Podcast News and Dates
November is an unusually busy month for travel anniversaries, including a few opportunities to revisit some of our earlier episodes:
10 November is the generally accepted date that Henry Stanley “found” the famous missionary David Livingstone. Our Livingstone episode explores Dr. Livingstone's life and travels beyond his famous meeting with Stanley.
This past summer, we took a trip down Route 66. The famous highway officially turns 100 on 11 November. Our episode features plenty of roadside Americana, but also a discussion of those travellers and motorists who found the road far less inviting and sometimes had to drive many extra miles to find a bed and a hot meal.
Finally, 14 November marks 137 years since journalist Nellie Bly departed Hoboken on her epic quest to beat Phileas Fogg’s (fictional) eighty-day trip around the world. Our Nellie Bly episode recaps Bly’s seventy-two-day circumnavigation and the race against a real-life competitor who Nellie didn’t even know existed until halfway through the trip. Nevertheless, she did find time to meet Fogg’s creator, Jules Verne, and acquire a badly behaved monkey, because primates-as-pets is a weird throughline in a lot of our travellers’ tales.
Research Notes
At what point does somebody else’s horrible death become a stop on the afternoon itinerary?
