Other Voices

"I'm told the French say that when you visit a new place for a week you come home and write a book. When you visit for a month you come home and write an article. When you visit for a year you come home and have nothing to say. So, perhaps the important part of travel writing is to visit briefly."

Rick Goodfellow (klef@corcomsv.corcom.com)

• My favorite excerpts
• Canadian reactions
• Reactions from the US
• Reactions from Europe
• Reactions from Australia and New Zealand
• Comments with a Techno or Web angle
• Comments with an Alaska angle
• Comments with a Canine angle
• Comments with a Photography angle
• Men of Few Words
• Pre-Web Comments (from people who only saw the text)

These are comments selected from the approximately 1 MB of feedback I got on Travels with Samantha from June 1993 when I started mailing it from the road through December 1994 when I got around to picking through the RMAIL files.

If you sent a comment and it does not appear, that is probably because some combination of the UNIX mailer and the UNIX file system ate about half of the feedback messages (including my absolute favorite that said something like "you have made my laugh, cry, roll on the floor...")

Of course, a couple of years after I published Travels with Samantha, I figured out how to harness the power of a relational database to the Web for collaboration. So my new Web services collect comments in real time and stuff them into an RDBMS.