What are your summer travel plans? There still is plenty of time to form your answer to the question being asked at patio parties all around town.
Perhaps you’ll say you’re going to the live music capital of the world: Austin, Texas. Our insider travel writer tells how to do Austin like a local. If you’ve had enough of the heat, maybe you’ll say you’re going to Wisconsin. We did and discovered a Wisconsin beyond beautiful lakes and cheese.
After reading our story, “Near and Far: 10 Takes on Travel” (page 35), you might book a flight to Arkansas to visit two of the state’s extraordinary cultural assets: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville and the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock.
Beach lovers looking for an unparalleled experience might say their family is visiting Rosemary Beach (on the cover of this issue) in the Florida Panhandle, with its cerulean seas, sugar sand beaches, and West Indies architecture.
Or maybe you’ll say, simply, that you are going to visit Johnny Cash. The new Johnny Cash Museum has opened and our Nashville-based travel journalist was there.
Magazine travel journalism generally takes one of two forms: the highly didactic piece — go here, stay there, see that — or the narrative in which the writer shares her first-person color commentary. The type of travel writing we favor and strive to present in this summer-travel focused issue is a hybrid: Great writing and personal narrative shared in the spirit of giving readers an understanding of a place that is inspiring regardless of whether you plan to visit. Yet, we hope you do visit, and that you use our stories as a guide.
It’s often said that European trips are “trips of a lifetime.” Frances Enzler, a local swim coach and instructor and advisor at the University of Evansville, and her daughter, Franny, embarked on such a trip this spring — a trip that would ultimately help define their lives. Managing Editor Victoria Grabner tells the Enzlers’ remarkable story of discovery in, “A Fated Destination” (page 32).
Like the hundreds of families touched by Frances and her husband, Dave, through youth swimming, our family knew Frances as a hard-driving, positive, smart, empathetic coach. When Dave called my husband — under Frances’ protests, so little does she like to be in the spotlight — a few days before his wife and daughter departed to Europe to tell us the reason for their planned European journey, we were astonished and knew the story should be shared. Frances and Franny traveled to Europe to be united with Frances’ Austrian birth parents. Clearly the most thrilling and satisfying aspect of publishing a city magazine is the privilege we have to learn more about what we think we already know, and to craft this knowledge into stories to share.
As always, I look forward to hearing from you.
Kristen K. Tucker
Publisher & Editor
Letters to the editor can be sent to letters@evansvilleliving.com. Read “300 Words,” the editor’s blog, at evansvilleliving.com/blog, each week.
