It seemed appropriate to celebrate Memorial Day by going to the Flight 93 memorial site. The drive through neat farms and small towns was easy under a grey and lowering sky. It had rained for the last three days. Flags were out in many of the towns and on houses lining the road. Almost none […]
Fences…
I’ll not stoop to bowdlerizing Frost and talking about virtues of good fences, but I was struck by the fencing in my Houston neighborhood during my stay there. These fences are shoulder-high or higher. Usually iron, some have decorative finials at the posts. Some cover palings with a unique feature of plastic carpeting mimicking a […]
Vignette – Tennessee
Sometimes I am fond of Tennessee, sometimes I am not. Mixed. It does not have the prettiness of the rolling hills of Kentucky or the well ordered, size manageable farms. It feels more scrappy either becoming or trying reinvention. The water ways that made for thriving towns and the railroads that connected to the burgeoning […]
Loop de Loop – TN and KY
I think of my trip through Kentucky and Tennessee as walking the interior of a chambered nautilus. The trip has been loops within loops — I began in the west, at Mammoth Cave, wandered east to Lexington. Meandered south and west to Bardstown and Fort Campbell. Skittered south to Shiloh (again) this time for the […]
Kentucky – It’s bourbon and horses
Visited the Kentucky Horse Park — in large part to honor, or atone, or reconcile with my memory of my father He was an avid horse follower. In my youth, he was track medic for the jockeys at Alexandra Park, not far from the last house we inhabited in Auckland. He claimed the only time […]
Ignorance – American History, American Stories
I may have said this more than once on my tour: I thought I had known, or at least, had a pretty good handle on American history. I had lived in Rhode Island for more than 40 years. When I met my wife, she lived in Lexington, steps from the Green. I had walked the […]
Shakedown camping – Texas Coast.
Off the road, the van got fluffed — first the chassis, so now she rides better — then the coach, and that is still in testing. Chassis have remained about the same; coaches not. There’s not a USB port in the van, which marks the era of its technology. The radical revolution in outfitting has […]
Chapter 4 – Turning ‘Round the Compass – Wandering North
I began this trip last August with no preconceived notions, or none that I was aware of. I like to think of myself as an innocent abroad, open to new experiences with a slow turn to judgement, and a frequent reassessment. It is all discovery. Off the road in an attempt to better understand my […]
Bookends
I had to make a quick trip to the frozen north that Rhode Island had become. I call it annual one: see doctor, dentist, dermatologist, tax preparer — those elements that require residency that is not the vagabond life. I flew out of Houston. The plane lifted off, circled about the city then picked a […]
Household Arrives….
My household goods arrived today — what turmoil! How do I have so much stuff? My portion of the 75 ft van, pulled by a blue Volvo tractor (I think that’s what those in the know call the truck engine part that pulls the long trailer), is tiny and takes but 45 minutes and maybe […]
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