Perhaps you’ve read Jack Kerouac’s coming-of-age novel On the Road or seen one of the classic movies about road trips across America: “Easy Rider,” “Thelma and Louise,” “Sideways,” or the comedies “National Lampoon’s Family Vacation” and “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” These stories offer a glimpse of the variety, vastness, and grandeur of the American landscape. […]
T.L., Phone Home!
Nevada is so desolate that there isn’t even much of a highway between Reno in the north near Lake Tahoe, and Las Vegas, far to the south near the mammoth Hoover Dam. You drive mostly two-lane U.S. 95, amid low brown hills, scrub bushes, Joshua trees, and rattlesnakes along the 715 kilometers (445 miles) between […]
Here, There, Everywhere
I’ve been buzzing about the country for the past three weeks, getting as far from our Washington, D.C.-based home as the northwestern tip of the other Washington in the Pacific Northwest. Over the next few posts, I’ll tell you about some places and things I encountered in this 11,000-km journey, and about the joys of […]
Roadies
Carol and I will soon head out on one of our trademark coast-to-coast adventures, if you count our home in suburban Washington, D.C., 200 kilometers (124 miles) from the Atlantic Ocean, as one of the “coasts.” The other end of the journey, in Port Angeles, Washington, just a short dash up the Strait of Juan […]
South Dakodak
If you’re like me, you sometimes look back at an earlier period in your nation’s history and think, “Those were the days!” We romanticize the slower pace and what today seems like their relative innocence — even if reality was something else again. I’ve already told you that I sometimes linger over old photographs — […]
Formidable Footpath
I want to tell you all about the Appalachian Trail from experience, for I have hiked it. Layers of fog greet A.T. hikers in the Appalachian Mountains. Well, not all 3,400 kilometers, or 2,100 miles, of it. More like 10 miles, some of it in my street shoes, thereby learning the first lesson of traversing […]
Valley of the Stun
Only one lonely, two-lane highway pierces Monument Valley, a vast natural wonder that straddles the Arizona-Utah border in the Desert Southwest. And then one unpaved, rutted, 27-kilometer [17-mile] loop trail winds through it once you get there. Stubs of sandstone jut upward like broken lower teeth on Monument Valley’s desert floor The air is clear […]