The Travel Writing Experiment

Off again on another October adventure we go! Since I typically post something travelly directly to social media, I thought I would try, perhaps for at least a week, putting the few pictures and thoughts out in daily blog form rather than a daily photo and long blog weekly. Shall we try? Let’s shall.

Traveling Like a Well Oiled Machine

The Fun Car, aka the red Subaru, aka O’Hara, does like to go. We are the kind of people that have packing down to a science, have taken photos of the insides of suitcases and the back seat, so that we know the most efficient way to strap down that laundry basket full of extra shoes and warm coats, and have tucked away the extra book we may never read, the ear muffs (going north in October!), and a kite or two (coast). Last year, it was 8500 miles down and across from Albuquerque to the Upper Peninsula, from California to Ontario. This year, we are far less ambitious and only look to go Moseying up the Left Coast, San Francisco to Victoria, Canada.

Pacific Coast, Mendocino. Photo by kajmeister.

The coast does not disappoint. The first day will be home up to Mendocino, a traverse through the vineyards north of the Bay, cutting through multiple tall tree groves and farmer’s markets. The outside temperature, reported by the car, starts to drop degree by degree as we pass westward by the Schultz Museum in Sonoma and the Navarro River Grove. The road is very twisty; apparently, we did not take the usual way through Willits. Instead we are winding, and winding, and winding up 128 through teeny towns of Philo and Boonville. The problem was that I was driving, at my request, and in this unusual move, KK started as navigator rather than as Formula One racer. Hence, we apparently took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

Continue reading “The Travel Writing Experiment”

Road Trip Redux

Note: This is one of my favorite early essays from 2016, reconstituted and updated.

“Kathy”, I said,
As we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh,
“Michigan seems like a dream to me now.
It took me four days
To hitch-hike from Saginaw.
I’ve come to look for America.”

–Simon & Garfunkel, America
I-whatever, photo by responsecrafting.com

The sun is lower in the horizon now, stabbing through the late afternoon windows when we drive westward home. My baseball team is starting to lose all hope of catching the division leaders. Even pet stores have back-to-school sales. It must be mid-August. It must be time for the End-of-Summer Road Trip.

Everybody’s had these. Maybe when you were a kid, and your parents loaded the station wagon/minivan/SUV with odds and ends and headed off to the Grand Canyon or the Smokies or the Adirondacks or Yosemite. Or, in college, when you and some friends just crammed into someone’s old beater and took off for somebody’s friend’s place where you could crash. Road Trips usually take place at the beginning or end of summer, or at the beginning or end of Something. They are part demarcation, part vision quest, like the mythic journeys where the heroes and heroines go into the underworld or across the sea.

Road Trips allow for a lot of staring out the window and contemplation as well as for Seeing Something New, possibly Interesting. Possibly Just Something. Let’s load the car. Personal epiphanies and experience, coming right up.

Continue reading “Road Trip Redux”

The Real Macbeth

When the hurly-burly’s done,
when the battle’s lost and won…


–Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act I: Sc 1: Line 3

Macbeth was a real guy. King of Scotland. Lived in a Castle near Inverness. Defeated Duncan and succeeded by Malcolm. Many things that Shakespeare used in his play were factually accurate. However, most of the characterizations of king Macbeth were historical gaffes.

Those of us who had to read Macbeth in high school, who had to diagram Shakespeare’s five act opening-climax-denouement cycle and to write papers about how Macbeth’s tragic flaw, his obsession with ambition, led to his downfall, were given the wrong impression. Macbeth the real King of Scotland (1040-1057), was not a murdering madman, but a far more complex, elusive, and interesting person whose true ambition may have been to unite Scotland.

Cawdor Castle
Cawdor Castle, formerly home to Macbeth, currently home to the Campbell’s.
Photo by kajmeister.
Read morE