Diana's View: Letters (10/5/2001)

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This is The Savvy Traveler and I'm Diana Nyad.

American travelers are in a quandary right now. The State Department is issuing a blanket caution, that U.S. citizens abroad may be at increased risk of terrorist attacks. People are hesitating to go far from home. And yet there's a group of 800 tourists from Portland, Oregon, who have traveled to New York City this week-end just because Mayor Guiliani asked for support of theaters, hotels and restaurants. They call it the Flight for Freedom. And there are similar gestures around the country.

We got a phone call from a woman named Roseanne LeSage who cancelled a family trip she had planned and booked a trip to New York City instead, to help give some tourist dollar relief there.

Maybe you can empathize with us here at The Savvy Traveler. We're travelers. It's in our blood. At our staff meeting this week, half of us felt strongly that we are doing a service for our listeners to continue to follow the aftermath of the disasters inasmuch as it has deeply impacted travel. The other half pushed for getting back full-tilt to traveling the world. Put September 11 behind us.

And in our feedback on the show from you, we heard the same kind of split. One man, Doug Snyder, wrote from Miami, that he thought our last show touched on "the complex emotions every single American feels these days". But a woman from Minneapolis, Anita Skogland, e-mailed us this: "We want an escape, something funny or real or exotic about the rest of the world. Come on, get on with it!"