I don’t recall where I bought Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey except to say that I’m sure it was on a trip out West. I am frequently inspired to buy books like this when I travel, but unfortunately they don’t always get cracked open.
Well, for some reason, I recently took this off my bookshelf, [...]
Monthly Archive for September, 2009
Focus on America’s National Parks: Images of Yellowstone
Posted in Discuss, Go, See, Watch, Wyoming on Sep 28th, 2009
It has finally arrived. Yesterday, the first episode of The National Parks: America’s Best Idea provided the best excuse in recent memory to avoid all to-dos, to step away from the musts, to ignore text messages and e-mails.
The show began with a quote from John Muir: “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places [...]
We Love Us an Oddball Museum
Posted in Alabama, Discuss, Do, Listen, Tennessee, Texas on Sep 25th, 2009
Met, shmet. Those fancy museum are fine, but Flyover Americans never met an oddball museum they didn’t love. So much so, we had trouble choosing among the gajillions we’ve visited.
Today’s threefer guest writer is our buddy Eva Holland, senior editor of World Hum, swell writer, cool chick, and ’60s soul junkie, which explains her detour [...]
I suffer from event blindness. It’s a rare condition wherein excitement about an event upends the sufferer’s research skills and stops them from checking out the location of said event. So, when an invite to the Plano Balloon Festival arrived, I said yes without delving deep into the destination: Plano, Texas. I’m a little bonkers [...]
I had a little staycation this weekend (and I use the word just to annoy Jenna), spending a night in Plano, a suburb of Dallas, to attend the Plano Balloon Festival–and, not incidentally, to hang out with Jenna, who was in town for the same event and will tell you her side of the story [...]
From Microbrews to Margaritas: Memorable Bars Across America
Posted in Alaska, Eat and Drink, Go, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Oregon, Three-fer Friday on Sep 18th, 2009
Some people pick one and stick with it through a trip (or a lifetime). Some beeline for the trendiest/newest/hippest this or that. Other folks play fast and loose, stumbling into every semi-interesting place they happen upon. Whatever. There’s no one right way to choose a bar.
As of this Friday Three-fer, a new Flyover America tradition [...]
No such thing as a bad photograph of the prairie. No, really.
I’ve been prairie obsessed since visiting the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Pawhuska, Okla., a year ago. Several months later, an hour tagging barbed wire fencing (as a favor to prairie chickens) in the Oklahoma panhandle convinced me that tromping across a prairie is a [...]
It took some work to push the toolshed door open. My grandfather, one of the finest pack rats to ever live, had used the tiny shed to store things both necessary and random. Gardening tools. Old wooden mirrors that, one day, he might want to hang again. Little boxes of this and that. Stuff. As [...]
Autumn Rituals
Posted in California, Do, Maine, Michigan, Texas on Sep 11th, 2009
Now that we don’t go back to school in autumn, we can face the season without anxiety (though we kinda miss the new school supplies) and enjoy our own autumn rituals.
While there’s much to love about a planned leaf peeping excursion to Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, and beyond, the early fall leaves that surprised me at [...]
As a total word nerd, I’m always inventing new phrases on road trips.
In the lexicon I’ve developed with my friends, “To Clark” means “to overly plan an adventure in an attempt to make sure everyone will have a great time, only to see the plans backfire, causing disastrous results.”
The verb is a direct reference to [...]
