Traveling Archives - Contra Mundum

Plage Beau Rivage, Nice, France.

2026 has been a very good year so far. I’ve traveled a fair amount. I’ve walked a whole lot. I’ve read even more.

Four years ago, I started research on an essay that I thought I would have completed long ago. But the topic kept getting bigger. The themes got broader. The subjects I had to explore became even more varied.

The pace of my research is highly influenced by my travel schedule. When I’m in the U.S., I’m surrounded by piles of books that I can sort through at any moment. While I’m in Europe I’m mostly confined to reading the books I’ve carried with me or delving into journal articles via the wonderful University of Georgia library.

In Europe, I also get a chance to think more broadly and to distill a lot of the reading that I’ve done while back in the U.S.

I won’t discuss the topic of my book project. Nor will I bother anybody with a list of titles that I’ve read this year. I can say that it requires me to read the breadth of American history. I can also say that I’ve found some favorite thinkers and scholars among the likes of Stanley Elkins, Sheldon Wolin, Martin Diamond, Henry May, and Harry Stout. Having the opportunity to follow my intellectual instincts, read deeply what I want, to switch gears when I want, to pivot to new fields of inquiry at will, has been a real luxury for which I’m grateful.

This year, I’ve also made more time to walk. In fact, this year so far, my wife and I have walked 60 minutes briskly each day for 182 days in a row–not including the 9 days in August when the flu knocked me flat.

More than anything, our feat, which we are continuing, has been a scheduling challenge. So far this year, we’ve completed our daily hourly walk in the following places:

Madrid, Spain; Athens, Georgia; Nice, France; Carros, France; New York City; Newark, New Jersey; Los Angeles, California; Denver Airport; Doha Airport; Billings, Montana; Livingston, Montana; Gillette, Wyoming; Anchorage, Alaska; Singapore; Seattle Washington; Schweigen, Germany; Neustadt an der Weinstrasse, Germany; Oslo, Norway; Nijmegen, Netherlands.

God willing, we’ll get to Naples, Italy, and Dresden, Germany, next month. But now I’m getting ahead of myself.

Lastly, this year I can finally say that I’ve visited all fifty states. Over the summer, we took a marvelous road trip through South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana before flying on to Alaska. I saw the Army barracks in Anchorage where my father lived during the Korean War, walked the battlefield where George Custer and his troops were routed, and visited the memorial for the hundreds of Lakota Indians who were massacred by U.S. soldiers at Wounded Knee. I was tempted to write a few essays after my road trip. (And one day I will.) But the book research called. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my rather chaotic life, it’s that focus is key.

Hasta Luego.

Istanbul

Last night, a group of very kind Bahraini women I met at a café here invited me to live in their wealthy little country in the Persian Gulf. My qualifications? I looked Arab. From which country? I asked. Kuwait, they all agreed.

When I first traveled to Europe as a 14-year-old kid, more than a few Spaniards I met insisted I was Chinese, which roughly translated to “really foreign” or “completely unlike us.” But more recently, my physiognomy has just as often given others reasons to include–rather than exclude–me.

Whether I’m in South Africa or Hawaii, locals are always projecting one or another ethnicity or racial category on me. In Johannesburg I’m “Coloured,” and in Honolulu I’ve often been mistaken for being a mix of Portuguese and Samoan. (Yes, that specific.)

But I shouldn’t say “mistaken,” because I don’t waste time correcting folks who are trying to welcome me into their group. You know what I mean, braddah? If people find common cause with me for my looks, it certainly beats the times those same looks aroused suspicion or plain old prejudice back in the continental US of A.

When the Bahrainis first asked me where I was from, I told them I was born in California. But my Americanness mattered little to them. They had already determined that I was one of them. The way I figured, they were vacationing in a non-Arab country, and they found an excuse to create connection with a chatty stranger.

By the end of our conversation, the youngest member of their group, a medical doctor, walked around the table to show me photos of Bahrain’s capital on her iPhone. Mostly they were nondescript images of marinas, restaurants, and walkways by the Gulf.

“We are an island country surrounded by water,” the doctor told me. And after a brutally hot summer in Madrid, the idea of island life genuinely appealed to me. And suddenly, so did the idea of leaning into my newly anointed Arab identity. I then turned to my new best friends and said, “As-salaam alaikum.”

Tag: Traveling

2026 So Far

Traveling While Brown