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.
 

The railroads built the west and it's fantastic that some of the original and most picturesque western rail routes have survived and are accessible from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Marines' Memorial Club

Every meeting features a 50-50 raffle and one or more lucky draws that you must be present to win. 

On a morning so muggy that my contact lenses floated into the corners of my eyes, I slogged through rain forest along the Road of Loving Hearts that crawls up 1,549-foot Mount Vaea on the island of Upolu in Samoa. Insects with unknown names cackled in the jungly canopy. Soggy muck squished in my sneakers. "What in the name of Caedmon am I doing here?"
 
"Looking for RLS," the patron saint of poets replied.
 
Aye. Just a wee bit ahead, in that primeval tangle, lay the Teller of Tales: Tusitala, a.k.a. Robert Louis Stevenson.

 

 
Robert Louis Stevenson's tomb on Mt. Vaea, Samoa.

Finally, the mount rounded off, the vegetation gave way to a vast view, the white marble tomb rose above a cerulean sea, and the writer's words read themselves to the pilgrim:

 

An undoubted fascination lures the traveler to the great cemeteries of earth: Westminster Abbey and the Tower in London, Père-Lachaise and Montparnasse in Paris, the American Cemetery and Memorial in Manila, Egypt's peerless Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens.

 
Paul Gauguin's monument on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas.

 

But a deeper wonder attaches to tombs that enshrine those who rest in near-solitude as well as in peace, such as Ėmile Gauguin in French Polynesia, the remote Marquesas, and the even remoter Hiva Oa; William Butler Yeats in Drumcliffe Churchyard, County Sligo, Ireland; Eleanor of Aquitaine at Fontevraud Abbey in France's Valley of the Loire; beautiful Rupert Brooke on the Greek isle of Skyros, or Vincent van Gogh in the hamlet of Auvers: worthy pilgrimage places all.

 
Eleanor of Aquitaine rests in the Abbey of Fontevraud.

 

Stevenson the vagabond, born in 1850 in Edinburgh, slipped in and out of public fashion all his short and sickly life: children's author, poet, essayist, playwright, Gothic and romantic novelist, historian, anthropologist.
 
The young man studied in desultory style at Edinburgh University, earning a never-used law degree in order to please his father, traipsing off to Europe, and - at the age of 26 - falling in love with Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne at an art colony in France. (Not good, thought his parents. She was 10 years older than he; she was married; worse, she was an American and an off-and-on Californian at that.)  They married, against many odds, and honeymooned at a mining shack on Mount St. Helena near Napa.
 
The writer had suffered all his life from tuberculosis,  which remained undiagnosed until after his death. He died of a brain hemorrhage at age 44 at home, Villa Vailima, outside Samoa's main town of Apia. Stevenson was at the peak of his writerly powers, world-renowned for "Treasure Island," "Kidnapped" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" among other classics. (At one time, it was all but illegal to grow up in the U.S. without reading "A Child's Garden of Verses.")
 
Forty local chiefs bore the body up the trail to his final resting place. When Fanny died in Santa Barbara, 21 years later, her ashes were interred by their daughter Isobel next to Robert Louis' tomb. Villa Vailima today is a touching museum.
 
On his honeymoon, RLS had penned "Silverado Squatters."  If you can't call upon the pair in Samoa, you might visit them in Robert Louis Stevenson State Park, a two-mile round trip hike up-mountain from the Highway 29 pull-out seven miles north of Calistoga. The shack is gone but the memorial, an open book, remains, although the inscription is difficult to read: 

 

It's a much easier task to do homage to one of the world's most popular painters, Vincent van Gogh. You have only to take an hour-long train trip out of Paris' Gare du Nord or Saint-Lazare to the leafy little riverside village of Auvers-sur-Oise. (If you drive, it takes about 30 minutes.) 
 
Vincent spent the last 70 days of his life in a creative frenzy producing more than a painting a day, some of  them canvases of the countryside that rank among his most cherished works. At his beloved brother Theo's urging, he had left the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and put himself in the care of Theo's friend Dr. Paul Gachet, a homeopathic physician in the little town. (Although Van Gogh sold only one of his hundreds of paintings during his lifetime - "The Red Vines," now in Moscow's Pushkin Museum - one of his two portraits of Dr. Gachet was sold at auction in 1990 for more than $80 million.)

 
Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles.

 

On the morning of July 27, 1890, Vincent walked from his room at the Auberge Ravoux into a wheat field and shot himself in the chest. He died in the inn's top-floor room two days later, July 29, with Theo by his side, and was buried in the churchyard on July 30.

 

Today one strolls in Auvers as if through a gallery of familiar images: There's the church right over there, see; there's the garden of fellow painter Charles-François Daubigny and on that side is the good doctor's house. Yes, that's the wheat field...but where have all the black crows flown?
 
There is much to be seen in Auvers before one pays final respects: Check out the museum and the studio-house of Daubigny, a contemporary of Corot and Daumier; call at the Musée de l'Absinthe, devoted to the milky, cloudy aniseed-flavored liqueur much favored by Vincent and other real as well as would-be artists of his day. (You can't buy a drink but you can buy a bottle.)
 
The palatial 17th-century, Renaissance-style Château d'Auvers presents a stylish technological tour of the world the Impressionists inhabited. Some call it hokey; it's not. It's folkish and humorous, with mock-up cafés, cinema projections, inventive special effects, and a smashing train-ride that seems to bounce through the country when it's really the country that's streaming by.

 
Vincent van Gogh and his beloved brother Theo lie in repose next to each other.

 

Leave until last the short walk to the cemetery, studded with placards reproducing en route the paintings Vincent so feverishly stroked.  Within the graveyard his simple headstone sits against a wall of ivy. Beside it, an identical one is marked for Theo, who faithfully followed his younger brother six months later, an ally in death as he was always in life.

 

From now through Jan. 18, you may greet Van Gogh at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park at the exciting exhibition "Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Beyond," which displays some of the most compelling canvases from the Impressionist collections at Paris' Musée d'Orsay.

 

 

 

Having read the book, a New York Times Paperback Nonfiction Bestseller for over 182 weeks, I anticipated the big screen adaptation and wondered whether Gilbert's insightful story-telling and self-deprecating humor would be adequately portrayed by Julia Roberts.  In my opinion, neither Julia nor the screenplay were able to convey the emotional depth of Gilbert's personal epiphanies while on her jetset quest. Read the book!

Bordering on kitsch, the movie's visual imagery and vignettes of life abroad can, however, serve to whet the appetite and wake the travel bug for newbies. The movie is also a catalyst to decompress 20+ years of time and  reincarnate long-buried memories into a new life for veterans who have traveled to these destinations in the distant past. This certainly happened.for me. 

 

Although I have not written a best-selling book of my own me-moirs, I blazed a personal trail well before Gilbert's -- except in reverse order and over a longer priod of time. 
 
PRAY (India):  Long before it came of age as a technology capital and customer service center of the world, I traveled to India in 1976 to search my soul, perform seva (service) and savor India's sublime spices while staying at an ashram in the Northern Punjab. Did I find enlightenment? Although I tried, let's say I must still carry a flashlight while walking my personal path.

 
LOVE (Indonesia):  In 1991, while I did not find Mr. Right (like Liz with her now husband, Felipe), I did fall in love with Bali. Beyond the endless beaches, resorts, tourist shops and nightclubs, there is Ubud with its terraced rice paddies and exquisite delicate artistry. This cultural oasis in the highlands cradles the true heart and soul of Balinese heritage. 

EAT (Italy):  In 2010, rather than traveling to Italy to hedonistically indulge in authentic Italian fare as portrayed in Eat, Pray, Love, I found nearby Tony's Pizza Napoletana at 1570 Stockton Street in Northbeach (San Francisco's  Little Italy). Tony Gemignani, proprietor of Tony's Pizza, is a 9 time champion of the World Pizza Cup held in Naples. He introduced one of the first coal-fire ovens on the West Coast in the Fall of 2009. Tony's signature Margherita Pizza is just one of many gourmet creations on his menu that includes mouth watering pastas and Italian dinners all made with authentic ingredients imported from Napoli. Visit tonyspizzanapoletana.com for more.

For more about EAT, PRAY, LOVE and author, Elizabeth Gilbert, visit elizabethgilbert.com.