Curiosity, Travel and Change
A weaver in Teotitlan del Valle gives thanks before beginning work I am in awe of people who can make something out of nothing—salvagers and re-purposers and cultivators, dumpster divers and weavers, farmers coaxing food from the harshest earth, entrepreneurs finding possibility in a world of scarcity. On my recent trip to Mexico I saw …
Capulalpám de Mendez is a pueblo mágico perched high in the Sierra Norte, reached by a curving, ascending two-hour drive from Oaxaca City. In these mountains, live people whose original language is Zapotec, not Spanish, who fight to preserve their traditions, and who live with a profound understanding of nature. View toward the villages Capulalpám …
Continue reading "The Sierra Norte: Walking in the land of the Zapotec"
Pete heading into class There is something about a test that, even at age 65, being retired, 40 years after taking two bar exams, LSATs, SATs, GREs and countless other tests, pop quizzes and final exams, still produces anxiety. At least that’s what I felt when I found myself last week in the cool, palm-shaded …
The view from my home Not long before the world went into lockdown, I traded the city for the country. For almost 40 years, I lived on busy Philadelphia streets, awakened at times by sirens and horns. For all those years, I reveled in the messiness and color of urban life and prowled many corners …
As the Road Trip enters its final days, I’m paying homage to the band whose name I ripped off for my blog. One of the greatest bluegrass bands ever, which only lasted from 1973-74 and included Jerry Garcia on banjo, David Grisman on mandolin and Vassar Clements on fiddle. Doesn’t get much better than that. …
Installation with Dale Chihuly glass work I remember clearly the brouhaha in Philadelphia over heiress Alice Walton’s attempt to purchase Eakins’s The Gross Clinic for the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas. Behind the claims that the painting was part of Philadelphia’s patrimony, were the barely veiled sneers about the painting being displayed in northwest …
Ok, sometimes you just gotta do the tourist shot Every self-respecting road trip across the Southwest should at least acknowledge Route 66. Even if you don’t organize your road trip around the “the Mother Road”, the vestiges of the 1926 highway appear at crossroads, on road signs, in souvenir shops, at truck stops, or in …
Continue reading "Standin’ on the Corner: Route 66 and travel nostalgia"
I admit that I humored Pete when he said he wanted the Road Trip to stop in Death Valley. He had grown up in California and had never seen it. I imagined a boring, flat, scorching, dusty wasteland hardly worth the detour. Boy, was I wrong. Death Valley is dazzling, in the way only an …
The cemetery at Manzanar In a time when anti-Asian hate crimes are on the rise, a visit to Manzanar reminds one that the most shameful anti-Asian hate crime in our history was committed by the American government during World War II. Guilty of nothing, but targeted because of their Japanese descent, 120,000 Americans were forcibly …
Continue reading "An American Concentration Camp: Manzanar, California"
The thirty-minute traffic jam in Sedona Arizona made me think about tourist destinations that have become victims of their own success. Sedona probably has the most picturesque setting of any town in America. Nestled against the majestic vermillion and ochre sandstone carved and jutted cliffs, with each building painted in some version of adobe, sage …
Old and On the Way 