797 Kayaking Manhattan; The Wild Mississippi; Happy Travels

·52 min·4 clips

Dean Klinkenberg woke up grumpy from a cold, noisy night on the Mississippi, stepped outside his tent, and watched fog flow downstream along the river — deciding it must be 'river spirits heading south for the winter.'

1. Travel with Rick Steves presents an episode covering Manhattan kayaking, the wild Mississippi River, and practical travel tips from three expert guests. 2. Journalist and author Elliot Stein, whose latest book Custodians of Wonder profiles ten people preserving vanishing cultural practices, describes circumnavigating Manhattan Island by kayak. 3. The episode's first segment centers on Manhattan's forgotten ecological history and how a 30-mile kayak trip around the island reveals it more clearly than any land-based visit. 4. The Manhattan Kayak Company, located on 44th Street on the west side, offers 10 escorted circumnavigation trips per year; the journey is 30 miles, takes 9 hours, and requires prior kayak experience verified by a skills test. 5. The Hudson River changes direction every 6 hours for its first 100 miles — a phenomenon the Lenape named 'the River That Flows Two Ways' — and at the Battery, the current can reach 12 knots, carrying kayakers through like a conveyor belt. 6. Stein cites expert analysis concluding that undeveloped Manhattan would have been one of the most ecologically diverse natural parks in the US, with deer, elk, hundreds of springs, giant ponds, and dense forest where the Upper West Side now stands. 7. Inwood Park at Manhattan's northern tip is the last surviving native forest on the island; it contains Lenape caves, a sliver of original beach, and a boulder marking the purported site of the island's sale to the Dutch 400 years ago. 8. The Hudson River is now considered swimmable on roughly two-thirds of all days following a decade of city- and state-funded remediation of industrial runoff; the Billion Oyster Project is working to restore the billions of oyster reefs that once covered New York Harbor and acted as natural water purifiers. 9. The second segment features Dean Klinkenberg, author of The Wild Mississippi: A State-by-State Guide to the River's Natural Wonders, who writes Frank Dodge mystery novels set along the river's banks in Dubuque, Rock Island, and La Crosse. 10. Klinkenberg describes the Mississippi as 'a force that creates and sustains life in abundance' — a river he first encountered as a college student at La Crosse, Wisconsin, where it became a refuge for processing pressure. 11. Navigation dams built in the 1930s to maintain a barge-depth channel have turned a free-flowing river into a series of stacked pools that trap sediment and are commonly misidentified as flood-control infrastructure; they serve no flood-control function. 12. The Mississippi has experienced extreme swings between drought and flood in recent years, including a 30-foot rise in a single week following a severe multi-year drought — a pattern Klinkenberg attributes to both climate change and river engineering. 13. Indigenous mounds along the Mississippi range from 1,400-year-old effigy mounds in Iowa's Effigy Mounds National Monument to 3,700-year-old mounds at Poverty Point in Louisiana. 14. The Mississippi served as a cultural corridor for jazz and the blues, with steamboats carrying musicians and immigrants from New Orleans northward; jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, who grew up in Davenport, Iowa, first heard jazz from a steamboat on the river. 15. Klinkenberg describes a 60-to-70-mile stretch of the lower Mississippi between bridges in the south where there are no communities, no roads, and no bridges — an area where campers on islands encounter only birds and turtles. 16. The third segment features Samantha Brown, host of Places to Love on public television, who has visited more than 250 cities and 60 countries over 20 years of travel media. 17. Brown argues that the core joy of travel is spontaneity — letting the day take you where it will — and that over-planning is the primary source of travel anxiety. 18. Drawing on her acting background, Brown applies the improv principle of 'yes, and' to travel: never drop the ball, always accept and build on what happens, and treat Plan B as frequently superior to Plan A. 19. Brown and Steves discuss dressing as a 'cultural chameleon' while traveling, adapting appearance to local norms — citing earth tones in Europe versus bright American dress — as a form of respectful immersion. 20. Listeners who enjoy practical travel advice combined with natural history and river ecology will find this a useful and varied episode; those seeking deep-dive destination content or single-topic focus may find the three-segment format diffuse.

As heard by us

A waterborne travel hour with Manhattan by kayak, the wild Mississippi, and sane advice for trips that go sideways.

Water sets the course in this episode of Travel with Rick Steves, beginning with Elliot Stein's kayak trip around Manhattan and the surprise of seeing the island as a natural place under the concrete. The Mississippi segment is the stronger current.

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You want Manhattan, the Mississippi, and plan-B travel advice in one listen.

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