My uncle Jack has lived in Oklahoma for as long as I can remember, and on two road trips, I’ve visited him in Tulsa on the way out west. It’s always nice to see him, and to hang out with my cousins who live nearby. The first time through, George and I took the opportunity […]

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It was a beautiful night for a concert last night at the Hollywood Bowl, and R.E.M. put on a terrific show, pulling out some obscurities and letting loose with the songs from the new album that sounded as good as I had hoped. We had some great (fan-club) seats, undoubtedly the best seats we’ll ever […]

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More great work from M B-W, at Sunset and Gower. I can’t decide who looks the worst here; I’m leaning toward McCain.

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It may seem strange to feature a photo of an English rock musician in this post about Texas, but it’ll all make sense. My first trip to Texas was a brief one, on the road trip route in 1997, a little out of our way, as we made our way from Arkansas up to my […]

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We took advantage of the holiday weekend to get up to Solvang, the little Danish outpost outside of Santa Barbara, for some sightseeing, wine-tasting, and hiking. We arrived on Sunday afternoon and enjoyed the strange Danish-ness of the town, its many windmills, and especially the Elverh?j Museum.We headed up to Los Olivos for a delicious […]

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On our 1997 road trip, Arkansas was our gateway to the west, and was the second state on our trip that we visited on two occasions. The first time around, we headed out of Memphis over the Mississippi and made it to Little Rock by ten p.m. to stay at a friend’s place, our first […]

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Yesterday we took a (very) brief walk around Laurel Canyon – rather, around the grocery store and past the house where Jim Morrison once lived. We were meant to walk up the Prospect steps and back down the hill on the other side, but the steps were blocked and overgrown at the top, so we […]

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Louisiana is the last of my “only on the road trip” states. We knew New Orleans, like Nashville, Four Corners, and Las Vegas, was among our must-sees on the trip, and though we spent less than 24 hours in the state, and didn’t see that much of the city, we did what we could and […]

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During our 1997 road trip, we drove the entire length of the state of Mississippi, twice, the only way we could figure out how to hit Nashville, New Orleans, and Memphis. I really wish we’d been able to do more, but with the West calling our name, we had to keep moving. We left Nashville […]

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In many ways, the state of Tennessee was the highlight of our entire 1997 road trip: between the food, the music, and the history of the place, we were constantly surprised and fascinated by what we discovered. We enjoyed the state so much we visited twice, first stopping in Lynchburg, Nashville, and Shiloh, and returning, […]

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It still seems slightly amazing that I can remember anything that happened nearly twenty years ago, but I guess I’m not in my twenties anymore, so I should stop being surprised. It’s Brent’s birthday today (he’s not in his twenties, either), and the combination of that event and the ubiquitous advertising announcing the return of […]

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Our time in Alabama on the road trip was pretty brief as we made our way from Atlanta to Nashville; the two notable highlights were my first experience at a Sonic Drive-In, in Fort Payne, and our only flat tire of the trip. We were somewhere on 65 between Paint Rock and Swaim when we […]

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Spending time in Las Vegas is always a surreal experience – the flood of lights that come out of nowhere as you approach from the air, the way the cartoonish buildings just sit there, visible from the tarmac as you taxi in, and of course, the crowds of people from all walks of life, in […]

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Ah, the World of Coca-Cola, circa 1997. Filled with fascinating (and self-congratulatory) history, as well as all-you-can-drink samples of the strange products Coke distributes around the world, the place proved amazing enough that I had to take Aimee there when we went to Atlanta the next time, for George’s and Anne’s wedding in 2005. Those […]

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One of the great things about my year at the Eastman House in Rochester was the fact that we took a number of multi-day field trips to various labs, museums, and conferences, including the Fifth Orphan Film Symposium, in Columbia, South Carolina, in March 2006. And one of the great things about the Orphans event […]

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