Ten Vacations That Changed the World

From forced exiles to country manors to motorcycle rides across South America, how a couple trips over the last seven hundred years radically reshaped history

Ibn Battuta: Traveled the World in the 1300s

He was the Rick Steves of his day, roaming the world to tell everyone what they were missing... only he did it seven hundred years ago, risking his life almost every step of the way in an age when visiting the next village made you a world traveler. Resolving "to quit all my friends and tear myself away from my home," this Arab writer left Morocco to make a pilgrimage to Mecca when he was twenty-one and didn't return home for nearly a quarter century, roaming across three continents and almost all of the major cities of the time, including Tunis, Alexandria, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, Baghdad, Constantinople, and Hangzhou. While Marco Polo is more famous, Battuta saw a far larger chunk of the known world, which he wrote about in the book Rihla and provided one of the most complete pictures of what 14th century life was actually like.

Sir Isaac Newton: A Productive Vacation

It's strange to say that a plague had an upside, but there was one for the scientific world in 1665. When the Great Plague hit London, Isaac Newton was forced to flee Trinity College Cambridge and return to the family home of Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. This was a great hardship for Newton, who lived for his studies — he avoided distractions so diligently it's believed he died a virgin — and doubly humiliating because he had made a point of leaving home to dodge the responsibility of managing the family estate. Nevertheless, being left entirely to his own devices proved essential to a number of his intellectual breakthroughs, as in the two years away he laid the foundations for calculus and reportedly conceived the law of gravity watching an apple fall in his orchard.

Ulysses S. Grant: Didn't Die with Lincoln

Most Confederacy-sympathizing actors would be content with assassinating a President, but not John Wilkes Booth, who tried to destabilize the entire government of the United States. Booth arranged for fellow conspirators to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward (while Johnson's assassin flaked out, Seward barely survived multiple stab wounds to the face and neck). Booth missed out on another target altogether, as Union commander General Ulysses S. Grant was supposed to share the Ford's Theatre box with Abraham Lincoln, only to back out at the last minute to visit family in Burlington. Booth would have been saddened to know that Grant would go on to be elected President and strongly defend the rights of freed blacks during his first term, though cheered as Grant's administration was overwhelmed by corruption and incompetence during his second.

Claude Monet: The Core of Impressionism

Impressionism took its name from his painting Impression, Sunrise and got many of its most revered works from the dwelling he picked up to get him out of the city. Born in Paris, Monet spotted Giverny from a train window and became obsessed with being there, purchasing a farmhouse in 1890. While Monet had traveled extensively for his art, in time he focused on creating a series of paintings of the lily pond in his garden, immortalizing his property. With its ranks including other masters like Renoir, Pissarro, and Cassatt, Impressionism remains the rare artistic movement to command universal respect from critics and still sell out museum exhibitions.

Lefty O'Doul: Popularized Pro Baseball in Japan

A washed-up starting pitcher turned outfielder, O'Doul won two batting titles, a World Series ring, and five championships as a minor league manager while mentoring Joe DiMaggio, but made his real impact outside America. After visiting Japan with a barnstorming team of all-stars in 1931, O'Doul was hooked, becoming Major League Baseball's ambassador to the Far East. He returned dozens of times, even after he retired from playing. His influence on Japan's obsession with baseball can be seen in the name of its biggest team, the Tokyo Giants, who took their moniker in honor of the former New York Giant Lefty. While Cooperstown continues to snub O'Doul — who has the fourth-highest career batting average in history — his fans can take solace in knowing Japan's Baseball Hall of Fame inducted him in 2002.

Bugsy Siegel: Made the Gambling Mecca

The brawn to fellow New York gangster Meyer Lansky's brains, Ben Siegel was sent west in 1937 to expand the mob's gambling interests in Los Angeles. He settled in Beverly Hills and promptly switched over to something approaching permanent vacation, as he partied with actresses and dreamed of his own movie stardom while narrowly dodging a murder rap. He reluctantly headed out to Las Vegas on Lansky's request and instantly was smitten. While William Wilkerson provided the vision for Vegas' first proper hotel/casino, the Flamingo, Siegel made it happen, procuring building materials despite post-World War II shortages. Having paved the way for the City of Sin to flourish, his murder just months after the Flamingo's opening prevented him from witnessing it personally.

The Inaugural Comet-1 Passengers: Ushered in Modernity

The Wright Brothers may have been the first to lift off in 1903 (assuming Gustave Whitehead didn't beat them to it in 1901), but it wasn't until May 2, 1952 that air travel really began to soar, when thirty-six paying passengers sat inside De Havilland's Comet-1 on the first commercial jet airliner flight. This flight to Johannesburg, South Africa radically altered the next fifty years, ushering in a Jet Age where just-in-time manufacturing changed the economic relationship between the first and third worlds, people of all income levels could travel the globe and exchange ideas, and terrifying new diseases like SARS and swine flu can become global epidemics almost before anyone knows they exist.

Che Guevara: ¡Viva La Revolucion!

Long before he met Fidel Castro, Ernesto Guevara did what any medical student would do with his free time: he went on spring break, driving across South America with a buddy on a motorcycle trip. While the journey involved some behavior typical of your average Spring Breaker (there was drinking), the poverty Che observed led him to join a revolution in Cuba and, far less successfully, one in Bolivia that led to his execution. He wrote about his experiences in The Motorcycle Diaries and ultimately became a symbol for everyone from idealists fighting for the downtrodden to vendors looking for an easy way to sell T-shirts to college kids.

Malcolm McLaren: Punk Rock Prosthelytizer

"I didn't have a reason to even be there," McLaren says of his time in New York in the 1970s, when he fled London to take a break from the fashion biz. He stumbled into managing the iconic but heroin-addicted band the New York Dolls and returned to England with a new understanding of the music business (he also got crabs). Things went better with his second group, the Sex Pistols, who flamed out fast like the Dolls... but first offended Britain so deeply with the song "God Save the Queen" that the charts refused to acknowledge when it topped them. The band hit #1 with the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, inspiring the formation of thousands of bands ranging from The Clash to The Pogues and generally shaking up the world so thoroughly that to this day when any work of art rocks the status quo it's said to be punk.

Gaetan Dugas: Patient Zero of the Pandemic

He was a flight attendant. He was also identified in Randy Shilts's And The Band Played On as Patient Zero in the AIDS epidemic, with links to forty of the first 248 AIDS patients discovered in America. With his airline passes, he traveled constantly and by his estimation had 250 sexual partners a year. While experts now believe his role in the spread of AIDS may have been exaggerated, the fact remains he developed Kaposi's sarcoma in 1980 (a skin cancer frequently found among AIDS patients) and still continued his prolific lifestyle until his death in 1984, spreading the disease to countless other people who spread it to countless more.