Reporting back from an enjoyable holiday, and I can happily state that Carol did not buy me a Lexus for Christmas. I did not buy her one either. In fact, we are trying to sell the one she owns.

What you crave in reading a travel narrative is the unexpected, a taste of fear, the sudden emergence by the roadside of a wicked policeman, threatening harm.

Ever since she’s been able to walk, talk and spurn, my youngest granddaughter has regarded me with a mix of antipathy, chagrin and disdain.

Keeping up with this idea of unknown unknowns to the point of belaboring it (as we say in New Orleans, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing), Carol and I arrived in Oxford with no thought of signing up for any sort of walking tour of the city. After all, I had spent six weeks here in 1971 matriculating in a summer program at Oxford University’s Exeter College. So the visit to the city began very much as a known known. I simply wanted to show Carol that I was once an Oxford scholar.

There are known knowns when Carol and I travel, and there are known unknowns. There are also, I suppose, unknown knowns, although I’m not precisely sure what such things might be. But my favorite attractions in traveling are the unknown unknowns. Unknown unknowns are what former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld identified when explaining why his and Cheney’s Iraq War was not the cakewalk they’d promised it would be. For me, unknown unknowns are the unique and worthwhile experiences a given destination might offer had I taken the time to consult a travel guide before arriving. Sometimes unknown unknowns turn out to be significant, such as arriving at Big Ben in London to find it fully ensconced in scaffolding, or discovering the Winston Churchill’s War Room and Downton Abbey’s real life Highclere Castle sell out well in advance of the day you had planned to attend. Then there are the unknown unknowns that turn out to be completely unexpected, but wholly enjoyable surprises. It’s for these, that I maintain a steadfast reluctance to plan ahead or try to learn anything much about where I’m going until I get there.

   It was when Carol and I were handed menus by the First Class carriage staff that I realized we had achieved a whole new level of British rail travel. I smiled aristocratically at Carol, as I placed my order for the Beef and Yorkshire Pudding and a glass of Cabernet. We had returned triumphantly to the realm of the English Leisure Class, and not a moment too soon. Harumph.

   As I’ve written before, my prime interest in travel is to simply go. The best way I’ve found to go is by rail. Consequently, there is no luxury offered on board a train that is beyond my otherwise pedestrian tastes to wish to avail myself.

Top 6 Napa Valley Wine Tour

Are you searching for an incredible way to treat your wine lover friend in Napa Valley?  Do you personally enjoy visiting the wineries?  If so, it is going to be very hard to choose from the numerous wineries from Napa Valley. While most of the wineries at Napa Valley close at 5 pm, some are open even after 5 pm. When almost all the wineries need prior appointments, some are open for tasting without a booking. There are even wineries that specialize in red wines only and some others have white wines as well.

Just to make it easier for you, here are our picks of the Napa Valley wine tour.

   I was reading a travel narrative, and the writer used a word that struck me in an epiphanal way. Theroux was describing his coastal tour of Britain (The Kingdom by the Sea) as “long coastal stretches of decrepitude.”

   That I wanted Carol and I to see what he was writing about on our own upcoming trip (“…what had been villages well served by railway lines had become curiously anorexic-looking and tumble down, somehow deserving the epitaph from ‘Ozymandias.'”) struck me as very odd: I wanted to sightsee. As I read on (“defunct viaducts, abandoned cuttings, former railway stations, ruined railway bridges) it occurred to me Theroux was describing what 1500 years from now would be the ancient ruins of a then former world empire. The funny thing is the current existing sites of 1500 year-old ruins hold no interest for me. In fact little is more boring than a well-preserved and properly docented or audiophoned historic pile of slave-constructed rocks, except for maybe the section of medieval religious paintings in a typical European art museum.

Anyone reading between the lines of this travel blog has to surmise that the way Carol and I eat and drink in Europe is not sustainable year round. Even when we spent all that time in Germany, we still found ways to turn the food pyramid on its head (thanks to some wonderful Italian restaurants there). Inevitably though, we wound up enjoying our last meal in Europe the way diners on death row enjoyed theirs. “When we get home, we’re going on a diet,” Carol would intone solemnly. I would receive those words with the same death row chill an inmate would experience in learning there’d be no intervention from the Governor.

  Moses might probably understand, but that’s about the only one. And even he would note I wasn’t looking for any Promised Land.

   In June 1971, I left the United States, and spent the next nearly three years traveling abroad. Always with very little money, I amounted to little more than a vagrant for a good portion of that time. On the positive side, I was genuinely looking for some place and station in life where I belonged. It had never occurred to me in that time of my life that in order to find what you’re looking for, you need some idea of what that is.