Gameshow legend Jim Bowen would famously draw back the curtain and tell contestants… ‘let’s look at what you could have won.’
It’s how I feel about Chicago.
Two years ago I was invited to the Windy City but had to respectfully turn it down…
Because my Dear Old Mum decided to turn 90 then!
A dose of the Blues
Chicago chic
The pictures of one colleague up on the stage singing the Blues, the group drinking Chicago craft beer and pizza and watching baseball at Wrigley Field didn’t help.
So what do you do when Plan A is taken off the table.
Move onto Plan B.
Which was to go this year, particularly as it’s the 100th anniversary of the Volstead Act, the start of Prohibition.
Until COVID-19 intervened.
Back with a bang
That’s St Patrick’s Day for you
So, onto Plan C and thanks to our friends American Holidays I can see a door squeezing open again.
AH, who think of everything know too that having missed our St Patrick’s Day celebrations, may want an even bigger hooley next year.
And there are few better places than Chicago where they literally turn the river green.
It’s all part of a pitch by AH to remind us that America WILL reopen and when it does he will be first in the queue.
Celebrate St Patrick’s Day with the family in Chicagowith American Holidays from €659pp.
Watch therefore for ye know neither the.day nor the hour that the Son of Man cometh – Matthew 25
Ignoring that this is the Parable of the Ten Virgins and that it deals with how prepared or otherwise they were to serve the bridegroom.
But there is a message here about preparedness and the buzz phrase ‘stay alert’ and, scholar that he is, I’m sure Boris Johnson would know of the passage’s significance.
Though, of course we could never see Martin Luther in his pomp now but you couldn’t help but get a sense of the man in Saxony.
And there is a preacher at Luther’s church, the Frauenkirche in Dresden worthy of his famous predecessor.
As he recalled his own father taking him to the ruins of the church where only the statue of Luther still stood and vowed that one day it would be rebuilt.
His near namesake is all over Washington where his statue remains unfinished in homage to the unfinished struggle.
While in Memphis https://www.civilrightsmuseum.org his last resting place The Promised Land the Civil Rights Tourist will want to take in the Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ Headquarters) in Memphis, Tennessee.
A little corner of Queen’s, New York, will forever be Co. Donegal.
For 60 years ex-pats and people who aren’t called Pat but love their craic have chosen The Irish Cottage as their place of refuge.
From the humdrum and their troubles at home.
A Donegal dream
Here Danny and Kathleen McNulty would make them feel part of their family and as close to being in Donegal https://www.govisitdonegal.com as you could be… 5,000kms from Ireland.
An emotional moment: At the Irish Cottage
Full disclosure here, Danny and Kathleen McNulty are my uncle and auntie.
The force of Nature that she was, Auntie Kathleen, passed onto the great Irish Cottage in the sky last month.
Where Uncle Danny would have been waiting for with her favourite drink.
Cottage industry
I first visited the Irish Cottage in 1983 before I could even legally drink but it didn’t stop Auntie Kathleen have me moving kegs out back.
King of Queens: Andy Murray, US Open champion In 2012
All the cousins were employed there to varying degrees over the years.
The canopy was lowered on a Queen’s institution – Steve Buscemi (of Boardwalk Empire) is a patron – last month to mark Auntie Kathleen’s passing.
Break soda bread together
I have a wealth of memories of the Irish Cottage.
Particularly the last occasion we broke (soda) bread there.
And the McNultys got the greater family out from Long Island.
And we had their famous Surf ‘n’ Turf… I could still be trying to finish it now.
The Lady and the scamp
Visitors to New York https://www.nycvb.com will obviously and rightly take in the iconic sites…
The Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty. the Rockefeller Center, Broadway er al.
Where the US Open tennis https://ustanew2.gotennissource.com is a unique experience and where another famous Scot (Andy Murray) rocked NY when he won the men’s title in 2012.
And to think that just a couple of months ago an underground abandoned street from the Black Death was open…
And drawing in ghoulish visitors in Edinburgh.
It might just give us solace though to reflect that our forebears had it worse.
A city under a city… The Real Mary King’s Close
It wasn’t just that the residents of Mary King’s Close https://www.realmarykingsclose.com were boarded up, they didn’t even have Netflix.
You can see how they lived on a trip to the Scottish capital https://edinburgh.org where the Old Town seeps horrible history.
How they lived in the Middle Ages
The EyamPlague Village Museum https://www.eyam-museum.org.uk, in Derbyshire in the English Midlands, is another example of how Medieval people lived with The Plague.
In their case sealing their village off in a remarkable feat of self-sacrifice from their neighbours.
Our pandemic will pass, and will become a chapter in history alongside the Plague of Athens and the Plague of Justinian.
So how will we chronicle these days in which we live?
Well, we have started already, curating the artefacts, masks, robes, PPE and everyday objects that we surround ourselves with just now.
And the everyday stories that inform and entertain.
It will come as little surprise then that it is the idiosyncratic, curious and super-efficient Germans who have been to the fore here.
Oh, the Cologne
Historian Rita Wagner has been curating a time capsule of the spring of 2020 for future generations for Cologne City Museum
Germans know from their own tragic war history that it is vital not to forget.
Cologne https://www.cologne-tourism.com, a city I know from my nearby Oktoberfest adventures, stands proudly with its cathedral at its centrepoint against the ravages of adversity.
So what do I have in common with Boris Johnson? The art of scribbling, of course, but also Hergé’s The Further Adventures of Tintin.
It transpires that the most famous ginger boy journalist in history has been keeping the convalescing British prime minister’s spirits up.
Because rather than poring over government papers and that pesky bug the premier has been gorging on Tintin adventures.
Encore Tintin
In French obviously!
More Tintin… this time in English
Maybe though he’s looking for inspiration on how to beat the bug because this coronavirus really could be a script out of a Tintin book.
Un pour BorisOne for Boris
Tintin and the Curse of COVID-19
The one where Tintin and Snowy head for Wuhan and the white fox terrier is captured by wet market traders who want to sell him for food.
And he also exposes a laboratory which is harvesting viruses.
We all need a scientist
All the gang come out, or are there already…
Thomson and Thompson are on a lecher tour, while Bianca Castafiore is performing to adoring Chinese ausiences.
And ‘blistering barnacles’ Captain Haddock is getting into all kinds of scrapes while Professor Calculus is researching a cure.
My journalist hero (no, not Boris)
Of course Tintin has been a hero for Fiftysomething journalists all over the world.
With the BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardiner even retracing Tintin’s steps for a TV special.
Hergé, interestingly, never left Belgium and his grasp of the world came from a photographer friend.
A joke in every line
Which means that the settings were somewhat stylised and his characters stereotyped.
But the adventures were, and still are captivating, and inspired a love of travel in all of us.
His adventures
The first of his 24 books was Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets which he wrote in the Twenties and where Frank revisited. Which you should do… https://www.visitrussia.org.uk.
While Hergé, like many young men in the Twenties was transfixed by America.
Tintin does travel out to China https://www.chinadiscovery.com in The Blue Lotus and other exotic destinations Cigars of the Pharaoh and The Crab with the Golden Claws in Northern Africa.
I got a glimpse of Egypt which just stirred my passion to get out there (I had passed up on Sharm el-Sheikh a couple of years ago) from the Jordan side of the Red Sea.
And I had the type of misadventure that Hergé couldn’t even make up, and which I might even reprise when I stir up some courage again… https://www.visitmorocco.com/en.
The best place to see Hergé, of course, is in his homeland, the Hergé Museum in Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve outside Brussels https://www.museeherge.com/en.
These days we are all confined to barracks and in the case of Boris Johnson bed-ridden by COVID-19.
So why not, do like Boris and let Tintin take you around the world.
It seems like a lifetime ago when we sat down for our annual Wendy Wu Chinese New Year dinner in Dublin.
You can read what you want into this year being the Year of the Rat.
And talked about what then seemed a distant (and Asian) threat… Coronavirus in China.
The city of Wuhan had been put in lockdown and our hosts, of course, were seeing the effects long before the rest of us.
The date, January 23, seemed insignificant other than I was long looking forward to one of my highlights of the year.
When the clock started ticking
And not just because it meant meeting up with old friends and the feast in front of us at Chai Yo Teppanyaki on Baggot Street Lower https://www.chaiyo.ie
But when we chronicle these times that date of January 23, 2020 will mark the day that Wuhan locked down.
And there’s even more…. Chinese New Year
Seventy-six days later, on April 7, the region emerged from lockdown.
And from this website’s perspective Travel began its fightback.
Chinese travel
With The Guardian reporting that China Eastern was operating 30 flights from Wuhan to other cities in China.
Like Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, with more than 1,600 trips booked.
Let’s get Shanghaied in Shanghai
More than 55,000 passengers were said to have booked tickets to leave the city, according to the railway operator.
And long-distance buses had also resumed service.
All of which had passed me by somewhat until my daily trawl as to what the rest of the world was doing brought me back to Wuhan.
And talk of further travel from the city on the Yangtze.
I’ve got The Donald’s ear
Because, and taking into account that no country is the same, 73 days takes Britain from March 23 to July 4.
Now the significance of such a date would not be lost on any of us and we all come from a different starting point.
The West is watching
But it would be great if all of us in the Western World can target that date to get going again.
And while it is unlikely that Donald Trump would follow anything that China does, we can but dream.
Alas the American Travel fair, IPW, bowed to the inevitable when the get-together, which was this year to be held in Las Vegas https://www.lvcva.com, was shelved.
Don’t Cancel Postpone
Those trade partners I visit (yes, and hug) every year are suffering just now.
Honest Abe and Honest Jim: In DC
And I can only reprise on how I found them and their venues, Washington DC, Denver and Anaheim in previous years…
King of Queens: Andy Murray, US Open champion In 2012
The Lady and the scamp
Another famous New Yorker
