Crazy construction as seen from the roof of our hotel. I’m pretty sure this was an empty lot when we were here last year.

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When we got to Cape Hatteras, that’s about when our road trip really started to feel real. North Carolina was the first state on our trip that I’d never been to at all before, it had begun to not rain all of the time, and it felt like a truly different part of the country. […]

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We didn’t visit West Virginia on our ’97 road trip, but I should cover it now, for geography’s sake. Not long after that trip, when I was living in Connecticut, my whole family traveled to Parkersburg, where my mom was born, and looked around the town cemeteries at the graves and crypts of our ancestors, […]

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Of all 49, I think my claim to having been to Delaware is the shakiest of the lot. George and I drove through on our road trip in 1997, and Aimee and I stopped at a rest stop on on of our road trips, probably in 2003, but beyond those cursory moments, I haven’t had […]

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Pennsylvania was also the state where George and I started our summer 1997 cross-country road trip, so I’ll use that entry to usher in a run-down of all of those states we visited on the trip, many of which I had never been to before. I had visited Maryland once prior to the road trip, […]

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Soon enough I’ll move on to all of those states I’ve only visited once, but for now, they’re all meaningful ones, and Pennsylvania is another doozy. Pennsylvania was the first state I traveled to completely by myself, when I headed to Dickinson College in Carlisle for my first summer at CTY, a.k.a. nerd camp. Taking […]

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We finally went to the Rose Bowl Flea Market yesterday, a once a month event in the parking lot surrounding “the most famous stadium in the world,” as someone said as we were walking in. We picked up Brian and had breakfast at Mike & Anne’s, delicious once again – and we saw two middle-aged […]

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I was talking to Aimee last night about what I was going to write about New York, and she suggested I almost needed two entries for the state, one for the year when we lived in Rochester, and one for everything else, the fifteen years of visits to New York City. She’s right; New York […]

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I took this photo in the summer of 2002, when I went up to Hancock, near Mt. Desert Island, to stay with George and his family for the weekend. I had been up to Maine a few other times in the previous year, visiting George twice in Bangor as he did his clerkship, and also […]

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Vermont, home to Brattleboro, Burlington, the bus station in White River Junction, narrow country roads, skiing, and the Ben & Jerry’s factory tour in Waterbury – that’s Vermont in a nutshell for me. I’m pretty sure my first visit to the state would have come during my first visit to Dartmouth, as we usually ventured […]

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It’s been awhile since we had a good comeback at our weekly pub trivia night – last week, we didn’t go because of a previous engagement, the week before we bombed out and didn’t manage a successful double-or-nothing all night. The week before, I think, we won, thanks to a Sinatra round which I helped […]

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I remember being surprised and excited at the thought that in New England you could drive just a few minutes from one state and all of the sudden be in another state; it certainly didn’t work that way in Alaska, and even in Colorado or Arizona, the neighboring states were far enough away that it […]

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He endorsed Obama on video, but more importantly, check out that great collection of vintage typewriters in his office. Nice. Wait until the last second of the video, when he gets up to turn off the camera, to see them all.

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Noticing that a number of the walks in Walking L.A. are under a mile long and don’t really justify an entire trip, we decided to tackle a group of westside walks this morning, four in all, from Santa Monica to Culver City. We started in Santa Monica, in an area of the community I’d never […]

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