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TRANSPORTATION AND TRAVELWAYS PROVINCES

Transportation Provinces are Creative Provinces that feature a certain type of transportation as their primary vision.
Travelways Provinces are Creative Provinces that are travelways with the primary vision of being devoted to a certain type of travel for humans and/or other creatures.

Animal Travelways Provinces

Animal Transportation and Travelways Provinces will be places where motorized or other mechanical vehicles will be either limited in some way, or abandoned altogether in favor of transport animals.

     Or they will be places designated as migration corridors for wildlife, or routes for livestock.

     Domestic animals such as horses, and their close cousins, burrows, mules, donkeys, and camels, will be particularly suited to such creative provinces. But other domestic creatures might also be featured in transportation, such as in elephant, goat-cart, and dogsled provinces. In some provinces, homing pigeons (the “Racing Homer”) might be used to carry messages.


A Countryside Horse Road

The Road, Winter, Otto Knirsch, 1853, Currier & Ives lithograph with hand coloring

     A Horse Road Province is a road linking two or more Horse Provinces or non-province areas, and which limits motorized and other mechanical transportation, to enable traveling by horse to a destination.

     In this example, people in a rural area encompassing several villages, form a Countryside Horse Road. Provincials begin by linking their properties to make sections of the road, which connect the villages and many outlying farms and other properties.

     Over time, as the Countryside Horse Road develops, provincials establish inns with stables, cobblers, tack shops, and other horse-friendly accommodations, along the routes.

Excerpt from Creative Provinces--A New World of Enchanting and Empowered Communities

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A Trumpeter Swan Migration Corridor Province

In this example, people form a Trumpeter Swan Migration Corridor Province to protect the routes of this exquisite bird. Provincials provide wetlands and nesting islands and fields along the route, and help to remove impediments to their travel.

     This creative province forms a federation with the Swan Lakes Province (described in the Featured Animal Province section of the book). It might also team up with such organizations as the Trumpeter Swan Society, which assists with swan migration.

     The result is a magnificent marshland corridor whose member provincials are magically visited twice yearly by their namesakes.

Combined Transportation & Travelways Provinces

Creative province travelways can combine any number of means of travel. Indeed, as province roads start to expand their networks, it will be expedient in many cases to overlap compatible travelways.

A King Edward Travelway

     In this example, people create a province travelway that specializes in the transition period of the early Industrial Era. The King Edward Travelway features fine horse carriages, such as post chaises, barouches, Hansom Cabs, stagecoaches, and early automobiles, as well as historic train lines, hot-air balloons, and early-period planes.

     The King Edward Travelway thus becomes a significant network of provincial travelways between various late Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century Province outposts. It draws to it, businesses that serve its traveling clientele, such as terminals where people can leave their modern vehicles behind, and sit in period cafés with vintage menus and the latest provincial news, while waiting for their carriage, train, roadster, balloon, or biplane.

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Water Transportation & Travelways Provinces

Travel by stream, river, and seaway has been vastly reduced in modern times, and in many places totally forgotten, once again due to the dominant culture of the automobile. The ubiquitous network of automobile roads, bridges, and tunnels has made it much easier to travel by land than by waterway. In addition, dams in streams (mostly unused today) interrupt such travel—not to mention interrupt aquatic-life migration.

     Airplane travel has had a similar effect on water travel.

     And as they have been increasingly forgotten as travelways, these bodies of water, which once figured so prominently in local culture, are also forgotten in many other ways, and are barely registered in consciousness as people drive over bridges, through tunnels, and fly high overhead. In Humanity’s quest for technological convenience and ease, it has once again shoved aside a beautiful, exciting, fun, and exhilarating way of traveling.

     But by provincializing, people can reclaim their waterways for travel.

A Mississippi River Heritage Province 

The Mississippi in Time of Peace, Frances Flora Bond Palmer, 1865, Currier & Ives lithograph with hand coloring

Mississippi in time of Peace.jpg

In this example, a Mississippi River Heritage Province is begun by people with properties and businesses in historic river ports and other key properties along the Mississippi, and by people who own and operate historic riverboats and other river-centered heritage industries.

     The Province Vision is to restore, recreate, and reinstate historic ports and boats of all types on the river, and to use these for significant travel.

     Gradually, more properties and watercraft are added to the Province, so that eventually they operate over lengthy sections of the river, with numerous stops at historic and period boatyards and boat launches.

     The Mississippi River Heritage Province eventually teams up with numerous Historic and Heritage Culture Provinces along the river, all of which will want to include period river travel as an integral part of their Province. Eventually large swaths of the Mississippi are devoted to travel via period riverboats.

Air Transportation Provinces

As with the automobile on land, in our air spaces we have inadvertently created a “global jet plane province.” While the airplane is a great invention, we must make room for all manner of other wonderful and magical types of air travel. With Creative Provinces, we can do just that: we can be enormously creative with our air transportation.

     Creative Provinces specializing in hot air balloons, Zeppelins, experimental aircraft, spacecraft, period airplanes, gliders, live airborne transport creatures, and aircraft of all manner of shapes and sizes, are just some of the interesting and fun possibilities for provincial airways.

Steampunk, Artie NaVarre/Pixabay

A Red Baron Province

Historic Airplane Provinces will specialize in a particular era of airplanes, such as the early experimental aircraft of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, or World War II-era planes.

     In this example, a Red Baron Province, named after famed German Ace, Manfred von Richthofen, is created for the revival of World War I-era planes for travel and reenactments. Both restored and recreated Caudrons, Breguets, Morane-Saulniers, Capronis, Sikorskys, Sopwiths, Curtisses, and many more of the 223 plane models employed during the war are used by the Province, with many new aces added to the rolls.

     The Red Baron Province becomes affiliated with various early-Twentieth Century provinces, and its planes become an integral form of transportation between them.

Motor Vehicle Provinces

Cars are probably the most wonderful invention of the Twentieth Century, giving us the incredible freedom to travel great distances, where and when we will. But we can actually have much more fun with them, while at the same time giving ourselves ways to not be excessive with them. We can do this by creating Motor Vehicle Transportation and Travelways Provinces—places where motorized vehicle travel is totally different from what is the norm today.

     Provinces can be created that feature a particular type of motor vehicle. The possibilities are endless: Vintage cars, neon-colored electric cars, racecars, steam-powered vehicles. The vehicles can be small, tiny, relatively slow, unusual looking, oddly shaped, amphibious, non-combustion, solar powered, trash-powered, brightly colored, all colored the same, or made of unlikely materials.

Great Gadsby Antique Automobile Province
gatsby-car-1949.webp

Gatsby car 1949, alexandre-schyns.e-monsite.com

Travel by antique and vintage automobiles of a particular period, or their reproductions, can be the defining Vision of a Transportation Province or Province Travelway.

     In this example, a Great Gatsby Antique Automobile Province is started by the members of two antique car clubs who live in and around a quaint seaside village, which also has many houses built in the 1920s, and in a nearby city with several neighborhoods built in the 1920s.

     The Province begins with encouraging travel by antique car within its domain, and over time it draws more people with cars of the 1920s, as well as amenities and services, such as antique car repair, and a vintage car reproduction industry.

     The Great Gatsby Antique Automobile Province eventually develops into a full Heritage Province.

Rail Transportation &Travelways Provinces

     Rail Transportation Provinces are creative provinces that have as either their primary vision or a supporting vision, transportation within their province by tracked vehicle. San Francisco, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; Melkmarket, Antwerp; and Alfana, Lisbon are all examples of proto-provinces of this type.

     Rail Travelways Provinces are provincial train lines that extend between creative provinces or non-province areas.

A Traditional-Ladies Train Line, of the Train of Thought Province

The Dixie Flagler, © Betty Ann Fraley

In this example, a Train of Thought is created as a province train line that meanders around the world, connecting creative provinces as well as non-province areas, with the primary vision of a devotion to intellectual and creative discussion, performance, and study. Its trains become veritable libraries of interesting books, with salons, discussion parlors, readings, workshops, and cafés.

     As the Train of Thought grows, it eventually includes in its provincial network, a number of small province train lines that specialize in a particular type of study or creative endeavor: A Ghandi-Tagore Train Line; a Jane Austen Train Line; a Sartre-Beauvoir Existentialist Train Line; an Impressionist Painting Train Line; a Soul Train; an Unsolved Mysteries Train Line...

     ...And as depicted in the Betty Fraley painting above, a Traditional-Ladies Train Line where women with a vision of upholding traditions, hold discussions!

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