Do you want to travel with Charley or Charlie. Charley made a road trip around America in 1960 with his author John Steinbeck. Charley was a poodle. Steinbeck asked "What are Americans like today?". He started in Long Island and followed the outer border of the US from Maine to the Pacific Northwest and down into his native Salinas Valley in California, over to Texas, then up the Deep South and back to New York. He went 10,000 miles. Steinbeck was 58 years old with a critical heart condition, so this was his farewell to his country. The book was published in 1962.
Travels with Charlie, on the other hand, is a weekly feature of Charles Paparella, from Delmarva. He is WBOC's feature reporter and travels the east cost peninsula in Delaware gathering news not normally be considered 'news'. The segment is named after the novel by John Steinbeck. In the book, Steinbeck does the traveling, and Charley is a dog. Our Charlie doesn’t like comparisons, but feels he could hold his own against any dog, although we’d have to see the dog, to be sure.
There are quite a few other Charlies - travel companies, etc. There are many stories about the story of the Travels with Charley - it gets a fact-checking, it gets reviews, there's the 'truth about travels with Charley', and there's Charley's lost chapter. There are titles "Dogging Steinbeck" and "Travels without Charley".
The discussion is whether Steinbeck's work was fact or fiction. That's others to discuss. We'll conclude with some good quotes:
We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
Who has not known a journey to be over and done before the traveler returns? The reverse is also true: many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.
I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.
Our pictures are from Chanticleer Garden, not far from Longwood and Winterthur. It calls itself America's Pleasure Garden.
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