Time

WILMINGTON, Del. – Time is both relative and absolute. When my flight from Los Angeles landed in suburban Baltimore at 7:00 this morning, it was 4:00 a.m. in Klamath Falls, Oregon. It was also 5:00 a.m. in Whitefish, Montana; 6:00 a.m. at Wrigley Field in Chicago; and 12:00 p.m. at the Headingley Carnegie Cricket Ground [...]

Here we go again

I’m back. Exactly nine hours from now, I’ll be on an Amtrak train headed for Chicago. For the second year in a row, I’m traveling across the country by rail, and this time I’m head to Seattle and Los Angeles after spending a few days in the Windy City. While I know where I’m headed, [...]

Gary Larson

DULLES, Va. – I was planning to write the last post on this blog before I left Oakland last night. I composed the whole thing and was about 30 seconds away from posting it when the flight crew said they had shut the door and all electronic devices needed to be turned off. I set [...]

Rocky Mountain High

(Did you really expect me to use anything else for the headline?) We finally reached Denver at around 11:30 a.m. MT. We spent about 20 minutes there, during which time the train was cleaned a bit and some supplies were restocked. We also got newspapers delivered, in this case the Rocky Mountain News. I was [...]

That toddlin’ town

DEERFIELD, Ill. – What a day this was. I covered a lot of ground, from the Magnicficent Mile to Soldier Field and a lot of Millenium Park in between. Once again, I took a lot of pictures. You’ll find highlights within this post and the full batch here. I started in Deerfield with breakfast at [...]

My tax dollars not at work

CONNELLSVILLE, Pa. – You know you’re really in the countryside when you have no cell phone signal whatsoever. Miles and miles with nothing but the little X next to the power pole in the upper-right hand corner of the screen, even though you’re technically in the same state as the wired metropolis you call home. [...]

All aboard

WASHINGTON – Perhaps the best perk of traveling by sleeper car on Amtrak is that you get to use the rail system’s equivalent of frequent-flyer club lounges. I’m not a member of any airline lounge clubs, nor do I travel on Amtrak enough (believe it or not) to qualify for the SelectPlus status that would [...]

In defense of the long form

I had the great pleasure of having a potluck picnic dinner over the weekend with a bunch of people I’d never met before. In fact, most of the people there only knew at most one or two other people out of the 10 of us. What brought us together was a shared interest in social [...]