Travel – Page 4 – I Don't Get It

Choo Choo Chuesday

Today is Tuesday Travel day (but not for you or anyone else on this planet right now), and today’s mode of travel is TRAINS. My granddad loved trains, often joining the engineer up front, donning the requisite engineer cap. While most of his train schedules and pamphlets are normal map-sized (the kind we once bought at gas stations), none of today’s images are larger than your hand. Most measure only five inches tall.

The majority are from 1934-1935, but this one is about to hit the century mark.

Folks back then would have needed a good pair of glasses to read the small font to find a route and a fare to their destination.

Advertising air conditioning was very important.

Even if was glaringly racist.

It certainly sounds necessary, after reading about the “torrid, sooty blasts from open windows.”

The font and artwork are still eye-catching after all these years.

The luncheon options, however, would not fare so well today. Ox tongue? Prune whip? Prune cornbread? What on earth?

Perhaps you’d be better served by keeping your appetite until you hit the Fred Harvey counter at Union Station (where Harvey Girls served up lunch). Fred Harvey advertisements were ubiquitous on time cards.

Why, even Judy Garland was a Harvey Girl in the movies!

And she sang about the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, which were all train routes.

What about you all? Have you ever ridden a train? Did you get a cool time card? Where were you going?

Welcoming Third Reich Touts Beautiful Country

Yep, it’s grandpa’s map time again. This time, it’s Germany! The last referenced date on it is ’33. Hitler has just become chancellor, he’s begun his purge of the civil service, professing national socialism. The Gestapo is born, and Germany is ripe for visitors!

It’s so hard to appreciate a large map online, especially one that has been folded since the 30s, with stiff, sharp creases.

But you can get a taste of the fanciful and intricate illustrations. Here we see it referred to as the German Reich, though this is the first year of the rise of the Third Reich.

None of its citizens can know what the next few years will bring, or how their children will become indoctrinated.

Can you appreciate the colors, the birds, the animals, and churches? What a happy place of frolic.

By the way, friends and family who have lived in and visited Germany say it is a beautiful country today! Add it to your bucket list.

Desperate Times Call For Desperate Bottled Water Alternative

Perhaps your grocery shelves are bare of bottled water thanks to the numero 19 virus . The good news is that it flows in the pipes in your home. Is it nasty? Put a couple filters on it, like we do. We have the best-tasting agua in the neighborhood.

But should your water supply run low (perhaps you are out and about, as the CDC has scolded us not to, even though it’s Spring Break, and most breaks have now become four weeks instead of one, and no sane teenager is going to stay home for a one month vacation, so off to spread some virus they shall go), remember that Coors Light is basically the same thing. Just worse.

Second Byrd Antarctic Expedition

Among my granddad’s things is this gloriously colorful 24 x 18 map. My guess is that Gramps mailed his request to General Foods, as Grape-Nuts was one of the foods Byrd took on his journey.

Per curtiswrightmaps.com,

It depicts Antarctica from a polar perspective, with the tip of South America visible at the very top of the image. Large areas are labeled as unexplored, inaccessible, or “claimed.” Inset maps of Byrd’s route south and the area near his camp are provided to the audience as a helpful aid. As explained in the decorative title cartouche, Byrd’s second expedition was the first to feature live two way radio broadcasts. A radio station sponsored by CBS was set up on the base camp ship and relayed weekly updates to New York via Buenos Aires.

Below, you can see the copyright of 1934. One wonders if, at age 14, Gramps ever put this on his wall. It does not appear so. Or has it simply sat inside this envelope for 86 years, going from house to house each time he moved, packed away in a box and never tossed away?