I don’t travel much. Some minor business travel now and again, a couple of international trips, and a few zig-zags between New England and the Midwest in my college/grad school years. It’s not that I don’t like to go places, it’s more a case of not being afforded the opportunity to do so on any consistent basis…not to mention not having the sense enough when I was a young person to take the time to do it then.

Part of the fun of living online, thus, is getting to learn about other parts of the world from people who live there and getting to enjoy travel somewhat vicariously through the travels of others. Lately, it seems like a lot of people I know online have been gallavanting here and there. Blog-buddy John Tolva is just back from an extended trip to Ghana as part of a project he is doing through his employer (a well-known International Business Machines company) to assist local craftspeople in selling their goods internationally online. I’ve been following his blog posts about the trip, as well as his Twitter feed. He offered up some great posts about what he saw and did in Ghana, along with great photos:

The Twitter posts were, of necessity, more terse but in their own way much more telling. He came down with a malaria-like sickness that he’s still taking meds for, and I gather his trip home was…eventful. But he also DJ’d in a disco, met wonderful people, and obviously learned to love a place that most Westerners do not have the faintest idea about.

Maya Waldman is a mutual friend of Andre Torrez who has spent most of the last three or four years travelling around Asia, including a year-long stint in the Marshall Islands as a teacher. She’s presently making an extended return visit to India, and I would not be the least bit surprised if she stayed there for a long time. It’s easy to understand her fascination and feeling for the place. Check out this amazing photograph of spices at a local market:

On a slightly different note, Brittney Gilbert, another MFOT, relocated from her birthplace of Nashville, Tennessee last year to the San Francisco area to take a job with the CBS television station there, KPIX, as their resident blogger. Even though Nashville is urban, Brittney has been going through that fish-out-of-water experience one inevitably has when moving to a huge metropolis. Especially one as unique as San Francisco (and even moreso, since she lives in Berkeley). She seems mostly happy in the Bay Area, but in this recent post on her personal blog, she talks about the sometimes astonishing differences. I can relate to her experience much more than I can either of the other two, having moved betwee small-town Maine and Chicago a couple of times in the 1980s, and still sometimes shaking my head when I walk through places like Harvard Square.

I doubt I will ever see Ghana or India in person. I have spent a little time in San Francisco, but not nearly enough to feel like I know the least bit about it. It’s just great to be able to benefit from the sharing of these three individuals’ experiences and have a small taste of the rest of the world.

Several things to share that come from some of the people I know from “The Site Which Shall Not Be Named”:

First off, let me recommend to you a new feature from the Boston Globe’s website, Boston.com: The Big Picture

It is the pet project of Alan Taylor, who is a web developer at the Globe and one of the best-known denizens of our particular web community. For a long time now, he has regaled us privately with photos snatched from the press agency wires — the photos that are sent to most every major news outlet in the U.S. every day. Most of the photos he’s shared are NOT the ones that photo editors pick for their publications, but are often times gripping pictures of crises, beautiful photos of exotic locations, or just interesting shots that weren’t quite newsworthy. After a lot of begging and pleading, he finally convinced the powers-that-be at Boston.com to let him post some of those pictures to a daily photo blog, which has now been up and running for a couple of weeks.

I highly recommend adding The Big Picture to your daily blogcrawl.

Also of major prominence, you might remember the sudden popularity of a website called “Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle”. A genuine Internet meme if there was one, it shot to the height of popularity just as Obama’s campaign started to take off in the polls this winter. Matt Honan is responsible for that website and also the paperback book version of it, which goes on sale nationally in August, just days before the Democratic National Convention. The Internet has, of course, moved on to other memes since then, but you can buy the book and remember those glory days forever.

Somewhat less importantly, but worth looking at anyway: Jason Rhode wrote a well-timed post about the 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel “It Can’t Happen Here”. The book tells the story of the rise to power of a homespun demagogue who becomes president and ushers in a wave of fascism that overwhelms America. Written in the 1930s, as Hitler and Mussolini were consolidating their power in Germany and Italy, the book is clearly aimed at the widespread popularity of fascism in the United States and at populist politicians like Huey Long, but, as Jason writes, the scenario envisioned by Lewis has many parallels to the rise of George W. Bush and the current political scene in the U.S. that it could have been written last week.

Last, but not least, Derek Taylor, who usually writes about the goings-on in my old stomping grounds of Portland, ME, recently went to Italy for an extended vacation and offers some potentially useful tips for anyone else who might follow in his footsteps. Included in that post is a link to the photos he shot there, which you’ll want to look at even if you’re not planning a trip to Italy.

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the profile of Grant Achatz in The New Yorker, and one of the comments I received was from a fellow who calls himself “Psiplex” online. “Psiplex” also has Stage IV tongue and neck cancer and is also undergoing a chemo-radiation therapy similar to the one Achatz received.

Since he was nice enough to leave a link to his own blog, I have been reading “Psiplex’s” posts ever since. Mostly he focuses on how to tap into one’s creative energies, particularly in the face of adversity. To be able to be so articulate and thoughtful about such an immense subject is no mean feat. Yesterday, though, he stepped away from that particular dialogue to give this detailed and highly personal account of what it’s like to undergo radiation therapy. It is a worthwhile read and a sobering reminder that we are both resilient and fragile.

I wish “Psiplex” continued success and strength on his journey of recovery, and will continue to keep an eye on his posts.

If you grew up in New England any time in the last 50 years or so, there’s a pretty high likelihood that you paid at least one visit to Story Land in Glen, NH during the summers of your childhood. The theme park has been a fixture of New England vacationeers since 1953, predating Disneyland itself by a couple of years. I first visited Story Land when I was about 10, if I recall correctly — a little old for a park that’s squarely aimed at the younger kids, and so I only went a couple of times.

We took Charlotte there for the first time in 2004, not too long after my heart surgery. Not much had changed in the 30 years since the last time I had visited, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. There were a few new rides and one whole section of the park that was a recent addition (plus obvious signs that there were more additions to come), but the basic attractions were all still there. The one of greatest import to Charlotte that summer was Cinderella’s castle. She was in the full throes of her Disney Princess phase that summer and the ONLY thing in the park that she wanted anything to do with was the castle and seeing Cinderella “in person”.

Though we did visit one other time, the group consensus at our house is that Story Land is pretty much a been-there-done-that for us, and not in the same league of cherished family traditions as York Beach. Nevertheless, I was completely intrigued and fascinated by this post at The Smart Set by contributor Meg Favreau. She worked at Story Land as a teenager and was one of the girls who got to be Cinderella. She doesn’t say what year her story took place, but she talks about one of the newer attractions and mentions the Internet, so it stands to reason that it was within the last 10-12 years. I have always wondered what it was like to have a summer job at an amusement park, so that alone would have been enough to recommend this article to you, but the tie-in to Story Land AND the fact that she was Cinderella make it a must.

SPOILER: Being Cinderella isn’t exactly a fairy tale.