Breaking Free  Why stepping out is the only way to travel.
August 13, 2010  I tell you all this to explain why I am not
(yet) crazy from all the traveling I do. I average 25 trips a
year, and more and more I feel like a hamster in a Habitrail. I
scurry into an entry tube, also known as an airport, and then
proceed through other tubes, a.k.a. buses and taxies, and P.F.
Chang's and smart new brewpubs in renovated downtowns, before
arriving, in every instance, at the exact same rest cube
furnished with the same paper-wrapped soaps, thence to sleep
before reentering the tubes and speeding off to my next,
predictable nodule. Like a hamster, I enjoy only the illusion of
freedom, but unlike a hamster, I can put on running shorts and
break through the tube walls.  It's not always easy, though.
Outside of certain older downtowns—New York, Chicago, San
Francisco—pedestrianism itself is kind of a throwback, the sort
of thing done by people who also re-enact Civil War battles and
play "base-ball" under 1850s rules. If G