After 104 days, 12,000 miles, and 25 states we made it home. It’s been an amazing journey and people everywhere couldn’t have been more kind to us (ok, except for one hotel employee in Montana, lol). We’re excited to move into our new home and to give Seattle a go for at least a couple […]
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In our last week on the road, our attention shifted from experiential to contemplative. From absorbing the places and people we encounter to thinking about our return to Seattle and what we’ve learned. But there have been a few places of note. In Montana, we passed through several smaller cities that each had a different […]
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More serendipity .. today we stumbled across Little Big Horn on our way to Billings. The location, preserving the battleground where Custer held his Last Stand, is little more than a large graveyard across miles of meadows. After the battle, the US Army buried the 268 dead soldiers right where they lay, with small gravestones […]
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Our trip was intended to experience the USA annd Americans focused on smaller cities, but we’ve not really targeted the classic roadtrip tourism sites, unless they were directly on our route. This week, our route sort of took us right through a few roadtrip classics … The Badlands, Mt Rushmore, and Devil’s Tower. The Badlands […]
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It is complicated, as Diego Rivera brilliantly captured in his ‘Detroit Industry’ murals at the Detroit Institute of the Arts. Henry Ford was an example of an American industrialist who revolutionized manufacturing around the world. For this, he deserves our admiration. The Rouge was his attempt to centralize complex manufacturing to one location, completely under […]
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We visited Chicago to visit with Linda and her husband Bill. Linda is the last of Dinah’s four friends from her youth that we visited on this trip. How cool it is that these five women, who met and became a posse of best friends in middle and high school have such close relationships to […]
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This was our last friends and family visit 🥹. I’m sad for it to be over, but what an incredible experience it has been to reconnect with so many good friends and wonderful family members. This stop was in the Windy City to see my last friend in the Hickory, Pennsylvania friend group, Linda, and […]
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Golly, have we enjoyed our stay in Detroit. In 2013, Detroit was a complete and utter mess … bankrupt with an 18% unemployment rate, 78,000 unoccupied/decrepit buildings, and no obvious prospects. 13 years later, things have changed. The unemployment rate is down to less than 5%, the downtown and surrounding neighborhoods are becoming vital again, […]
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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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Pittsburgh was the “big city” south of the small western Pennsylvania town I grew up in, which we rarely visited. I vaguely remember a trip we took to see the Ice Capades as a young girl, but mostly it was an untapped mystery. A more recent visit had piqued my interest (The Andy Warhol Museum, […]
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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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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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