After leaving the City of Steel, we headed to Detroit and started out by exploring the industry that made Detroit famous. First up, was a visit to the Ford Rouge factory. The Rouge on 3 square miles of land (named after the Rouge River on a parcel that Ford originally intended to make into a […]
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Dinah and I have spent a great deal of time talking about and processing upon the South’s attitudes towards race, its culture, the support for Trump, and a feeling that the South hasn’t escaped its history. I admit to having entered the South on this trip with impressions and biases that are driven by my […]
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Dinah’s third high school girlfriend! Sue and her boyfriend, Marty, showed us all of the charms of Winchester, VA. They love this town and it is easy to see why. From nice restaurants, artful museum, and lovely library to the promise of a grand-scale apple festival happening this weekend, it offers a lot for its […]
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Visiting Monticello, Jefferson’s home in Virginia, promotes reflection, particularly in this 250th anniversary year of our country. As you most likely think of him, Thomas Jefferson was a big concept person. As he wrote for his own memorial obelisk, he was the “Author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for […]
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Upon finding out that there was an Edgar Alan Poe museum in Richmond, we just had to go and didn’t even bother reading anything about it in advance. It was completely worth it. Poe’s legacy is astounding. He was at the root of the emergence of Horror, Mystery, Science Fiction, Detective literature and American short […]
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The South is a stronghold of US whiskey and so I’m giving it a go to see if American Whiskey can begin to compete with my love of Scotch. I’m a fan of rye and bourbon in cocktails but have never cottoned to just sipping on them. So it’s been a kick to ask bartenders […]
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After a bit of hesitation about sorta not wanting to gawk at rich people’s lives, which we generally have no interest in, we decided to go to the Biltmore Estate outside of Asheville. The Biltmore Estate is the absurdly large ‘country home’ of George Vanderbilt. George was the grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the “Commodore”. Starting […]
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Sometimes on this trip there are brief glimpses into parts of America that you wish you could dive into, but have to rush to the next place to see a friend or family member or even just get to a reservation. Walker Valley Market, run by the Amish, in Pearisburg, VA, was one of those […]
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In Greenville, we ate at Soby’s, who’s shrimp and grits were recently rated the best in the state of South Carolina. Our waitress said she is completely addicted to them and chows them down several times a week. Oh golly (I’m trying to cut back on my potty mouth, now that the President has appropriated […]
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Last fall, I was on the phone with a call center agent who addressed me as ‘honey’. When I observed she wasn’t from my part of world she laughed, telling me that she lived in South Carolina. So of course I asked where we should go when visiting her neck of the woods and she […]
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Very mixed feelings about Charleston and all that it reveals. I’m so sensitive about the injustices of the past that are still palpable today. Yes, there was a glorius and beautiful antebellum (literally defined as “before the war”) period for some white people, but wow, built so heavily on the backs, skills, and knowledge of […]
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Savannah, as we had heard, is pretty gorgeous. Throughout the city, there are oaks dripping with Spanish Moss in squares and larger parks, surrounded by beautiful, historic buildings. There are accessible and impressive natural waterways–the historic river waterfront with its bustling shops, restaurants, and boat traffic, but also a bit out of the city, a […]
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Chattanooga has one of the best city names in the US, courtesy of the Muskogean people. Until this week, the only thing I knew about the city was that Glenn Miller had a huge hit about it in the Big Band era with a song I don’t really care about. But thanks to that song’s […]
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Our visit to Knoxville was fairly underwhelming. We did go to Yassin’s Falafel house which was rated one of the friendliest restaurants in the US of A. Ends up, there is more than one Yassin’s Falafel house and we went to the wrong one, where they were not so friendly. Knoxville does take pride in being […]
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The sounds and party atmosphere of Nashville is pervasive with the heaviest concentration in just 2 throbbing blocks on Broadway, also known as the Honky Tonk Highway. The street itself seems to be alive and reverberating with music coming out of every crevice and doorway, and in many cases, 3 floors to a venue. Was […]
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On the outskirts of Nashville lies Franklin, a small, affluent city. Franklin is ‘the first city in Tennessee’ that is LEED certified. For cities, LEED serves as a comprehensive framework for local governments to measure, manage, and improve their sustainability performance. We were excited about this, so we stopped in and visited with the city […]
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What an amazing experience to have a tour of the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in NW Alabama. Who recorded here? Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Etta James, Paul Simon, The Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel, Duane Allman, Cat Stevens, Lynyrd Skynyrd, just to name a few. From the 1950’s through 1970’s, this small corner of Alabama […]
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From afar, Mississippi has always seemed so poverty stricken and I’ve always thought it must be a sad place to live. But the locals we’ve met here absolutely love Mississippi. They say that it has a strong sense of community, where everyone helps everyone out. It’s a reminder that happiness and wealth are often disconnected […]
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Paddling through the bayou amongst the Cypress trees and various water plants and lily pads took us into a magical world of birds (Great Blue Heron, Little Blue Heron, Night Heron, White Ibis), alligators (we saw two young ones!) and a fishing spider (yes, it actually fishes for small fish). We learned that the Cypress […]
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Dinah and I are currently on the Natchez Trace Parkway, an incredible gently curving road through forests that extends 440 miles from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee. It follows a 10,000 year old trail for native Americans that became the major land route between south and north through the War Between the States and beyond. […]
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The South is a foreign land to Steve and I, only having dabbled in it for work here and there. But for this trip, we’re all in, committed to getting a sense of what the South is all about. Underlying everything here, it feels, are the past years of slavery, which created both extreme inequity […]
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What an experience to be in a city where music can be heard everywhere. This place where Jazz was invented – and that is also a center of blues, brass band, funk, creole music, and variations of all – is a feast for the ears. It had to be New Orleans, with its mélange of African, […]
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Our Voodoo tour guide (yes, we took such a tour which was much more about NOLA history than Voodoo) spoke to us about three lies upon which Louisiana ended up being American, rather than French, English, or even Spanish. Lie #1: Intrepid explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle floated down the Mississippi from Illinois […]
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From Austin, we zipped down to Houston to see the NASA Space Center. Our first visit was to Mission Control, which brought back so many memories from my childhood and youth when I was nuts about the Space Program. It’s amazing to see the Stone Age technology (by today’s standards) with which America –at its […]
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In this most recent visit: Here are Steven and Alison at the Fairgrounds at the Austin Rodeo. See the post on Austin for more. One of our objectives for the road trip is to connect with friends and family who are spread out across the country—and there are a lot of them! Being able to […]
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On the way to Austin there are “loose livestock”, so many oil wells (or iron horses, as they are called) and the vestiges of the German Immigrant Trail. At some point the desert gives way to trees and then more trees. And then eventually you meet the big, modern, traffic filled city of Austin. If […]
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(By Steve and Dinah) Today, we left the company town of Marfa after three days of immersion in the minimalist world of Donald Judd. Company town!? Because Donald Judd single handedly put this town of 2,500 souls on the world map when he adopted it as his new home in the early 1970’s — and […]
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On our second evening in Marfa, we headed up to McDonald observatory, about 45 minutes out of town. McDonald Observatory is operated by University of Texas and offers regular public ‘star parties’. Some friends had suggested we go and we didn’t really research what we were getting into and sorta expected maybe 30-40 people in […]
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It feels like we are now really entering the heart of the Great American Road Trip! Pistachio ice cream eating at Alamogordo Pistachio Land before noon ✅ Hiking around the dramatic and highly photogenic White Sands National Park ✅ Taking the natural entrance (a spiraling walk down one and a […]
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Who says the sky is safe? Dinah and I can tell you that the New Mexico sky is full of white trails going every which way. The one day with blue skies unsullied by white lines crisscrossing the sky, we ran into a woman in downtown Santa Fe who assured us that the government had […]
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