Travel
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Before Grandma died, she specified cremation and asked that her ashes be divided between the graves of her husband Dan and her daughter Phyllis. Now the time has come to fulfill the first half of the assignment. We'll fly to NYC later this month. We'll make a pilgrimage to the Baron Hirsch cemetery on Staten…
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We drove from DC to Bradford, Vermont. Not desrious of hazarding the I-95 corridor, we veered far to the west, almost to Scranton. It was a mostly pleasant ride. Travelers, remember the Taconic State Parkway – it's underused, neatly landscaped, truck-free. Along the way, we encountered a road sign which said, Lititz, Pennsylvania. Lititz. I know that name. How? Have I been…
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A long weekend in Santa Fe, New Mexico — a handsome small city. I don't know of another place in the nation in which the principal economic engine is the making and selling of arts and crafts. I myself am in the familiar situation: anything I can afford, I don't want, and anything I want,…
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Stepping westward, we left St. Louis behind and detoured northward to enjoy scenic Route 79 to Hannibal. Well worth it –lovely, well-cultivated bottom land and wonderful vistas from the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi. We toured Louisiana, an old river town where a handful of century-old mercantile buildings are hanging on precariously, waiting to be redeployed…
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TV-free for more than three months, we stayed last night at a motel in Frackville, Pennsylvania and couldn’t resist taking a gander at the tube. I was shocked to see how artificial and contrived it all seemed. The actors were not real people, nor were they actors pretending to be real people. They were actors…
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It’s just about 2000 miles from our residence in Colorado to our summer quarters in Vermont. Early this week I made my 33rd drive from the one to the other. We were lucky — we sidestepped both floods and tornadoes, though fields were flooded throughout Iowa and there was impressive and nasty twister damage in…
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Today we covered 200 miles or so of Route 34 of western Nebraska, the reddest part of one of our reddest states. We started in the high steppes and finished in fertile (when irrigated) farmland. Here are some of the roadside highlights. Nine reassuringly green John Deere dealerships, evenly spaced along the route. A number…
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On two occasions this year the Williamsburg Bridge (from Manhattan to Brooklyn) has made a guest appearance in the plot of my life. In January, as faithful readers know, we set up shop in Manhattan. One day we strolled over the bridge from the Lower East Side to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The bridge…
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Over there on the west side of Alameda, at the intersection of 9th and Santa Clara, plunked down right in the midst of an otherwise residential neighborhood, is a most intriguing commercial island. Once upon a time, I'm sure, it would have consisted of (let me guess) a hardware store, a mom-and-pop grocery, a haberdashery…