Literary travels at home and abroad
The picturesque town of Haworth in Yorkshire, England, was home to the Brontë sisters — Emily, Charlotte and Anne — and the surrounding moors served as the setting for some of their fiction, most notably Wuthering Heights. The Black Bull (left) was a watering hole favored by their wayward brother, Branwell. We stopped here for a pint after a literary walking tour of the town.
Inside the Black Bull, we took in the atmosphere and pints of Guinness. We raised a toast to the Brontë sisters, a sketch of whom hangs behind us on the wall.
The following day, we braved the misty weather for a 2.5 mile hike out in the beautiful heather moors to a spot favored by the Brontë sisters, known as “the meeting of the waters” due to its gushing waterfall. (Though when we visited, the waterfall was really more of a trickle!) Pictured is the famed Brontë chair, where Emily used to recline while playing with tadpoles in the water beneath her feet.
At the Globe Theatre in London, waiting for a production of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors to begin. “Groundlings” are standing below, but we opted for seats in the gallery.
The Dashiell Hammett Suite at the Hotel Union Square in San Francisco, CA, is where Shannon slumbered before heading south to uncover Steinbeck’s haunts in Monterey and Salinas. This atmospheric guest room is an homage to crime fiction scribe Hammett and his characters, notably The Maltese Falcon‘s Sam Spade.
The Steinbeck House in Salinas, California, was the writer’s birthplace and is now a luncheon restaurant serving delicious fare made from Salinas Valley produce. Shannon and her husband dined in its Victorian ambience before paying a visit to the National Steinbeck Center located nearby. (Oprah Winfrey once taped a segment of her show on the house’s front lawn when her book club discussed Steinbeck’s semi-autobiographical novel East of Eden.) Tours of the house are given on Sunday afternoons during the summer.
Remarkably, the huge windmills that Don Quixote valiantly battled still stand — more than 400 years after the errant knight mistook them for oppressive giants. Joni and her husband followed in the footsteps of Quixote and his creator, Miguel Cervantes, in the sunbaked La Mancha region of central Spain, and you can, too, by downloading the Quixote route map. The windmill pictured here (just one of a cluster of ten atop a scenic hillside) is in Campo de Criptana, a cultural heritage site.
Another important site on the Quixote trail is the picturesque university town of Alcala de Henares, just 20 minutes north of Madrid by train. This is the thought to be the place of Cervantes’ birth, and the author’s traditional Castilian-style home has been recreated on the site where the original is believed to have stood, at the Museo Casa Natal de Cervantes.
Here is Joni in front of the Cervantes birthplace home having a conversation with Quixote and his faithful sidekick, Sancho Panza.
While visiting Florida during the Christmas holidays, Joni ventured down to laid-back Key West to check out the Spanish colonial-style Hemingway Home and Museum, where Papa lived from 1928-1939. It was his first home on U.S. soil after living abroad for most of his adult life.
Particularly moving was seeing Old Hem’s office (pictured), where he spent some of the most productive years of his life and produced all or parts of several works including Death in the Afternoon, The Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not (set on Key West), The Snows of Kilimanjaro and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
While there, she couldn’t resist a stop in the famed watering hole, Sloppy Joe’s, to have a Papa Dobles, a rum-based cocktail originating from a recipe created by the author. The bar operated as a speakeasy during Prohibition and its original owner was Hemingway’s fishing companion and drinking buddy, Joe Russell. (During the time in which Papa resided on the isle, the bar was located down the street in what is now Captain Tony’s Saloon.)
Last fall, Joni and her husband visited the charming burg of Hay-on-Wye, Wales, otherwise known as the “Town of Books,” thanks to its ratio of 30 bookstores for a mere 1,500 residents. It’s a bibliophile’s heaven, as well as home to the famous Guardian/Hay Festival held here annually each May. Pictured is the honesty bookshop (take a book, leave 50 pence) on the grounds of Hay Castle.
On a road trip through Alamaba with her friend Erin Hennicke, Shannon paid a visit to the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery — where she channeled Jazz Age glamour by posing with Zelda’s elegant cigarette holder (the flapper looks on in the portrait hanging on the wall). The museum, housed in a residence the Fitzgeralds once occupied, is the only one in the world devoted to the couple.
The Southern adventures continued in Monroeville, Alabama, hometown of Harper Lee, where every spring a production based on her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird is staged. Part one is set on the grounds of the Old Courthouse Museum (left), and the second half takes place inside in the courtroom Lee used as the model for the one in the book. In addition to the courtroom, restored to its 1930s appearance, the museum has an exhibit devoted to Lee and another to her childhood playmate, In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s author Truman Capote.
The mysterious mansion in Salem, Massachusetts, that inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables beckoned to Shannon and her husband, who paid a visit during a summer weekend. Colonial-style gardens border the abode, which is picturesquely situated on Salem Harbor.
