Tag Archives: travels story blogs

Words XX: Adventurer

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The word adventurer was initially synonymous with gambling. The gambler would yell out “Adventure!” for help at the roulette table much as a modern gambler might yell “Come on, Seven!” at craps.

Adventurer
Casino Royale (Campbell, 2006)

To be an adventurer was to be without responsibility or care. Quite often ‘adventurer’ was hurled as an insult.

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) spun adventure on its head, using the word to imply bravery and daring. Captain James Cook, sailing 40 years later, would become synonymous with the word, now often meaning one imbued with courage and class.

*Gleaned from Martin Dugard’s Farther Than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook.

Travel Thursday: The Metaphor of It

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I’m giving up on Existential Thursdays. Got tired of pushing that rock up the hill! Instead, let’s try Travel Thursday because it’s always nice to go somewhere, especially when you can’t.

In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of territories we have conquered and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening.

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and never will have.*

Excerpted from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

Young Chronicles III: Cochrane to Timmins

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Mileage 8573

I phoned my mom last night and everybody is fine. And me and Nigel had a party last night. We had three cookies and we watched TV. Then everybody went to bed and a pillow fell on me. And we saw two mouse like in the picture.

Mileage 8638

We are arriving in Timmins and we are ahead of the two cars, Mr. Fleming and Mrs. Cohen. We went to an open pit mine. It is 4/3 of a mile long and 1/2 a mile wide and 500 feet deep. They told us they have been working for seven years and they are going to work for three more years!

Then we went on a tour of a Timmins. We got magazine called The Golden Porcupine. The weather changed and it began to rain. Then we saw a skating rink and Frank Mahovlich learned to skate there. And I got one rock for dad, one for mom, and two for my sister and two for my brother. And one for me.