Founded in 1934, the Foreign Travel Club (FTC) of San Francisco, the oldest of its kind in California, celebrates its 75th birthday this year.

 

The Club was launched by a band of enterprising men who challenged the monopoly of the local travel scene by employees of the Southern Pacific Railway.
 
The Club is non-sectarian and apolitical. Led over the years by respected executives of the travel industry, the Club membership has comprised individuals who have contributed to the growth of the single most important industry that enhances the quality of life and the vitality of the San Francisco Bay Area.
 
The FTC's monthly luncheon meetings, featuring speakers on travel topics are occasions where past and present travel industry executives, travel writers and frequent travelers meet to share experiences and promote the business of travel in a spirit of camaraderie.
 

Registration begins at 11:30 am. Guests are welcome at these luncheons. 

Travel + Leisure names Bangkok world's top city

  

 

ShermansTravel editors present their top picks for secluded U.S. beaches, where quiet coasts invite in-the-know sunbathers to savor their relative solitude.

 

Enderts Beach, CA
Living as long as 2,000 years and growing as high as 35 stories, the imposing old-growth redwoods that make up Northern California's Redwoods National Park tend to overshadow the region's sublimely secluded U.S. beaches and coastline, which are separated from the lush forest by wide swaths of sand and marsh.

 

Bowman's Beach, FL
The secret's out about the beauty of Sanibel Island's linen-white sand beaches - situated about 25 miles southwest of Fort Myers, Florida - so you won't be alone in searching for a stretch of a secluded U.S. beach to call your own.

 

Carova Beach, NC
This barrier beach covers the upper stretches of the Outer Banks, North Carolina, and is the most undeveloped of an already spartan beach chain.

 

Cumberland Island, GA
This protected National Seashore in Georgia (it's also designated a United Nations International Biosphere Reserve) has been an in-demand getaway and secluded U.S. beach since the late 19th century, when the Carnegies used it as a family retreat.

 

That Aramaic, the language of pre-Biblical times, is still spoken in parts of Syria? That there were several warrior queens as well as a female apostle in Syria and Lebanon? That you can have tea in a Stone Age village in Jordan? That camel meat is absolutely delicious? That the Wadi Rum in Jordan is not something you drink? 

 

Having traveled from the mysterious souks of Damascus and ancient "Dead Cities" of Northern Syria to the hidden cliff city of Jordan's Petra to the chic nightlife and galleries of Beirut (often called "The Paris of the Middle East") Diane and John will share tales and images from their recent month-long pilgrimage among these crossroads of some of our earliest civilizations.

 

Also, flying in from Jordan to be a part of our program is Alena Bartoli who has lived there for a number of years and leads  outstanding educational travel programs through South Jordan Sojourn. She knows everyone and everything about Jordan!

 

 

Alena Bartoli: A graduate of Yale University, Alena has has been roaming the world since 1978. She has lived in Jordan for a number of years and runs South Jordan Sojourn  educational travel programs that allow travelers to explore, encounter and embrace the cultures, history, language and peoples of southern Jordan and beyond.  (www.enter-east.com)

 

(Corner of Mason St.)
San Francisco, CA

COST $26 Luncheon and Program

 

Truth is, I thought I knew Lebanon. It was very old; older than olive trees; older than recorded history; old enough to have sent sailors from the port of Tyre to found a port in Egypt. They had named it Carthage, which in their language meant simply "new town." Archeological digs witnessed  that the town of Byblos was born before 5,000 B.C. and that, as a port exporting papyrus, it gave its name to Bible. ("Paper," of course, is just papyrus writ small.) Tyre and Sidon exported fabrics dyed purple, made from the shellfish purpura (Latin) or porphyra (Greek). Eventually, as words do, this migrated into the phrase "born to the color purple" used mostly for kings and bishops because only they could afford it.

 

Who wouldn't love such a place?

Old Byblos Harbor.  As a port exporting papyrus, it gave its name to Bible. 
 
The Beirut of the late '60s and following decades smacked of "la belle vie," showing off its French heritage in food, fashion, and fun. (After all, since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the end of World War I, it had lived under the mandate of France.) One stretched on sunny beaches, water-skied on the sparkling Mediterranean, and indulged the self in the luxurious trappings of the Phoenicia Hotel, where the world that mattered met.

 

 

One day, at a construction site on one of the major downtown streets, a workman fell underground and found himself in a Roman villa, complete with wall lamps, sculptures, and the sniff of history. Like any Frenchmen worth their garlic, the Lebanese turned it into a restaurant.

 

 

 

Ah, Beirut! But it came time for Baalbek and other Roman presences in the Békaa Valley (also home of local gastronomy and wines), for the Cedars (of Lebanon, where else?), and Sidon and Tyre and, and... .

 

The Phoenicians were uninterested in conquest; they traveled for trade. Yet across their little land (home to the Canaanites of the Bible, remember) tromped the armies of other, more compulsive civilizations: all the really old ones, followed by Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamelukes, and finally Ottomans. All these left residues of their cultures behind, willingly or not. Quite willingly, we wandered to look at them.

 

The Romans, as usual, built the best and the biggest. Baalbek is their largest remaining site: ancient Heliopolis, city of the sun. To stroll in its ruins, to sit on a handy column in the shade, to hear the haunting voice of the flute-like mirwiz is to feel the hair rise on the back of your neck, to wonder what it's all about, anyway.

 

Here it was certainly about power: The six famous Corinthian columns that soar into the ever-blue sky must have told the hordes who tramped by the Temple of Jupiter that there the Roman gods were in residence. Yet even the columns are dwarfed by the mysterious megaliths that support them; in the world comparable only to the stoneworks of Egypt. The Temple of Bacchus is the best-preserved Roman structure in the Middle East. 

 

Tyre is home to earth's largest antique hippodrome (where chariot races were staged); it also boasts a superb triumphal arch and Roman aqueducts.
 

A World Heritage Site, Ouadi Qadisha (HolyValley) now celebrates the treasured Cedars of God (Horsh Arz el-Rab). Nearby is one of the earliest Christian monastic settlements - in the world, naturally.
 
On that first visit, having purchased along the road a Byzantine master-work (made last week), I was guilty of asking the merchant whether he thought war would come again. "No," he shook a turbaned head. "Not." I believed him because I wanted to write that.
 
Less than a decade later, in 1975, the Lebanese Civil War shook the land of cypresses. But after 1990, peace broke out again and Beirut undertook a costly reconstruction. Then the month-long war between Israel and the Hezbollah raked the civil structure. However, because of its tightly regulated financial system (once Lebanon was "the Switzerland of the Middle East"), it bounced back and in 2009, the country enjoyed 9% economic growth and smiled while welcoming the largest number of tourists in its history.

Lebanon is older than yesterday. I hope it can be as young as tomorrow.