sharp!

Roaming Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Museums offers so much history and science.  I grew up fascinated with the moon mission. At the Air and Space Museum I could see, even touch, the spacecraft and visualize the experience.

My mind and extremities were aroused as I shivered amid Denali National Park’s vast and colorful tundra while a native Athabascan described her people’s traditions. I could feel the conditions that required their ingenious adaptations and perseverance.   

What better way to feel the Athabascan culture than through through the words of one of its daughters amid the unspoiled tundra of Denali National Park.

What better way to feel the Athabascan culture than through through the words of one of its daughters amid the unspoiled tundra of Denali National Park?

 

Walking the expansive grounds of Beijing’s Forbidden City helps you process the separation and extravagance of the ruling class that eventually led to revolution.

A photo of Mount Rushmore is interesting. Viewing it up close from all angles gives you appreciation for the enormous challenge of sculpting huge granite outcroppings with dynamite.

I’ve viewed many beautiful pictures of Yellowstone’s colorful geysers. Walking among the steaming pools and breathing their sulfur odors demonstrates a bit of what goes on deep below our feet. And seeing Old Faithful go off on schedule is, well, really believing.

SPIRITUAL

To move, to breathe, to fly, to float

To gain all while you give

To roam the roads of lands remote

To travel is to live

-Hans Christian Anderson

Have you ever really seen the stars? Away from the ambient light of civilization so thousands of lights explode like diamonds against a pitch-black sky? I have done this high in the mountains while backpacking, at sea on cruise ships and even from remote spots in Hawaii.

It is magical. Awe-inspiring. Humbling.  Mysterious. Soul refreshing. Gets us outside of our modern climate-controlled cocoons. Invites the kind of big-picture contemplation that has mystified and inspired for ages.

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You can’t help but contemplate the miracle of creation high in the eastern Sierra Nevada.

Down to earth wonders have similar effects.  Peer over the edge of the Grand Canyon. Stand in the center of Yosemite Valley and wonder at the kaleidoscope of granite, trees and plunging waterfalls. Put on snorkeling gear and enter the colorful undersea world of a Caribbean reef. John Muir called such pristine sights nature’s cathedrals because they can’t help but kindle appreciation for the wonder of creation.

Man-made monuments also inspire introspection about spiritual matters. Michelangelo’s sacred art, Jerusalem’s temple and Cambodia’s Angkor Wat demonstrate humankind’s relentless search for the divine. The physical feats and message behind them can only be fully appreciated in person.

Travel also connects with people in the here and now. The mixed-race tour guide deftly explaining the complex relationship between Native Americans and the Euro-descended amid the backdrop of the American West. The proud Roman cab driver joyfully describing the wonders of his city.  The Tokyo guide who helps us understand why the traditional sacred tea ceremony remains important in a modern Japan of bullet trains, electronics and neon.

We went to New Orleans to help clean up after Hurricane Katrina. We experienced this great, and staggered, city and its people in a more personal way than usual travel affords.

We went to New Orleans to help clean up after Hurricane Katrina. We experienced this great, and staggered, city and its people in a more personal way than usual travel affords.

 

Take this to another level through voluntourism. Help the National Park Service while enjoying the scenery. Rescue endangered sea turtles on a picturesque Costa Rican beach. Aid a clean water project in conjunction with an African safari.

Mark Twain has transported me to different times and places in his books. He also was an advocate of personal exploration:

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

How much easier it is for us to visit distant places than in Twain’s day! And do it in a way that’s beneficial to our physical, mental and spiritual health.

TIME TO PLAN YOUR NEXT ADVENTURE

There’s no better time than now to contact an Expedia travel consultant to book a journey that will nourish body, mind and soul. All the travel suppliers have tee’d up discounts for the heavy booking season that begins right after Christmas, and your consultant has the knowledge and tools to hook you up with the right amazing experience.

Call: (800) 745-4015 or (949) 201-4246

Click: ocglobetrotter.com

Email: cmeyer@ocglobetrotter.com

Come in: 24321 Avenida de la Carlota, Suite H-3, Laguna Hills, CA 92653. In Oakbrook Village center between Trader Joe’s and Woody’s Diner

Check out our reviews on Yelp.

Rushmore and Crazy Horse: Presidents, Indians, Networking

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Presidents immortalized in granite.

Even though I’m a bit of a geography geek, I have to admit no recollection of Rapid City before preparing for our Tauck tour from Mount Rushmore through Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. The town in the southwest corner of South Dakota is the gateway to the memorial to four presidents, so it was our starting point. But it does not rank in state capital contests because Pierre holds that position. And I guess my awareness of South Dakota in general was lacking.

A stroll through downtown revealed a city that in its heyday might have been a model for Walt Disney’s iconic Midwestern Main Street and had later fallen on tough times. Some sort of urban renewal has been at work, symbolized by statues of 35 (so far) American presidents on street corners, clearly meant to capitalize on the proximity to Mount Rushmore

The sprawling Indian “trading post” store made it clear  we were not in California anymore. Susan picked up some coyote teeth and other small artifacts for her students, but we passed on the full-sized buffalo pelt robe, which was priced at $1,230.IMG_0583

 

The Mount Rushmore monument itself is one of those things that seem so much bigger (physically and symbolically) when standing before it and considering the enormity of such an undertaking. For sculptor Gutzan Borglum, this enormity was not only in skillfully designing, dynamiting and sculpting noses and brows – imagine an ill-placed TNT blast blowing away what was to be an ear. He had to get government permission and money – lots of it – over many years to make it happen. In order to employ his artistic skills, he had to employ his persuasive skills.  He apparently was tireless and masterful at both. 

Borglum’s  friendship with President Theodore Roosevelt appears to be an object lesson to the power of what we now call networking.

Three of the four presidents depicted are slam dunks, right? The father of our country, the author of the Declaration on Independence, and the savior of the union. So how you pick a fourth to include with that crowd? Do you even need a fourth?

 

Officially, Washington represents independence, Jefferson expansion (through the Louisiana Purchase that doubled the size of the country), Lincoln liberty (through the Emancipation Proclamation), and Roosevelt conservation (for his love and promotion of wild lands and expansion of the national parks system).  

“The purpose of the memorial is to communicate the founding, expansion, preservation, and unification of the United States with colossal statues of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.”   -Gutzon Borglum. Official Mount Rushmore website

I’ve nothing against Teddy.  I admire his rough-riding, Panama Canal-building, trust-busting and nature-loving ways. And who wouldn’t love a guy who called his third party Bull Moose? Still, he seems a bit out of place with the Big Three. If it was really conservation you could argue for Grant, whose signature created the world’s first national park, Yellowstone. And that was after he commanded the Union army’s Civil War victory. 

 

Roosevelt, however, is more connected to the outdoors movement, his pose repeatedly captured admiring natural wonders and bagging big game. But his friendship with Borglum (the sculptor had crafted a bust of Lincoln that Roosevelt displayed in the White House and campaigned for TR) might just have been the clincher to getting the Rough Rider’s gigantic likeness immortalized on the mountain. For Borglum, it might have been a calling card with the powers that be in D.C. He obviously knew what he wanted to do.  But he could never have got it done without knowing who could provide the necessary permission and significant funding.

And I figure he needed as powerful a calling card as possible. I’ve been conditioned my whole life to know that this monument exists. But imagine when Borglum first described his grand vision. Can you see a few eyes rolling? And the price tag -which grew significantly over the two-decade quest like California’s bullet train projections. Excuse me!

Actually, the sculptor is not credited with the original brainstorm of turning Black Hills granite into an uber-larger-than-life monument. A superintendent of South Dakota’s Historical Society thought oversized carvings of western icons (Lewis and Clark, Buffalo Bill, Sioux warriors, General George Armstrong Custer) might bring tourists to a beautiful but unknown region. Borglum contended it would be grander (and apparently more attractive of federal funding in competition with sites in, say, Virginia or Oregon) to celebrate icons of the entire United States.

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ICONIC INDIAN: The model shows what the Crazy Horse monument is designed to look like.

 

To some Native Americans, the placement of this monument to American leadership in the Black Hills seemed like more salt in the American wounds. The lovely place that derives its name from the contrast dark ponderosa pines and the clouds the mountains attract strike against the white badlands to the east and had long been for Indians a spiritual place of reflection and renewal. Disrupting such country was bad enough   it was being scarred with homage to the government that had fought Indians, broken treaties with them, destroyed their way of life and subjected them to reservations. (How interesting to hear this described on site by our Tauck tour director whose ethnicity combines native and Euro-descended.)

 

Politics were different in the 1920s. Any Native American protest would not have derailed the grand endeavor. And not much noise was apparently made by a wing of the conservation movement that might object to the very blasting of a mountain or Roosevelt’s brand of “taming” the West, big game hunting.

 

So in one of the West’s delicious ironies, Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear approached a Borglum apprentice to create a giant granite monument to Indian icon Crazy Horse in the Black Hills, just down the road from Rushmore. Korczak Ziolkowski, a Polish immigrant from Boston didn’t just take the job, he made it a life’s devotion that outlasted him and now rests with his widow, 10 children and their progeny.

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The warrior’s head has been shaped and the blasting goes on to carve his entire body and horse.

Crazy Horse dwarfs Rushmore and is pitched as the largest of its kind. It has already taken much longer to create and relies entirely on private donations. Ziolkowski was as strong in his belief in the free market as in his devotion to “honor the culture, heritage and living heritage of North American Indians.”

Is this work in progress an accurate depiction of the legendary leader, warrior and strategist? Hard to know since no photographs or paintings exist; only oral descriptions were passed down. Seems to me it doesn’t matter. It’s more than about a man, or even a tribe, or even a culture (for there are many distinct Native American cultures). Just as Rushmore’s greater meaning is about the ideals of America and the struggle to live them, Crazy Horse symbolizes dignity, struggles and renewal of native peoples. Its campus has become a magnet for Indians from around the country to gather, display and sell their wares, and celebrate and renew a culture interrupted.

And perhaps even brings the Black Hills back to spiritual balance.

Next: Cowboys, Buffalo and Lots of Hot Water.

 

 

The Wonders of Wyoming and the Value of Being There

Taking a ride at the Ranch at Ucross.

Yeehaw: Taking a ride at the Ranch at Ucross.

Travel is nothing if not learning about people and places. Sure, you can soak up a lot of information about Wyoming from Wikipedia. But  there truly is nothing like being there to gaze at the wide open landscape under the big sky, mount a horse, watch a bison lounging by the parking lot,  and hear a cowboy’s drawl.

 

In all honesty, I had not given much thought to Wyoming or South Dakota before this trip. Oh, I knew Mount Rushmore was in South Dakota and I had long wanted to visit Yellowstone National Park, but its location in Wyoming made little difference to me.

 

I was looking forward to this journey from Rushmore to Salt Lake City in a general way. I hoped to see buffalo and geysers, but had not fully anticipated the immersion into cowboy culture I would receive. Cultural immersion is something we often mentally reserve for travel to foreign lands.

A buffalo lounges near the Lake Yellowstone Hotel parking lot.

A buffalo lounges near the Lake Yellowstone Hotel parking lot. (click to enlarge)

 

But we live in a big country with distinct subsets of American culture.  Our visit to South Carolina and Georgia a few years ago exposed us to the courtly ways of the South. Granted, this was not as different from California as, say, Germany, but it was clearly different.

 

The Western culture of the plains also is distinct.  We had not left the country, as evidenced by the singing of the national anthem prior to Cody’s rodeo, but the display of patriotism was considerably lengthier than at an Angels game.

Flags flying at the start of the Cody rodeo.

Flags flying at the start of the Cody rodeo. (click to enlarge)

Plus, it was accompanied by prayer for country and the safety of the athletes. Between the play-by-play and corny jokes, the announcer invoked the cowboy code in asking for applause as consolation for riders whose efforts had fallen short and prayer for a young girl who sustained an injury.

You can read about such things for academic knowledge, of course, but being there gives you the feel of a competition that is at once violent, with riders being thrown of bucking broncos and raging bulls, and kind of genteel, with the crowd bowing in prayer and giving it up for those who had fallen short on this day.

 

While these are not huge contradictions,  I find them in a way symbolic of the complex web that continues to forge the great American West. As we traveled through breathtaking and diverse landscapes, we learned of overcoming  extreme hardships, betrayal and reconciliation, and difficult balancing environmental stewardship with economic needs. We heard of the collisions between native peoples and the Euro-descended from a tour director with blood from both camps.

Susan and I might have seen Rushmore and Old Faithful traveling by car and guidebook, as we had experienced other national parks and monuments,  and we surely would have witnessed their ingenuity and splendor. We would have missed some of the dramatic backdrop, color and context provided by Jan George, our Tauck guide, and filmmaker Ken Burns, via video aboard the coach that carried us across the Cowboy State.

Old Faithful: Dramatic evidence that you're Yellowstone is a camouflaged volcano.

Old Faithful: Dramatic evidence that you’re Yellowstone is a camouflaged volcano. (click to enlarge)

We would have snapped the requisite photos at Old Faithful and picked up a few interesting nuggets of information from our Lonely Planet guide book and visitors center exhibits. On our Tauck tour, we also were able to gain a deeper understanding of this land, its people, the battles of the past, and present-day issues. 

In future posts, I will share some highlights.

You can check out Tauck’s itinerary for this trip here. Simply comment on this post to request more information about any of your travel needs.