We’re about to take a Radio Cab to the airport and start our long journey to Venice, Italy. This vegetable and fruit boat is just down the street — well rather, canal — from our apartment. Address is 2817 Dorsoduro,…
Back from the Friendly Skies
I arrived back to sane, springing-ahead Portland last night, weary from my sojourn to home turf in northeastern Pennsylvania and a pilgrimage to icy, snow-drift and dreary Ithaca for a friend’s memorial service on March 1st. It was a grueling trip. Lots of down time, time to observe the shabby, broken-down weariness of that part of the east
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The Sun Returns on Tuesday
I was hoping to get in my 3.2 mile loop to and from New Seasons market this afternoon but, alas, it’s really coming down cats and dogs out there! The crows have invaded the front lawn, picking worms I guess…
Home Again Jiggety-Jig
The wind—cooler wind, how great is that?—is up and the evening has barely begun. Wind chimes welcom me home and my cat lazing with a feather bungee toy on the kitchen braided rug. What a joy to return to the smells, the sights, the cooler air of western Oregon…
Travel Diary: Impressions of Nashville and Memphis
We’ve been back two days from our trip to western Tennessee, Nashville then Memphis via the Natchez Trace. I’m finding it hard to construct a coherent narrative of everything we saw and did.Maybe that’s all a travel tale ever really is, a patchwork of sights, tastes, and sounds?…
Travel Diary: Bronze, Blues, and Brews
Rocking steady blues at a music festival held in a park on the edge of a river in the isolated, interesting town of Joseph, Oregon, in the Wallowa Mountains, not far from the Idaho border. We are friends with the music coordinator so we have backstage passes…
Travel Diary: The Capital of Nowhere
From Jan Morris’s last book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere—words that speak to me, maybe help explain some of what I struggle to understand, this otherness, this search for place and identity and tribe…
Travel Diary: Back from Vancouver, B.C.
Road trip north up I-5 until it ends and is highway 99 again and dumps you easily and with charm into downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. The Vancouver International Jazz Festival was happening while we were there — free concerts in and around Granville Island…
That Said, What Was Fun About Driving 1000 Miles…
Highlights of My Thousand Miles to Nowhere, Somewhere and Back…
— Stumbling on/into Klindt’s, the oldest bookstore in Oregon, in The Dalles and finding a set of Lawrence Durell’s Alexandria Quartet for $12 just as R.E.M. is playing “The Great Beyond.”
— Doing “drive-by shootings”– photographs from the car while moving. Hold up the camera, point, and click. Vistas, clouds, rain off in the distance, the sunlight on the top of an old silo, a way-too-huge flag on the twin towers of a cement factory that rises up out of nowhere.
— A crow that I can pretend is Edgar Allan Poe’s raven, perched on the top of sign on Route 30, outside Haines, Oregon, announcing that I’m at the 45th parallel, the midpoint between the North Pole and the equator
— The way the leaves moved in the slightest breeze on the quaking aspen outside my window at the Sandman Inn in LaGrande, Oregon.
— At the same Sandman, overhearing a shard of conversation between army guys-on-tour and a couple who live near Antelope, Oregon where (as the husband says) “that Rajneesh guy used to live.”
— Eas-as-pie wireless in the Sandman; picking up wireless from hotels blocks away in downtown Boise before the genius light bulb goes on in my head and I think, aha! close the drapes!
— The Idaho Black History Museum in the Julia Davis Park across from the Rose Garden where I talk with the director (her sister is in the Lion King on Broadway) while I buy my son a $5 Juneteenth T-shirt for his birthday.
— The “Homage to the Pedestrian” art installation in The Grove in downtown Boise. Every time a person walks by, bells, whistles, clapping and light drumming start. I could never figure out if it was canned/pre-recorded or if the actual act of an individual walking by generated a unique set of rhythms each and every time.
— Getting that hour back as I return into Pacific Daylight Time just north of Huntington, Oregon.
— The sign at Exit 383 at Weatherby, Oregon “Panning for Gold, Next Exit.” Panning for gold translates into a pack of RVs and campers and tents alongside the highway and a bunch of humans with picks and shovels digging into the soil that made up two very tiny hills of dirt that look like they were leftover from some outhouse construction project.
— Randi Rhodes and her big, wonderful, sassy, obnoxious politically savvy mouth when I’m finally on I-5, close Albany, Oregon, and can pick up KTTH, 990 AM, The Truth once again.
— Cleaning out the car, starting laundry, realizing I have days and days stretching out in front of me where basically I don’t have to drive much again…
Why Road Trips Are Less Than Fun These Days…
Ten Reasons (So Far) Why Road Trips Are Less Than Wonderful These 21st Century Days
1. The roads are too damn crowded. Even in the wide open spaces of Eastern Oregon’s Malheur County, an irresponsible, big honkin’ Chevy Tahoe or Ford F350 Super Cab with the requisite “Support Our Troops”
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