As print newspapers fight to stay alive, travel sections lose pages and steadily increase service journalism while operating under more scrutiny than ever. In support of our paper/e-ink colleagues, here’s the Sunday print travel news that’s fit to post about.

Amid the dozens of predictable round-ups on the season’s best ski resorts, this week’s travel sections also managed a few history lessons and some unexpected surprises.

The highlights of both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times were rooted in history and equally captivating.  The tale of the Dutch town of Leiden — a haven of tolerance for the early Pilgrims, on their way to a new life in the New World — allowed the LA Times to touch on the coming holiday without doing a trite “home for the holidays” narrative. And, aside from being a clever way to mention Thanksgiving, the story and its subject proved fascinating in their own rights.  Writer Susan Spano describes Leiden as “…a town in Holland where, for a brief golden moment in the early 17th century, people of disparate faiths could worship as they saw fit — French Huguenots, Roman Catholics, Jews, Quakers, Lutherans, Dutch Mennonites and a small group of religious dissenters from England, later known as the Pilgrims.”  Later in the piece, Spano returns to the idea of religious tolerance, noting that the town’s many ethnic restaurants illustrate the mix of cultures that currently call Leiden — now an artsy university town — home. “…many ethnic eateries around town … testify to a new wave of decidedly non-Protestant immigrants from such places as Morocco, Thailand, Ethiopia, Iraq and Vietnam,” she writes. “Their growing presence, which has sometimes created tensions, has forced the Dutch to revisit the idea of religious tolerance in this post- 9/11 world.”

The section’s other Thanksgiving story-on spending the holiday in Hawaii — is a bit more predictable, although solidly written, and the section is rounded out by about the 10^th story I’ve read this year on Portland’s food carts. I’m gonna go ahead and call the end of the whole food-cart novelty thing in the next year or so.

SCORE: 7/10 carry-ons

The New York Times’ historical feature is also set in Europe, but in a decidedly better-known destination: Paris. Using the writings of Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, “an aristocrat notorious in Napoleonic France for gratifying his palate with the same abandon as his contemporary the Marquis de Sade showed in indulging carnal desires,” Tony Perrotet takes us on a 19^th century gastronomical tour of the city of lights. It turns out that Grimod, who Perrotet calls the grand-pere of modern food writers, made a living in his time penning guides to Paris’ culinary delights, and a handful of the stops on Grimod’s tour can still be visited today.  The section feels meaty and well-rounded this week, with a piece on the growing indie rock scene in Athens; a “36 Hours” service piece focused on Rajasthan, India; and the latest in a slew of recent articles on Jordan, this time focused on the country’s increasingly chic capital, Amman.

SCORE: 9/10 carry-ons

The Washington Post’s section, on the other hand, felt unusually light, particularly on the travel narrative front. The sole offering in that department was Glenn Kessler’s great piece on Naoshima, Japan’s art island, which is now on my list of things to see before I die. Just imagine it: “… the main museum is also the hotel. After the day-trippers have left the island, a handful of guests have free rein at Benesse House, able to wander the halls at their leisure examining pieces by Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and other greats in a strikingly modern space designed by Tadao Ando, one of Japan’s most famous architects.” Too bad the rest of the section is devoted to pieces on Travel Aid volunteers at airports, where to find good food in Palm Springs, and Dallas’ new art district.

SCORE: 6/10 carry-ons.

The Chicago Sun Times travel section, which in recent weeks has been pretty light, shone through with a story on rafting a stretch of India’s Kameng River recently opened to foreigners. It’s a great blend of adventure and cultural commentary. “We saw nature as it was meant to be — raw and lush. But we also witnessed its fragility: a simple farmer burns away an entire mountainside to work a small patch of land; bulldozers send rockslides tumbling down mountain slopes as they carve out a road; an energy-hungry nation begins work to dam yet another free-flowing river,” Arthur Max writes. He goes on to illustrate this mix of anthropology and adventure throughout the piece, as his rafting group shoots the rapids, capsizes, and camps, meeting local wildlife and residents along the way. I finished up the story thinking, “Good job Chicago Sun Times.” Then I saw the tiny “AP” attribution at the bottom. At least those eds picked a good story, though, and I haven’t seen it anywhere else, unlike the section’s “Tour Obama’s New York” story, which made the rounds last week and is pretty tired by this point.

SCORE: 3/10 carry-ons.

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