Here you can browse through my blog posts prior to February 2022. Currently I'm sharing my travel experiences, candid opinions, and what's on my mind solely on my Facebook page. — Rick
All this week, I am sharing a behind-the-scenes look at the production of my new public television special, “The Holy Land: Israelis and Palestinians Today.” In this clip, we sit down to our first lunch while scouting TV production in the Crusader town of Akko, Israel. We were treated to a typical and colorful array of mezze-style plates: delightful dips, soups, and salads that are a daily edible reminder of how fertile Israel is. A few months later, we were at the same table with our crew and the camera rolling. Delicious.
“The Holy Land” has already aired to great success on stations in several locations. Many other stations, such as WTTW 11 in Chicago and KCTS 9 in Seattle, are excited to air it soon. Call your local public television station to find out when you can see it too.
Many of you know that I am a board member of NORML and an advocate for marijuana policy reform. And if you’ve understood my position, you know that I’m not in this to be “pro pot.” I am involved to end an expensive, racist, and counter-productive prohibition as wrong-minded and costly to our society today as the prohibition against alcohol was back in the 1930s.
An exciting new documentary movie called “Evergreen” tells the story about how my friends and I helped legalize, tax and regulate marijuana in my home state of Washington. (And is the closest I’ll ever get to “starring in a movie”.)
Since the last election, my state, along with Colorado, considers responsible adult recreational use of marijuana a civil liberty. And now, we are working to legalize marijuana in Alaska and Oregon. If you would like to get involved in this work (which I consider good citizenship), here’s a great opportunity to support us. Simply join NORML with a donation of $50 and they’ll send you a free DVD copy of “Evergreen.”
In what I call “the lower 48” states, hundreds of thousands of people—not rich white guys but black and poor people—are arrested each year for marijuana possession. But, in Washington and Colorado, thousands who would have been arrested are not, saving our states millions of dollars and avoiding untold heartache. Great things are happening as our country is, step-by-step, ending the war on marijuana and undoing the prohibition of our age. We have exciting momentum. There’s lots more to do. That’s why I’m donating these DVDs to NORML for this campaign. And that’s why I’m packing up and heading to Oregon next week for an intense week of media and lectures in ten different cities.
Since 1980, we’ve been producing guidebooks. My first book was self-published. I gently drove the precious little bundle of 256 lovingly typed pages (with white-out fixes and ballpoint-pen drawn maps) to Ed Wise, the owner of Snohomish Publishing. A couple of weeks later, I took delivery of 2,500 copies of my first edition of Europe Through the Back Door. I stacked the boxes along the side of my piano-recital studio, where family members could sit on them–if there were no seats left–when their children performed.
Flash forward 34 years: I’m hosting a monthly all-staff meeting as about 60 of my co-workers are gathered together. And we have four guests joining us from our printer, Friesens, an employee-owned company located in the little town of Altona near Winnipeg in Canada. They have traveled here to Edmonds to present us with a delightful handmade quilt of one of our book covers—a tradition when they print a million books for an author and publisher. (While we don’t have a single title that sells in that range, Friesens has collectively printed a million of our guidebooks.)
Photo: Patricia Feaster
As our guests explained how thankful and proud they are to print our books, and how their little town of 3,500 includes 500 people who work in their plant, I enjoyed the beautiful thought that it takes a village to bring a guidebook to our travelers, too. And the people who make sure the pages are in order, the covers are crisp, and that the right paper stock is in supply are as critical as the researchers in the field and the sales reps who visit the bookstores.
It’s fun to work in an age of dramatic change. And we’re leaders in our field in electronic guidebooks. But I remain “a print guy.” Fortunately, the print market for guidebooks is steady and we’re selling more books in print than ever before. Of all the travel guidebooks sold in the last six years in the USA, our market share has more than doubled—from about 8% to about 18%. And for that we have a lot of people to thank… including you! Thanks for helping keep our Canadian friends in Manitoba busy and us as well. And happy travels.
We’re ramping things up for our public television special, “Rick Steves’ Holy Land: Israelis and Palestinians Today,” which is airing all over the country. I’ll be giving talks around my state (and in Dallas on Oct. 1 at the AT&T Performing Arts Center), and I enjoyed doing an interview with Dave Ross on Seattle’s KIRO Radio. I thought you might like to listen in, so here is our entire 19-minute conversation, uncut.
If you’ve seen the Holy Land show in your city, please let me know your thoughts. If your public TV station has yet to run it, please call them and ask when it’ll air. Thanks.
(By the way, you can find more of Dave Ross’s extended interviews here.)
Last week I enjoyed an amazing experience as a guest on National Public Radio’s popular quiz comedy show, “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” Each week the show has a guest join the panelists for a bit called “Not my job.” And last week was my turn. They taped the normally Chicago-based show before a live audience last Thursday in my town of Seattle. The host and panelists were on stage with the guest, with a back table full of radio editors. About 3,000 NPR fans packed the Paramount Theater, adding energy and lots of laughs. The event lasted two hours, which was edited down to an amazingly fast, smooth, and smart one-hour package of entertainment. (The program’s editors edited on the fly as the show was taping, and before the night was out the host had a short list of little pick-ups that were needed to make the production smooth.) They actually taped two versions about the Scotland vote, because the result was not yet known the night they were recording the show (to air two days later). Within about 24 hours, the live show was edited and tight and ready for prime time. I was on stage for 20 minutes, which was trimmed down to this nine-minute bit. I’ve never been surrounded by such comedic genius. It was an exhilarating ride. I could say just about anything and they’d run with it in such a fun way. In a few minutes the brilliant and funny host, Peter Sagal, had me talking about things I’d never before talked about (along with a few of my standard lines).
