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Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

08.19

2009

Carolina drive time

Summer Drive, G Magazine, South Carolina

For the current issue of G Magazine, I wrote about a summer road trip across the upstate of South Carolina. With photographer Peter Frank Edwards, I met fishermen and fiddlers, tasted local wine, and waded into mountainside swimming holes. PFE’s hound, Sparky, rode along in the station wagon. I love this kind of travel, and this magazine always does a beautiful job with design. The feature runs eight pages. Here’s an excerpt:

SUMMER ROAD: Following the Cherokee Foothills Scenic Highway

When the teenage boy walked up and eyed the slippery rock made smooth with algae and the current of mountain water going downhill… well, that’s when the show began. It was mid-morning on a sweet, early summer day at the shoals, and up until then, there’d been only quiet sunbathing and wading by the small crowd gathered there. Then, without a fuss, the kid in cut-off shorts took on the wet slope standing up, all the way down, surfer style – even spinning around backwards for part of the ride, slipping past the boulders and trees that line one side of Little Estatoee Creek, the sunbathers on the other. He didn’t fall. He didn’t even make it look like it hurt. (Other sliders who make the ride sitting down or on their stomachs confirm that a few scratches and bruises are usually the worst damage.)

The stunt was part of the June scenery at Long Shoals Wayside Park a few miles east of Keowee-Toxaway State Park – where everyone from miles around knows that just beyond the woods at the parking lot’s edge is a path to the naturally-formed waterslide. The sliding possibilities and sights there are just one of the wonders along this part of the upstate arc of Old Highway 11, the Cherokee Foothills Scenic Highway…

Summer Drive, G Magazine, South Carolina - 2

– Sandy Lang, August 2009

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In print/published, Travel

07.18

2009

July Mainer

Cindy’s takeout, Freeport, Maine. PFE Photo.

Sunshine is even more precious in Maine this summer. Everyone talks of the rainy weeks of June. One lobsterman shook his head and said, “Ain’t had no spring. Hardly had no summer.”  But since arriving on the eve of July 4th we’ve had several of the fleeting sunny afternoons, the clear-sky evenings when the light hangs on longer than you think possible, gleaming in the coves, over the spruce tops and across the lakes. We’ve got a tiny cabin about half way up Maine’s shoreline – a coast  that juts out so raggedly into the cold, clear ocean, breaking off into islands, the rocky outposts of long-ago glaciers. After the long drive up from South Carolina, our first Maine stop was north of Yarmouth on Route 1 at Cindy’s, where the owner showed us his old Ford. “Bought it from the second owner,” he said, passing some hot onion rings out of the stand’s window, and then a hefty, buttery lobster roll wrapped in white waxed paper.

A couple days after getting to the cabin at Long Pond, we drove a few miles up the road above Silver Lake to the Silveridge Farm. The strawberries were plump, red and ready for picking. I filled an old clam basket with 9 or 10 pints, which weighed in at $9. We gave some of the sweet berries to friends, and ate the rest with yogurt, with tapioca, on biscuits, fresh in slices or on the hand, and the last couple pints I cooked into jam. Summer is good here. You can see it and taste everywhere, and it’s all the more prized with the come-and-go sun.

– Sandy Lang, July 2009 (images by PFE)

jam, Silveridge farm, Bucksport, Maine. PFE Photo.

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Food, Maine days, Travel

07.01

2009

Singing on St. Helena

St. Helena Island, SC - Peter Frank Edwards Photographs

In a white-painted, one-room building on St. Helena Island, Joseph “Rev.” Bryant was singing “Oh Lord, come by here.”  His voice filled the spare, shed-sized structure, with its benches of narrow boards nailed together, one bare bulb in the ceiling. After the spiritual, Rev. got back to telling stories – talking fast, mixing in Gullah-Geechee pronunciations. He told of moral lessons and Gullah traditions, of plucking fiddler crabs from the pluff mud as a child, and of “sour sally,” the red flowering sourgrass weed “that you can suck on when you’re walking and thirsty, but it’ll put a real knot in your face… more sour than a lemon.”

Describing himself as “the real deal,” Rev. is a one-man tour business, the kind where he’s a passenger in the tour-goer’s own car, giving directions and pointing out sites on St. Helena and nearby sea islands, all within about a 75-mile drive south from Charleston. Along the way, he tells stories and describes the scenery he knows so well from driving a local school bus for many years – the family and community names (often from former plantation owners), the Reconstruction-era houses that are still standing, the cottage that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used as a writing retreat, and the dirt road through the pine woods that you can follow a ways to see a 19th-century cemetery.

An ordained Baptist preacher and Navy veteran, Rev. Bryant fell into song that morning when we stopped inside one of the community praise houses, where, he explained, the descendants of formerly enslaved Africans still meet between church services to share information, pray, sing, and shout. As I sat and listened to his claps and choruses, I let the sights and sounds sink in as much as I could. Glory be.

Joseph “Rev.” Bryant, photo by Peter Frank Edwards

The storytelling, singing Joseph “Rev.” Bryant, above. The copy is an excerpt from an “On the Road” travel feature I wrote for the July 2009 issue of Charleston Magazine, just published.

– Sandy Lang, July 2009 (Images by PFE.)

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In print/published, Lowcountry S.C./Charleston, People, Travel

06.22

2009

Chinatown soaker worth it for the okra

Sloshed far down Canal Street in the torrents on Thursday. Cold and wet, feet soaked through, umbrellas blown backwards, we met for the deep bowl of soba noodles in a smoky fish flake broth, the cleaver-chopped roast duck with crisped caramel skin, the hot fried flatbread torn into pieces to dip in curry sauce, the bright green mound of shrimp paste-coated okra.

While the rain poured on slanting sidewalks and streamed on plate glass storefronts, we breathed coconut, lemongrass and curry. We talked and ate through our table’s line-up of steaming plates, filled our tiny cups with tea.

lady finger belacan, Overseas Taste

In NYC last week, I had the chance to eat twice at Overseas Taste (also known as “Oversea Asian”) at 49 Canal St., first with art director Tim Sutton and editor/writer Dave Bry. Tim and Dave knew exactly what to order.

PFE’s photo is of the tender okra dish ordered on both visits, Lady Finger Belacan.

– Sandy Lang, June 2009

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Food, Travel

06.04

2009

Barbecue backroads makes G&G cover

barbecue road trip Garden & Gun

The open-spoke steering wheel is as wide as a bicycle wheel in my hands, and I’m cruising – floating almost – on two-lane asphalt in a tar-black Chevrolet, passing pine tree rows, tobacco barns, railroad crossings. Pulling up in a bare-ground parking lot, I see the woodpiles, the smoke rising, and I walk inside, smelling the fire…

Photographer Peter Frank Edwards and I set out this spring to find old-school barbecue parlors in eastern North Carolina. He shot film and Polaroids along the way, and somewhere east of Greenville, we found the great old Chevy. The story is in the latest Garden & Gun issue, which is just off the press and set to be mailed out this month.

There are more images in print and the entire piece is online at Garden & Gun.

Garden & Gun June 2009 cover

– Sandy Lang, June 2009

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Food, In print/published, Travel

05.01

2009

Rainforest flights

St. Kitts, Mount Liamuiga

“Take your hands off the grips, lean back and fly,” the Kittitian guide, Kenny, told me. I was working in St. Kitts earlier this week, and tried out the zipline course that’s just opened in the jungle above the ruins of a centuries-old sugar cane factory. A Land Rover took us up to the top of the mountain, and the cables zig and zag to bring you back down to the base. From the second line, the view was all wide Atlantic, with the treetops and the Wingfield River’s bed below. St. Kitts is an island of green vervet monkeys and mango trees, of batik making, cricket tournaments, and of plates of whole pan-fried hine fish served with plantains, rice and peas. Oh, and the 18 mile-long island makes sugar cane rum and three of its own beers, Carib, Skol and Stag (advertised as “a man’s beer”).

In the clouds is Mount Liamuiga, which at 3,792 feet is the tallest peak – otherwise known as Mt. Misery.  (Images by PFE.)

– Sandy Lang, May 2009

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Travel, Wild animals and places

04.12

2009

Barbecue parlors and whirligigs

barbecue road trip

Just back tonight from a three-day road trip in eastern North Carolina… have some mementos. The color shot is one I took with my old Polaroid camera while the wind was making the whirligigs at Vollis Simpson’s place whir and clang into quite a racket up in the pine trees. It’s like watching an open-air kaleidoscope. I had the honor of meeting Mr. Stephen and Ms. Gerrie Grady at Grady’s Bar-B-Q and taste the most tender and delicious black-eyed peas on earth.  Peter Frank Edwards shot the 4X5 black and white Polaroid of me with the old Chevrolet we came across on Highway 264. I kept peeking in the cracked driver’s window at the soft leather bench seats, the open-spoked steering wheel that was wide as bicycle wheel. That’s the one I wished we were driving.

One more whirligig…

whirligig

– Sandy Lang, April 2009

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Food, Travel

04.08

2009

Heidi Klum, airplanes and me

Delta SKY April 2009

A couple weeks ago I began an assignment to write a batch of articles for a summer issue of Delta Sky magazine. The in-flight magazine has just gotten a fresh re-design, and the editors sent over a copy of the April issue, thought I’d share the cover. I’ll post more on my articles soon…

– Sandy Lang, April 2009

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Travel

03.23

2009

Snorkel, then supper

grill dinner

Along one of the coral dust and gravel lanes of a campground that’s just a few miles past the seven-mile bridge to the Lower Florida Keys, we pitched our tent. A few feet away was the site’s (number 57) wooden picnic table, and our neighbors’ RVs and “cabana” trailers surrounded us… their canopies strung with party lights shaped of globes, fish and alligators. The mid-March mornings and evenings were still sweater-cool at the Sunshine Key RV Resort & Marina, but in mid-day everyone looked for shade, water or air conditioning.

We were lucky enough to join fishing parties on two of the three long Florida days of our visit… riding out with Captain Bookie Burns in his 23-foot Aquasport. The first day’s trip was to the jostling Atlantic side for a couple hours over a 20-foot bottom where we reeled in mostly Lane Snapper and Yellow Tail while the boat bucked against its anchor and the chum bag made its long line for us to cast into. Besides the catch (which was slow at the start, but just enough to keep things interesting), the floating chum also attracted a steady school of silvery ballyhoo, and then at one point, a cruising 4-5 foot shark. Further out, a hefty sea turtle bobbed up and looked around. When our bait of shrimp ran out, we motored nearer to shore to drop anchor in a calm bay about four-feet deep. The captain wanted to do some snorkeling, see if he could back some spiny lobsters into his mesh sea bag. Soon we’d added a couple of the claw-lacking lobsters to the cooler, and back at the campground that night, Peter Frank sliced a tail for grilling, alongside a whole grunt, with lime.

Sunshine Key 2009

The second fishing day was on the calmer Gulf of Mexico over a grassy, 14-foot bottom where the Jack Crevalle, mackerel, Mangrove Snapper and Lane Snapper kept us busy. We were only at Sunshine four nights/three days, but we got in a Keys groove… after fishing we’d swim from the campground dock in a mud and sand-bottomed wash between the Gulf and the Atlantic. Then we’d shower in the cinder block bath houses and head back to our campsite or someone else’s for cocktails or beer, and plates of hors d’oeuvres… hard boiled eggs, peanuts, crab dip, cocktail weiners on toothpicks, spears of asparagus. And then in the breezy night with coconut trees leaning, we’d sleep well and long on the air mattress with all screens open in the tent… once after a particularly good round of picnic table dominoes.

 – Sandy Lang, March 2009

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Food, Travel, Wild animals and places

03.10

2009

Underwater Keys? I’m in.

along Route 1 between Miami and Lower Keys

We leave soon… won’t make it as far as Key West this time, like we did in winter 2007. Back then, for three nights in a row, I floated in a tile-edged pool of 90-degree water after dark – an old cistern – and looked up through palm trees at the stars. Twice, I was the only one in the pool. And the one night when two other couples were also there, I dunked under and still heard nothing but the sound of bubbles – not even a rooster crowing. It was magical.

One of Ole Papa Hemingway’s characters talked about Key West turning into “a beauty spot for tourists.” I agree that it was a certain destiny. What else could the warm island be – positioned as far to the South as it is – in a land of people who always want to go as far as they can?

This time we’ll camp near Bahia Honda Key, and I’m packing two or three bathing suits.

– Sandy Lang, March 2009

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Travel

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