The Yahoo! Around the World Travelogues section is a good place to start if you’re interested in web information from circumnavigators.

Here’s the link that lets you make a donation to the Canadian Red Cross in support of their work with the earthquake in Iran (and here are the American and British counterparts).

And here’s a useful statement from the British Red Cross titled Why we ask for money, not gifts:

It is often thought that a ‘free’ donation of clothes, medicine, or tinned food helps the victims of disasters, but with cash the British Red Cross can help more people, more cheaply, and more efficiently.

As part of the world’s largest emergency response network, the British Red Cross is ready to meet crisis needs anywhere, at any time. That means having the right equipment, personnel, aid and technical know-how to respond to anything from a major earthquake to the outbreak of war.

Cash is the lifeblood of rapid response. It can be instantly transferred and converted into whatever is most needed, anywhere in the world. Cash not only allows us to use our strong purchasing power to benefit the maximum number of people; it also allows us to adjust our response very rapidly to changing needs and priorities in the affected country.

The Drive Around the World expedition has a weblog (and a companion RSS feed).

One of the items mentioned in First Overland, the story of the Cambridge-Oxford expedition to drive from London to Singapore that I just finished reading, is that the so-called Burma Road (also known as the Stillwell Road, after General Joseph Stillwell), which was built during World War II to connect Ledo in Assam, India, to Kunming, China, cost the U.S.A. $137 million to build.

I was curious to know how much this would be “in today’s dollars,” which led to a further curiousity about how “in today’s dollars” amounts are calculated.

I sent this question in to the IsleAsk service and received a very helpful reply from Brenda Brady at the Holland College Library with some pointers to relevant websites:

• Current Value of Old Money from the University of Exeter.
• How Much Is That? from the Economic History Association.
• The Value of Money from Suburban Library System in Burr Ridge, IL.

What one learns from these and other websites is that, to quote Brenda, “determining the relative change in the value of money is not as simple as it looks, and can depend on context, changing technologies, changes in supply and demand, etc.”

That said, using the calculator on the How Much Is That? site, the $137 million figure comes out to anywhere from $1.5 billion (using the Consumer Price Index) to $2.3 billion (using the unskilled wage) to $4.2 billion (using the Gross Domestic Product per capita).

Calculated using any of these methods, it’s still one heck of a lot of money for a 1,079 mile road: even in 1942 dollars it was more than $125,000 per mile. Although, of course, not as much as our Confederation Bridge. But they had to go over water.

If you haven’t tried IsleAsk, I would encourage you to do so: it’s an easy way to get high quality reference information, from local sources, at no cost.

The sole piece of culinary expertise passed through the generations from my grandfather was how to make proper potato pancakes. My father taught us. I will teach Oliver.

Unfortunately Catherine dismisses all potato pancakes as merely “potatoes, salt and fat,” and refuses to even consider enjoying them, which is going to interfere with the evolutionary pass-down scheme.

What’s worse, you can’t really make good potato pancakes without an electric frying pan (at least in our tradition), and having lacked an electric frying pan for at least a decade, there’s been a significant turn-down in my potato pancake consumption recently.

So today, what with it being the heart of the holiday season and the taste of Rukavina family potato pancakes of yore dancing in my head, I took Oliver up to Smitty’s to have their version thereof.

Unfortunately, like everything else on the menu at Smitty’s, they were bland, dry, and tasteless except for the salt (sometimes I think a giant tanker pulls up to the back door at Smitty’s once a year and drops off a load of generic “breakfast food glop” from which they then concoct all of their food, simply varying the amount of salt and food colouring to approximate each dish).

So rather than sizzling into my body with a rush of holiday glee, the Smitty’s pancakes hit me lit a ton of, well, breakfast food glop.

Sigh.

I may have no choice but to arrange for Catherine to go on some extended errand, and to then secretly bring a proper electric frying pan into the house, along with a sausage grinder (the other required apparatus, used to properly grind the potatoes), and cook up a bunch for Oliver and I.

Merry Christmas, Papa Dan, wherever you are.

I’m still looking for information on Hermann Kleefisch’s trip around the world. He set off from Prince Edward Island in July in a VW microbus.

Bob Likely passed along a possible email address this morning, and I’ve written to see if I can get an update.

If anyone else has any news, I’d welcome it.

Starting on November 1, 2003, a convoy of left California for a longitudinal circumnavigation by Land Rover. The trip is in support of The Parkinson’s Institute.

As I write this, they’re in Ecuador. They’ll head through South America, then around to Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietman, Laos, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, China, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Alaska, Canada, and then back into the continental US with a finish in July, 2004 in California.

The expedition has a Take Me With You! program where they invite “members of the media, sponsors, professional travel writers, photographers,filmmakers, and celebrities” to travel with them for one to two week periods.

My obsession with round-the-world voyages has prompted me to start a new weblog, Reinvented World. Over there I’ll be talking about all manner of circumnavigating, with pointers to books, websites and other resources. There’s an RSS feed of the posts, and RSS of the discussion as well. Enjoy.

Who Needs a Road? was my introduction to driving around the world. I first read about the book in an review by Al Podell in blue magazine. Originally published in 1967, the book was re-issued in 1999. I bought myself a copy, based on the review, and read it from cover to cover in a couple of days. I was hooked.

The book concerns an expedition, begun in 1965, in a Toyota Land Cruiser, by Harold Stephens and Al Podell and a collection of irregulars. They started from New York City, headed across the Atlantic, across Europe, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia, Australia, across the Pacific, and up through Panama to New York City. They covered over 40,000 miles, and took almost 3 years. But they did it.

After reading the book, I wanted to know more: the closing scene talked about film that was taken of the expedition crossing over into the USA at El Paso, Texas. “Where was the film?”, I wondered.

So I tracked down the email address of the publisher, and sent off a note. Imagine my surprise when I received a reply shortly thereafter from Harold Stephens himself, now 30 years older and living in Bangkok. We struck up an email correspondence, and, using my Internet search skills, I helped Steve (as he is called by everyone) track down long-lost friend and acquaintances, both from the round-the-world trip and from his adventures afterwards.

And I tried to help Steve find the film. This led me on a wild electronic goose chase through Hollywood, across the US, and into Hot Springs, AR, where I tracked down the son of the man who had shot the film. Frustratingly, I was never able to get in touch with him, and so the film remains out of reach to this day.

After a year or so of working with Steve at a distance, it occured to me that we were presented with the unique opportunity of visiting Thailand with someone knowledgeable “on the ground.” We were a little uneasy about the notion of travelling so far with a nine month old son, but decided to explore the idea: I sent a tentative email to Steve, asking him what he thought of the idea. As he related in this article for the Thai Airways magazine, Steve thought this was a fine idea:

I guess I never expected them to come. This often happens, people make plans and then their boss gets sick and they can’t get the time off or their grandmother ends up in the hospital. But not with Peter and Catherine, and their son Oliver. They were on their way and gave me their arrival information, and now I began to worry. Had I done the right thing? Here was a couple that had made only one trip outside of Canada, and that was to New York, a few hundred miles away. Now they were travelling half way around the world, so far away that if they travelled any farther they’d be on their way back home.

The funniest part of our voyage to Thailand is that both Steve and I realized that, although we’d made plans to rendezvous in the airport in Bangkok, we had no idea what the other looked like. As luck, or fate, would have things, we walked out of the customs line, I spotted Steve immediately, and we were on our way.

Needless to say, our trip to Thailand was phenomenal: there’s nothing like having a “man in Bangkok” to get you grounded and oriented. You can read more about our trip in a series of posts I made at the time:

• Wild Blue Yonder
• Other side of the world…
• Tuk Tuk
• Accessing the Web
• Chatuchak Weekend Market
• Crafty Thailand
• Leaving Chiang Mai
• Phitsanulok
• The Story of the Good Time Girls
• Phitsanulok to Bangkok
• Back in Canada

Our trip to Thailand infected us with the “travel bug” and we’ve been across the US, and then to Spain since, and are eager for more.

If you’re looking to jump start a life of travel, Who Needs a Road? is a good place to start.

I’ve developed a strange obsession with voyages around the world. Ever since I stumbled across Who Needs a Road? three years ago, I’ve been compelled by stories of expeditions — by car, boat, horse-drawn cart, bicycle — that set out to circumnavigate the world.

I can’t say what it is about this that entrances me so, but I could happily spend all my waking hours reading tales of tire changes in the jungles of Burma, of border crossings into Turkey, and of arranging for the transport of horses across the Pacific.

It would seem that the logical conclusion of this obsession would be to actually set out to do it myself, and that is, in fact, a secret plan that I hold in the far back reaches of my mind.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to start this very-focussed little weblog to share my passion with others, with hopes that I will reach into the community of round-the-world groupies and share resources, pointers and ideas.

So while on the main weblog you will read tales of my petty everyday life, here you will read only of loft world-circling books, resources, websites and more.