Banner photo: Shipshewana, Indiana Dan, author of the site, Departing in Five Minutes, leads this week’s Lens Artists Challenge, and he’s selected the topic, Unbound: Escaping Your Confines And Seeing The World. Once again, I’m combining the Lens Artist Challenge with my Monthly Monochrome series. Dan writes, “From a day trip to a road trip …
Parke County, Indiana. Looking for the Mill Creek Covered Bridge, I turned left when I should’ve turned right. The road winds through some cornfields until the cornfields end and the road dips into a dark, woody hollow. It’s a foreboding place. A twinge of anxiety in my gut. Just about to the bottom of the …
A chapter in an occasional series of posts documenting a Spring 2021 road trip. Continued from the post, Route 66: Diners, Twin Arrows And Trading Posts, (link here). The van rocks and bumps as it grinds out of the dirt lot near Twin Arrows, Arizona. Lexi, my canine backseat driver is standing behind me, peering …
A chapter in an occasional series of posts documenting a Spring 2021 road trip. Today in America time is money and very few have time and money to call their own. If you work, the chances are that work won’t bless you with the time or the money to take the great American road trip. …
A chapter in an occasional series of posts documenting an autumn 2021 road trip through the Midwest. Continued From Purgatory at the OAK Bound for Omaha, baby. The gate agent announces the boarding sequence; special needs passengers, military, first class, and economy. Walking past the proletariat towards the jetway and my first class seat I …
A chapter in an occasional series of posts documenting an autumn 2021 road trip through the Midwest. September 10, 2021 I’m relaxing, if relaxation is actually possible, in the Delta Airlines boarding area at Oakland International Airport, known in airport-speak as simply, OAK. At the airport, relaxation is an earned and short lived luxury. There’s …
A chapter in an occasional series of posts documenting an autumn 2021 road trip through the Midwest. This post is a continuation of the post, A Coffee Shop Morning: Chewing on Life September 23rd, 2021, driving southbound in Eastern Iowa. Off to my left is the Mississippi River and somewhere deep in the river bottom …
A chapter in an occasional series of posts documenting an autumn 2021 road trip through the Midwest. “Plans should be ephemeral, so be prepared to move away from them.” ~ Anthony Bourdain. Nine o’clock on a weekday morning is never a good time to get on the road in a major metropolitan area. But, instead …
“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless – like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” ~ Bruce Lee …
It’s been some time since I’ve submitted to a photo challenge. Cee Neuner’s Midweek Madness Challenge is, Pick a Topic. Some suggestions are; sky, clouds, trees, grass and landscape. So here goes. Below, cornfield in rural Indiana Below, Clouds and sky outside of Shipshewana, Indiana. Below, a tree lined road outside of Saxesville, Wisconsin Below, …
A chapter in an occasional series of posts documenting an autumn 2021 road trip through the Midwest. Continued from Contemplating The Mystery Box. Out there, between Denver and Pittsburgh, lay a broad land I’d barely seen. A once vast grassland that had become countless square plots of cornfields and soybean fields, splashed with small towns …
A chapter in an occasional series of posts documenting an autumn 2021 road trip through the Midwest. Once you post it on social media, you own it. Doesn’t really matter what it is. It could be something as sweet as an approbation or as vile as a slur. Like it or not, it’s yours to …
A chapter in an occasional series of posts documenting an autumn 2021 road trip through the Midwest. Throughout the years that I’ve been blogging, I’ve often searched for new blogs to follow. Maybe I was looking for something in my areas of interest; history, photography or politics. Maybe it was a search for new ideas, …
The Red Lodge, Montana area attracts hunters, fishermen, hikers and campers, but my single purpose was to drive the Beartooth Scenic Highway. Sixty five miles long, starting at Red Lodge, the Beartooth snakes up the Beartooth Mountains to an elevation of just under 11,000 feet before dropping down into the twin towns Cooke City and …
At the northernmost edge of the town of Red Lodge, Montana, a cabin hewn of logs and caulking sits amid a ring of river stones in front of the Red Lodge Visitor Center. If the old cabin were sitting deep in the woods at the end of a dusty road it wouldn’t draw a glance, …
“Well, we’re not in the middle of nowhere, but we can see it from here.” ~ Thelma & Louise It seemed that way sometimes, those times when we got a little bit lost and found ourselves on a long stretch of a desolate county road. It’s on those roads when you haven’t seen a passing …
Two routes lead from Sheridan, Wyoming to Red Lodge, Montana. The quicker is to take 90 north into Montana, till you get to Hardin. At Hardin, you make a hard left and head into Billings, born as a railroad town in 1882, and grown up to be the state’s largest city. From Billings you slide …
Fashionably late. Again. I’ve managed to lag behind in the photo challenges so why should this week be any different? The subject for LAST Saturday’s Lens Artist Challenge is Getting Away. What an appropriate title for 2021. We were stuck in 2020. Cabin fever, depression and not a small amount of despair. In the late …
Monday, June 7, 2021 Day twenty-two. It’s another of those gotta get out early days, and this time we’ve actually managed to get out early. It’s not a matter of beating the mid-afternoon heat but of finding parking. This day’s plan includes a stop at Devil’s Tower along the way to Sheridan, and the National …
When we started out, we hadn’t included a ghost tour in our plans. Thing is, when you cover 8000 miles over sixteen states, the diverse American story is bound to offer up a collection of spectres. The ghosts that we encountered weren’t those mischievous, annoying spirits who move the furniture about while you’re out of …