Oh, the places I’ve gone — part 1

More than 65 years of travel (in my first memory of a trip, I’m a little boy with my mother, visiting her brother in Rhode Island) has taken me to every one of the 50 U.S. states, nine out of 10 Canadian provinces plus one territory, and at least 38 countries on six continents.

I took notes.

My wife, Marian, and I once stayed in a Florida hotel called the Del Ray Inn. I counted 18 cigarette scorch marks on my nightstand, 19 on my wife’s nightstand, 18 more on the dresser, and an astonishing 50 on the wash basin. The smoke alarm dangled by its wires from the ceiling. The back of the battery case was missing from the TV remote. Most of the drawers lacked hardware. Freight trains rumbled past several times a night.

But not all was shabby: On the walls were large posters for elegant French goods: Chapeaux Mossant, Parapluie, Revel.

In a restaurant in Utah, we decided cocktails were in order. I asked for a gimlet. The young waitress paused, stared at her notepad for some seconds, and finally asked, “So you want a shot of gimlet, right?”

“Why don’t we make it a beer.”

One night in Israel, we strolled into a bomb shelter converted to a bar, where we encountered a tipsy gang of Danish bus drivers on an actual busman’s holiday. They seemed to be having a great time. When the jukebox played John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” they sang along with gusto. Knew every word.

On a family foray to New Orleans, my parents dropped me off at the Royal Orleans hotel (I was 12 years old) so they could go to a Bourbon Street strip club. This was my mother’s idea. They returned after a few hours. I recall my father looking bemused. My mother looked delighted. She was still talking about it the next morning. She was a lively woman.

While we’re discussing family members: in the late 1960s, my father and his brother Dale, my namesake, were in the Canadian Rockies near Banff, Alberta. They were enjoying the solitude, the silence, the immersion in unspoiled nature. Then they spotted two dots. The dots became bigger until they resolved into the figures of a pair of people walking toward them. This was a vast wilderness, but Dad knew what was coming. Sure enough, with all this open country to choose from, the pair elected to walk up and sit down next to my uncle and my father. “Hi,” one of them said. “We’re from Cleveland.”

Brochure in a Jamaican hotel room: “The sun in Jamaica rises promptly at dawn.” Only one of Jamaica’s unique qualities.

As a travel writer in 1987, I stayed in hotels in Moscow, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and Kiev (now Kyiv), all then part of the Soviet Union.  Each floor had a babushka seated by the elevator, and most floors had a makeshift bar at the end of the corridor, serving whatever you wanted, provided whatever you wanted was vodka. The rooms were austere: a single bed, rough sheets, thin blankets, a lone inadequate towel, and an ancient telephone. There must have been thin bars of soap; I don’t remember. But I do recall that every room, inexplicably, had a beautiful shoe brush.

On that same trip, part of our group was a theater critic for The Nation. In Moscow, he desired a photo of KGB headquarters. He knew where to look, found the building, and composed a picture. Then he saw a man leave the front entrance and come straight toward him. He thought Uh-oh. The man smiled, gestured, and said, “You know what is building?”

“The KGB?” replied the critic.

“Yes!” said the Russian. “KGB! Would you like to come in and see lobby? Much nicer than CIA!”

Last Russian story: On an Aeroflot flight to Moscow, I find my seat, then prepare to buckle up. Only my seatbelt is missing all of its hardware. No buckle, no insert, nothing. I turn to the East German soldier next to me. He shrugs and gestures to his belt, and I see that he has knotted it like a rope. So I do the same and pray the flight crew is sober.

But wait, there's more... Watch your inbox for part 2 tomorrow. Travel anecdotes—I got a million of ’em.