Traveling houses - February 27, 2012

A walk around the park—Anya was rambunctious, which is unusual for her first thing in the morning—and then half an hour with her in the dog park before picking up Daniel from school. It was high 20°s F, a little breezy. Pleasant and bright. We're bracing for a pretty decent storm tomorrow which may be mostly slush, or might be a bunch of snow. We won't know for sure until tomorrow.

One of my morris team is leaving for a term in Denmark. We'll see if he can get out of Minneapolis Wednesday morning.

I've talked in general terms about the extension of the indoors into automobiles and the like, and this is a feature of 20th Century America. We talk about the "Road culture" but Americans have been traveling since before they were Americans. And really even the invention of an indoors on wheels is older than the car with heating and a sound system. For a real mobile indoors, consider rail travel in the days of the Pullman Car.

If you go back even further, consider the passengers quarters in the finer ships of the line, going back... how far? We think to day of the grand age of ocean liners, from the late 19th Century on past World War II, but there were finely furnished cabins in the days of regular travel to India. Not luxe like the Titanic, but still comfortably turned out.

Did these sorts of fittings correspond with the more regular passage of well-to-do women? I wonder. Or perhaps with a more general rise in comfort as a marketable value in the late 18th and early 19th centuries: more cushions, less hard wood pews...