For over 30 years, I’ve wanted to ride in one of those “air boat” (or is it a “fan boat”?) things in shallow water, dodging alligators like a slalom skier with the wind blowing in my face. Last July, we drove from Atlanta to Florida Everglades National Park to do […]
When you shut the door to my office, you see 3 framed University of Alabama degrees on the wall that I didn’t earn. One from 1939 for Jamie Waid; one from 1941 for Prentice Thomas; one from 1967 for Janice Thomas. When the first 2 were being pursued, the Tide […]
We left Atlanta on December 27th and headed north, stopping for soul food at Southern Star in Chattanooga, our borrowed Kia Sedona packed for 1,000 miles of exploration across the Bluegrass State. A couple hours later, we were peeing at the Kentucky Welcome Center off I-65, and 45 minutes after […]
A friend of mine turned 40 in late September, and late September is when millions of Germans celebrate Oktoberfest for 2 weeks, so I felt compelled to attend my 3rd such festival. And perhaps even more compelling was the chance to see a new country, Belgium, and to sample the […]
Speeding away from Mountain Home AFB and all the structure a day spent with active duty military can bring along US-20 E through high desert and into the Rocky Mountains on a Monday afternoon during business hours felt like the most freedom I’d had in years. The highway wound through […]
We got The Note that schools send when they’re about to delve into “sex ed” a few months ago. Do you know The Note? The Note can make an otherwise good day awkward; I was afraid of The Note. In any event, we decided we should have a series of […]
Rather than fly home to Atlanta and then go to Philly the next day, we changed our flight “home” to go straight to Philadelphia, landing at midnight on Friday night (thanks to a delay at JFK), June 16. Why end a vacation with another vacation? In a word, Bono. I’d […]
We loaded our Kia Carens, left our Paris apartment, and said “farewell” to the barista we’d seen every morning for a week by 9am on Tuesday, June 13. It was time to head west. Just over an hour later, we pulled up at Giverny to see Monet’s gardens. If this […]
On Monday, June 12, we arrived at the Palais Garnier, the original Paris opera house, at 10am and signed up for audio tours. The children had their own version, and the voice leading theirs was, most appropriately, the famous Phantom of the Opera. I’ve never seen live opera nor spent […]
On Sunday, June 11, we arrived 45 minutes early for our 10am time slot to visit 6 million dead people in the Parisian catacombs. We descended a spiral staircase into the underground–130 steps–leading to the darkness below. We walked 1.5km, stopping at visual markers that synced with our audio tours […]