We left Cincinnati this morning, but the 850-ish mile, 15-hour drive is now over and our home is still here and we had a good time.

continue reading.....

We’re just outside Louisville, Kentucky, tonight. Neither of us had ever been to Kentucky before.
There are more trees here south of the Ohio River. The roads curve a bit more. We’re in Eastern Daylight Time again. Drivers have a bit more attitude. It’s a nice wayspot.
We left Saint Louis this […]

continue reading.....

“Considering his Harper’s Ferry raid, was John Brown a terrorist?”
Last Saturday Lisa and I visited the Adair cabin and John Brown museum in Osawatomie, Kansas. There isn’t a lot to the two-room cabin and the shelter that surrounds it, but we enjoyed the diversion. In one room, the great-great-great-granddaughter of the Adairs recounted […]

continue reading.....

Ozarkland
Mini-golf, part 1
The Titanic theatre
The Wax Museum
Baldknobbers Jamboree
Big Hat for Lisa
A Bad Lie

continue reading.....

I don’t even know where to start. This place is just so overwhelmingly shitty — what’s the word? — bizarre. Yet, we’re having a great time. We left Winfield, Kansas, where we stayed with Lisa’s auntie and uncle and visited her ailing grandparents. We made a pact to never get old […]

continue reading.....

[ed. note: Fabulous guest writer Lisa brings you another posting.]
Hidee-ho neighboreenos! Here we are in Branson, Missouri. Wild, wacky, weird Branson, Missouri. It’s hard to describe the experience that is Branson. I once heard it described as the hillbilly Vegas which may be pretty close in the end. I’d feel […]

continue reading.....

The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways turns 50 this year. My parents’ generation grew up as it was being built — my father did road construction for a bit, among many other things, and has many stories about it. When I grew up in Iowa, the interstates were […]

continue reading.....

I have been developing a lot of theories and questions about American life (or subsets of it) on this trip:

Americans — myself included — don’t really understand class or regional differences. And for an unknown reason we are inclined to see differences up the social scale as snobbery and down the scale as stupidity. […]

continue reading.....

Today we visited my brother in prison.
If I were going to write a memoir — tentatively entitled A Million Little Miles — I would fill it with all sorts of (probably) inappropriate details about how my family set me up to be the obsessive, mildly neurotic, fun-loving person I am today but that it’s really […]

continue reading.....

Silos and Smokestacks National Heritage Area? WTF?

Sites in this 37-county region of
northeastern Iowa illustrate the
transformation that took place as
mechanization paved the way for
a distinctly American system of
industrialized agriculture.
Tractor design and manufacture,
mechanized farming, corn-hog
production, dairying, beef cattle
feeding, and meat packing
continue to characterize the
region. The unique cultural
histories of family farming and
agribusiness are equally well
represented.

continue reading.....

Lesson numer one … babies don’t make sense. Among my relatives with whom we visited in Kansas were my two second cousins, aged three months and eight months. The three-month-old … no problem. She let me hold her and made happy baby noises until she got hungry … at which point I […]

continue reading.....

We’re still here in the Midwest. Time expands here and is full of nostalgia and goes on and on. But despite this, our trip is not quite half over, and we’re still having a good time.
Minneapolis
On the 14th we arrived at our friends’ house in the Minneapolis ‘hood. We definitely need to […]

continue reading.....

The baseball trip ‘06 so far. Click for bigger pictures.

Jacob’s Field, Cleveland (from I-90)

Poisonous frogs, Chicago

Anaconda and child, Chicago

Frozen Margaritas? U.S. Cellular Field, Chicago

View from the seats, U.S. Cellular Field

Mr. Sweep, denied

Chicago, from the Sears Tower Skydeck

Millennium Park, Chicago

Sue, the T-Rex, Chicago

Homo sapiens (not life size)

Triceratops, Chicago

Wrigley Field, Chicago

The final disgrace

Minneapolis Institute of Art

Mill […]

continue reading.....

Bob Wickman, you’re dead to me.
True, you made the final two outs last week after the previous two relievers gave up five runs, but you did give up one of your own (if my scorecard is correct).
But tonight you couldn’t find the strike zone and the two Brewers you walked scored on Geoff Jenkins’s long […]

continue reading.....

The trouble with rooting against a team — such as we did Sunday against the White Sox — is that fate may call in its markers. Tuesday we went to Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs . . . my team . . . my lovable band of Northside ne’er-do-wells. When I was […]

continue reading.....