Newsletter Feature Article
Images from Egypt to Hadrian's Wall
By Stephen Husarik, University of Arkansas-Fort Smith
From 10.1 (Fall 2006)
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I'm happy to tell members of NAHE about my exciting and profitable travel sabbatical this past year. About four hundred University of Arkansas at Fort Smith students followed my travels electronically in a special WebCT course as I worked my way from the lower reaches of the Roman Empire (Egypt) up to Hadrian's Wall, England. I collected about 3,000 still shots, panoramas and digital movies for use in a database available exclusively to our students for their PowerPoint projects. There are many rare shots in the database, including the room in the Gonzaga Palace (Mantua, Italy) where Monteverdi's Orfeo was premiered, the courtyard of the Bardi Palace (Florence) where opera first began, and the bridge (Lecco, Italy) recently identified as the one behind Mona Lisa's left shoulder.
A now rather famous bridge in Lecco, Italy.
The trip took two and one-half months, covered approximately 24,000 miles and involved 34 hotels, 56 buses, 52 metro rides, 39 trains, 14 planes, 11 cabs, 10 vaporetto rides, 4 cable cars, 4 ski lifts, 3 boats, 2 rental cars, a felucca, a carriage, a bicycle and a camel. Beginning in Madrid, Spain, I flew (it's less expensive by plane than train) to Bilbao, Santiago de Compostela, Malaga, Granada and Gibraltar and took some interesting panoramas of the Rock of Gibraltar (one of the two feet of Hercules). After presenting a paper at the "Performance Matters" conference in Porto, Portugal, I embarked upon a luxury tour of Egypt and the Nile.
Steve travels in style in Egypt!
Back to the continent, I worked my way by train from the Italian Amalfi coast to Rome, Florence, Milan, and other smaller towns in the north-with a slight detour to Innsbruck. After visiting the factory that manufactured the UA Fort Smith bells, I drove across southern France and visited Roman monuments in Orange, Nimes and Caracassone. A short flight from Toulouse put me in Paris, which I used as an outpost to visit Parisian monuments, and to visit Versailles, Vaux le Vicomte, Fountainbleau, Giverny and Rouen. In Rouen, I gained special entrée to the room where Monet painted his famous cathedral facades. Express train travel was effective in getting me around Belgium and Holland where I visited about a dozen towns with bell towers. As Head Carillonneur of our university, I was able to obtain a special audience with Aime Lombard up in the performing booth at Brugges Tower and captured a short movie of him performing for hundreds of people in the town square below. He signed two personal musical compositions for performance on our tower.
Delft, Holland interested me enough to make a panorama flash movie from the spot where Vermeer painted his famous view of Delft. Did you know that most people in Delft use bicycles to get around? There are 30,000 University of Delft students who sometimes take unlocked bikes, ride them across town, and then throw them into a canal to hide the evidence. The canals are dredged for hundreds of lost bikes each year.
My German travel covered places that I had never had a chance to see before including Aachen, Trier, Cologne and Heidelberg. I flew from Cologne to Berlin for 24 euros (Didn't I tell you flying is cheap?) and used Berlin as a jumping off place for visits to Pottsdam and Dresden. Another flight brought me to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. From London, I visited Stratford-upon-Avon, Canterbury and Bath. This mind-boggling tour ended up at Hadrian's Wall, with just a few days spent in Edinburgh, Scotland before returning.
Steve in front of Hadrian's Wall in Haltwhistle.
During the trip, 400 students followed my travels on WebCT, engaging in dialog, and/or asking questions and requesting pictures to be used in their Humanities projects. It was a real challenge to find internet cafes all over Europe to keep up with their communications. I noticed wherever I went that students were busy using both the internet and their cell phones. Upon returning to the United States, this inspired me to add a new component to our Humanities Capstone Project: our students now use the internet to meet students in other countries and get them to send cell phone shots (jpegs) of important architectural monuments for our projects and our database.
My travel sabbatical was a terrific experience and I will be forever indebted to the late Chancellor Joel Stubblefield and the administration of the University of Arkansas - Fort Smith for supporting this educational adventure.
