The adventures and various works of a photographer, road tripper, former patron of the local arts, aspiring app developer, and late night coffee drinker and conversationalist.
I've been spending quite a bit of time lately working on my long-neglected road trip travelogs and photo galleries. While going through related memorabilia and papers, sorting items into piles of what to file away versus what to discard, I stumbled upon my old pre-departure checklist from 2024. I make one of these lists before every significant out of town trip as a safeguard against leaving something important behind, a practice I began following a near "missed opportunity" in 2010. About two hours into a drive from my then-home in Allen, Texas to Hoopeston, Illinois, I realized that I'd left a critical piece of kitchenware destined for use at my friends' home back at my apartment. I ended up purchasing a new one at a Target store in Texarkana, an option that, while a bit pricey, was still better than the alternative of turning back and making what should have been a single day's drive up north take two days to complete. I started making my pre-departure checklists shortly thereafter.
I generally begin a list two weeks ahead of my departure date, adding individual items as they occur to me rather than trying to think of every single entry all at once. I've learned from experience that allowing this additional time makes me less likely to overlook some item I need to take along or to forget something I need to address at home. The following list may seem overly comprehensive, perhaps to the point of fastidiousness, but in reality I've become fairly expert at packing things efficiently for a couple of weeks on the road.
(Some items have been censored for privacy and/or security reasons)
This is a listing of notable restaurants and food establishments I've enjoyed in various cities across the United States and Canada. These were found during my various road trips, and represent
where I had a good personal experience with the food and/or service. In a sense, this is a list of recommendations and places I would revisit, though it should be noted that individual experiences can vary across different visits.
New York-born photographer Arthur Rothstein made a name for himself with his many series of photos documenting America. His long career earned him recognition for his work as a photojournalist, author, and teacher, but it is perhaps his Great Depression era work, undertaken at the behest of the U.S. Farm Security Administration, for which he is best remembered today. In 1942, this assignment brought him to North Texas and to the old Fort Worth-Dallas Highway, where his photographer's eye led him to capture a string of period businesses and landmarks along the way. These images would become important historical records of their period in history, all of them eventually seeing reproduction on prints, postcards, and historical publications and websites time and time again in the decades since.
I'm known to my associates as a road trip guy, and I have put a lot of miles on cars over the years. While going through my archives of old photos to prepare for a future blog series, I hit upon the idea of assembling some of them into a chronological history of my various vehicles. To that end, here are my nearly thirty years' worth of cars. It's a somewhat bittersweet trip down memory lane.
Continue reading "My 30 year car history"
I've made many long road trips over the past decade or so, with most of my nights on the road having been spent in various motels across the U.S. and Canada. For the past several years, I've mostly made use of Booking.com to book my lodgings whenever I'm not able to stay with friends or family. Booking.com has proven to be a great resource for finding places along my way, particularly when I'm trying to decide whether to stop for the night or if I can continue a bit farther onward. I can look for patterns or trends among recent reviews and also try to find last minute deals. But there's an apparent issue with this website that needs to be acknowledged, one I've encountered a couple of times and which has called their ratings' reliability into question for me. And it's this: I've posted several reviews on the site in recent years, and the two most negative ones have both been deleted.
