I am the daughter of a man with a TripTik. You may not know what a TripTik is, or you may understand it to be a triptych, a work of art made up of three panels, often hinged together in a sacred altarpiece. You may be thinking of scenes of the baby Jesus attended by beasts of the field or angels with the faces of men. But what my father possessed was genuinely a TripTik—an itinerary in strip maps held together by plastic rings, enabling the user to flip from one page to the next. My father acquired the itinerary, issued by the Automobile Association, to keep his family safe on the road. He was in that respect a conventional man.
Category: travel
ESSAY | Corn and Chicken and Death and The Return – Alan Weltzien
The fact that we’d never visited Mexico apart from a couple of long-ago weeks in Tulum, Yucatan might explain my scanty knowledge of El Dia de Los Muertos or the Day of the Dead. I knew it wasn’t connected to Ireland’s Samhain or All Hallow’s Eve, beloved in my childhood.
COMFORT FOODS // Sik Fan – Kimi Canete
In my earliest memories, I am eating Chinese food. My great-aunt’s house in the suburbs outside Boston is split-level and her mother, my great-grandmother, lives in the lower level. You enter through the front door onto a landing between the two halves of the house, and if you walk downstairs, her kitchen will be directly in front of you.
COMFORT FOODS // Overheard at Terasa Obor – Ana Prundaru
the problem with mici is
they’re all so good
that they don’t even ask you
what you’re ordering
ESSAY | Trying To See – Erin Ruble
On a sunny September day in the early 1990s, a German couple taking a shortcut through the rock spires on the Austrian-Italian border spotted the head and back of a man jutting from a patch of half-melted ice. The couple, thinking they’d stumbled across the corpse of a mountaineer, told the owner of the inn they were staying at. He, in turn, contacted the authorities, who sent a forensic investigator.
Bessarabian Days – William Fleeson
A Chisinau bus will teach you the city. The Moldovan capital’s network of these vehicles, and its trolleybuses and marshrutkas – the decrepit minivans, unchanged since Soviet days – could take you anywhere, for nearly nothing. Mostly you paid in physical stress. Riders crammed into spaces meant for people half their size; young mothers loaded…
Mesoamerican Triptych – William Fleeson
Pérado I. Pérado stretched over its one paved road, the village elongated to avoid the mud of the side streets. Haitians called out Blan! – “White man!” – wanting attention or a cash handout or, failing the former, cash alone. I stopped for lunch at a roadside shack. They had rice and chicken and pikliz…
Reading Heat-Moon in Nicaragua – William Fleeson
For a dusty Central American beach town, San Juan del Sur has a ton of history. The former fishing village once offered passage to Forty-Niners on their way from the US east coast to California. Cornelius Vanderbilt grew his fortune by running a waterborne transit line for that gold rush: faster than overland travel, the…
Umbrology – Brian McNely
I stepped off the plane in Helsinki – airport code HEL – and found a restroom. Standing at a urinal, I heard birdsong piped through overhead speakers: odd, soothing, out of place. The train to downtown Helsinki departs from a giant, cool tunnel many meters below street level. The platform is nearly empty. Massive faux-tapestries…
Missing Woman – Katie Hunter
In early October 2020, my partner Greg and I drove at sunrise to Zion National Park in southern Utah. On the way I swigged coffee and snapped photos of sandstone cliffs dip-dyed red by the sun. They dwarfed what I’d imagined while planning our pandemic-adapted vacation – a national park tour via road trip, starting…
ONE POEM – Ava Patel
Here lie abandoned gyro crusts and Bundt cake crumbs.
Your fingers shine with olive oil grease
TWO POEMS – DS Maolalai
waking
at midnight
to piss
on the sand dunes
and the sky overhead
like a badly
scratched frying pan.
Porridge 