We were in Europe recently for a few weeks, and spent a few days in the beautiful city of Budapest, Hungary, a city rich in history. Our hotel was directly across the river from the neo-Gothic Hungarian Parliament building, a building I could stare for hours, if I had the time1. There was much to…
Whispering in the dark Information overload manifests itself like a demon in the dark. On lazy days that I spend reading for most of the day, I fall asleep at night to the whispers of passages that I read earlier in the day. These whispers are vague and formless and closely resemble a fever dream.…
Sleep of the Just Plain Tired There is still light in the sky when I fall into a dreamless sleep. It is something of a miracle in its dreamless quality and in its duration. When I awaken, just after 6 am, I realize that I have slept more than 8 hours, an achievement unparalleled in…
A Remarkable Number It seems these days that almost every travel article I read tells me how bad air travel has gotten. Airlines are nickle-and-diming passengers. Passengers are getting into fights with airline staff. Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Airlines do nickle-and-dime passengers. The overall quality of the airline experience has gone down considerably in…
A little over a week ago we hit the road for our holiday vacation. All of the preparations were done. At 7 am, as planning, I pulled the car out of our driveway for the 560 mile drive to our hotel on the I-95 corridor in Savannah, Georgia. We have been doing these holiday road…
Since 2010 we head down to Florida every December to spend the holidays with family, and to have a vacation away from home. Since 2012, we’ve driven so that we avoid the stress of airports, canceled flights, luggage limits. It saves money because we don’t have to buy airline tickets for the five of us,…
One subset of travel books that I enjoy are those that mix travel with some theme of discovery. John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley is the model from which many of these books have taken their example, and Nathaniel Philbrick is quick to admit that Steinbeck served as a model for his entry in this sub-genre,…
Is it cheating if your experience comes from books? Say, you’re chatting with friends and during the course of the conversation, someone comments on the beauty of Westminster Abbey. You jump in and agree to its beauty, but what really astounds you is a certain place in the Nave where you find yourself standing among…
The centerpiece of our recent road trip was Niagara Falls. When we were trying to figure out where to go, we determined that none of us had ever been to Niagara Falls before, and that would make a good destination. We drove to Albany, New York, to visit friends, and then began a drive west…
When I was a teenager, we would spend several weeks each summer visiting my grandparents in New York. For some of the time, they would take us on road trips. We visited Cooperstown, the Catskill Game Farm (which no longer exists, so far as I can tell), Howe’s Caverns. Sometimes we’d venture into New Hampshire…
The worst part of a vacation is returning home. The worst part about where we live is that there are no good routes home. Having recently spent seven days on a road trip, driving blue highways and visiting more rural areas, coming back to a major metropolitan area like ours is a drag. There are…
A big part of our recent road trip vacation took us through central New York. Over a period of two days, we drove from Albany, where we visited friends, to Niagara Falls. On the way, we stopped in several places, the first of which was Cooperstown, New York, home of the National Baseball Hall of…