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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
June 4th, 2021. The Black Hills, South Dakota. After an interesting, if somewhat disappointing, stop at Wall Drug, we’re headed to our cabin located somewhere between Hill City and Custer. Our route has taken us through relatively large, Rapid City, slowing us down on a sweltering afternoon when all we want to do is get …
That’s the way it is with vacation trips isn’t it? Seems like eons ago – if you even remember it at all. Seems as if the national park t-shirt with the wolf on it and the Mount Rushmore refrigerator magnet are the only hard evidence that you actually went somewhere. Going back to work dims …
Saturday, May 29, 2021 Day eleven. Note: Posts are not in chronological order. We’re traveling from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Amarillo, Texas. We’ve just hit Cline’s Corner’s at the junction of Highways 285 and 40 (Route 66}. Cline’s Corners isn’t a town, just a large rest stop; RV park, filling station, café, and last …
Friday, May 21, 2021 Day four Mother Nature. Sometimes she can be a real; you know, that “B” word? When she gets to feeling a little fishwifey, she’ll cut loose with an earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. I had a friend in Missouri who used to hunker down when the …
Thursday, May 20, 2021 continued. Next stop, Oatman, Arizona. We enter Arizona, through the town of Mojave Valley. I slow down at the Welcome To Arizona sign and ask Cora if she’d like me to take her picture standing by the sign. She declines. “It’s too hot,” she says. It is that. The thermometer on …
Warning: Some content rated R. Post-It notes, travel guides, an oversized Rand-McNally Road Atlas, assorted other maps, pens, pencils, a highlighter, notepads and a couple of spiral notebooks; my current life in a nutshell, all of it scattered about, on a little desk, a printer stand, the dining table and, to the wife’s displeasure, the …
It’s been alleged that COVID is in recession in America, and with that news, along with the arrival of summer and increasing vaccinations, Americans are looking to rid themselves of a side effect of the pandemic; let’s call it hometown-itis. Whether they contracted the coronavirus or not, most Americans have exhibited symptoms of hometown-itis; alternating …
Come the beginning of October we’d reached a disheartening anniversary. A year had passed since Cora and I had taken a trip to anywhere besides Home Depot, the grocery store and a couple of al fresco lunches. October 2019, we spent a few days in Reno, Nevada. Reno isn’t exactly the flower in the garden. …