Webcams allow you to travel the world, without ever getting off your butt

One of the great joys of traveling — at least in the opinion of this country bumpkin who spent his first 18 years deep in the hollers of South Lincoln County — is the revelation that those places you always heard about, read about, saw in movies or on television, really do exist.

And then, after you come back home from one of these exotically foreign spots in the world, it’s comforting somehow to remind yourself, “You know, self, things might be pretty dull right here right now, but in Hawaii, somebody is walking on the beach right this minute. Or, in Paris, lovers are smooching on a bridge over the Seine, with the Eiffel Tower looming in the background. Or, waves are lapping up on the coast of Venezuela, or Normandy, or Corfu or Malaysia. Really.”

I bring this all up only because I think in my own little brain, these places don’t really exist unless I’m there to witness them. And, as soon as you’re no longer there, they once again cease to be.

The other day a co-worker was trying to impress upon me the significance of the first time she saw the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain, with her own eyeballs. After a lifetime of being fascinated with the Andalusian attraction, it was almost too much — too overwhelming.

And I knew exactly what she meant. I’d heard most of my life about the view from the top of Steens Mountain from my dad, who spoke in reverent, hushed tones about the way the mountain rises so gradually from the west, then just drops off into the Nevada Basin to the east — especially where the giant glacier-carved Kiger Gorge descends to the desert floor.

It isn’t so much the “where” or the “what” that floors me here, but the fact that the Alhambra and Kiger Gorge are both sitting there right this minute just being, you know, awesome.

When you go visit these places, of course, that gets stuck in your craw. How can we get so upset about a person who’s late for an appointment, we ask ourselves, when there’s tequila being poured in Mexico right now? Or that there are waves crashing at Cape Kiwanda, even without Ray Atkeson’s camera on them. Or that people are strolling arm in arm in Milan, dressed in their summer finery, checking out everybody else while at the same time very aware that they are being watched themselves.

One of my guiltiest pleasures in life is going on abbeyroad.com and watching the traffic and pedestrians in front of the Abbey Road studios in London, where the iconic “Abbey Road” album cover was shot with the four Beatles single-filing their way across the street.

Usually when I peek in on the funny little street with the zig-zaggy lines along both sides, it’s dark or raining. The last time I looked, though (about lunch time on Friday), it was 7:56 p.m. and still daylight in London. There were all kinds of people out, many stopping to take photos and plenty of cars going through, always on the wrong side of the street, of course.

There are countless other places in the world with cameras running nonstop, and I for one find it extremely entertaining to spy on life through them. A particular favorite is earthcam.com.

On earthcam, you can see life unfolding in Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, Tokyo, Brooklyn, Paris and many, many more places. There is even a special section devoted to cameras pointed at big buildings under construction — and let’s face it, watching a building go up is one of the most interesting things there is.

Click on the Niagara Falls camera and you get not only the sound of the water crashing over that wide precipice and the sight of cars zooming by on the highway — you see the mist rising from the river below and even the rainbow caused by all that airborne water. You can almost smell the moisture in the air, and I’ve never even been to Niagara Falls.

I’ve never been to New York City, either, but any time I get a hankering to I can click on the Times Square Cam and watch the tourists and the taxis swarming like ants in the Big Apple.

In Egypt, the Sheraton Cairo Hotel & Casino cam invites us to “reserve a hotel room with a view,” but the view we see on the camera is not very enticing. The city is shrouded in so much smog one can easily break into a coughing spell just looking at it.

Now, I’ll warn you, this webcam browsing can get a little freaky. The Dealey Plaza Cam in Dallas, Texas, allows you to peer out “from the sixth-floor window of the former Texas School Book Depository,” from which John F. Kennedy was shot by one of our more famous nut-case snipers. What you would want to stare out that window for is beyond me.

It’s quite amazing who and what all you can eavesdrop on webcams. In addition to all the traffic and weather cameras pretty much everywhere, you also can watch people smoke dope while they mumble stoner lingo. You can watch people’s pets (for nothing, of course, so why bother?).

You can watch people eat pastry in a New York bakery. There’s no limit to the wacky stuff you can observe. It is, quite literally, possible now to be that fly on the wall you always wanted to be.

Me, I’m pretty conventional, and I’d much rather check in on the Grand Canyon, surfers on Lake Michigan or, best of all, the tourists crossing the crosswalk on Abbey Road.

Former editor of the Review as well as managing editor of the Beaverton Valley Times and The Times, Kelly is now chief of the central editing and design desk for Community Newspapers and the Portland Tribune, and he contributes a regular column.