Getting lost with Linda Ellerbee

If you ask TV journalist and author Linda Ellerbee what she thinks of Paris or the Andes, you don’t get a list of the sights she saw there (and she’s been almost everywhere). You get a story, complete with characters, plot, philosophy and flashbacks, told with passion and the occasional four-letter word.

Along the way, she makes you wish you had been with her, even sitting at the bottom of the Grand Canyon in sodden clothes or getting shot at as a missionary in Bolivia, driving from Alaska to Houston in a Volkswagen camper with two kids and a dog or deciding, on the Cote d’Azur, whether to get a divorce.

You don’t even have to ask her if you can tag along. All you need is her new book, “Take Big Bites: Adventures Around the World and Across the Table.” Part biography, part cookbook, part travelogue, the book reads like a third-class bus ride, careening down a bumpy mountainside and is packed with people and odors.

Ellerbee, who celebrated her 60th birthday last year by walking the 200-mile Thames Path in England, was a news writer, reporter and anchor for CBS and NBC and is the author of “And So It Goes” (1986) and “Move On” (1991). She now produces the award-winning Nickelodeon children’s program “Nick News” and divides her time (when not on the road) between downtown Manhattan and western Massachusetts. She got the idea for “Take Big Bites” while trying to organize 40 years of travel journals, which, she discovered, were strikingly preoccupied with food.

I once ate one of the same kind of fried fish sandwiches on the docks in Istanbul, Turkey, as she did. So I had to interview her -- a joy, partly because the more she talked, the more her voice took on the twang of Bryan, Texas, where she was born.

Question: You started traveling as a child. Where did you go?

Answer: I took my first trip on an airplane when I was 14 to visit my aunt ... in Williamsport, Pa. That was the first time I ever had a submarine sandwich, which I thought quite good.

My mother and father and I only went places by car -- like Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. I was an only child, so I sometimes got to take a friend along. But I mostly remember sitting in the back seat alone, asking, “Are we there yet?” and hearing my mom tell my dad, “Ray, stop driving so fast.”

My father was a life insurance agent. He took me around Texas on business trips to towns like Tyler, Palestine and Lubbock. He taught me to get up early, go walking and get lost, which meant having an adventure.

The best trips we took were when we met relatives at a motel on the Guadalupe River in Texas. My cousins and I spent all day on the water in inner tubes, then, tired and sunburned, went to bed early, leaving the adults free to do whatever they did.

Q.: What places in America do you think all children should see?

A.: I wish parents would take their kids to unfamiliar places. They need to get out and see things they don’t usually see. It’s obvious that we’ve become a nation of strangers. How many California families go to the South? And parents in Mississippi ought to consider taking their kids to New York.

Q.: Nowadays, you often travel alone. Aren’t you afraid?

A.: There have been times when I’ve been skittish, but I’ve been in far more danger in my work as a journalist than in my travels. If you use common sense and stand up for yourself, with a smile, things are usually fine.

I even hike and backpack by myself. Sure, it’s not as safe as hiking with someone else. But life is not without risks. I live 12 blocks from the site of the World Trade Center.

Q.: Just eating out alone is difficult for some solo women travelers. Is it for you?

A.: No, I don’t find it hard. Thankfully, I can stand my own company. But I understand the fear some women feel of how they will be treated, how it looks. Other people -- especially couples -- assume you’re there alone not by choice but because of a lack of alternatives.

But I think everybody should learn how to eat alone. It’s easiest if you go early, when restaurants don’t mind giving up a table to a single. Outdoor cafes are the best, because your eyes never tire of watching the passing parade. And take a book set in the place where you are so even when you’re reading you haven’t left it.

Q.: Does traveling solo get easier for a woman as she gets older?

A.: Well, handsome young men don’t run over to pick up your luggage. But that will come again when you turn 80. There’s great benefit in the invisibility of being a woman of a certain age traveling alone. You can go up to men and talk to them without it seeming like a come-on.

Q.: You love to eat street food in faraway places. Have you ever gotten sick?

A.: I have not had a bad meal, starting with guinea pig in Bolivia when I was 19. Some of the best food in the world is sold on the street. Of course, I don’t walk up to any old stand. If the vendor is dirty, I go elsewhere. And I was born with a cast-iron stomach. In China or Chinatown, I go for things like sauteed duck tongue. The only time I ever got sick from food was when I had a Belon oyster in a restaurant in Brittany, right where it came from.

Q.: Do you worry about food and places starting to all seem the same because of globalization?

A.: That’s why it’s important not to go to McDonald’s in Paris, why I had sauteed morning glories in Thailand in March instead of Italian food in a big new hotel restaurant.

Q.: Is there anything you won’t eat?

A.: Strawberries.

Q.: Where are you going next?

A.: Down the Colorado River with six kids, then to Puerto Vallarta [Mexico] for a month to write.

Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read at latimes.com/susanspano.