When we told people that we were going to be traveling cross-country, we received a lot of recommendations for which we were grateful. We kept track of our friends’ ideas and added them to a growing collection of “must see” and “best of” lists from a broad cross-section of the almost infinite online travel resource universe. In less frequented places, our research was invaluable. In Los Angeles, we were overwhelmed by the volume of places we wanted to visit. For our last weekend in California, we settled on two especially […]

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On Friday Sarah, Mariah and I planned to visit the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum. Their website intrigued us. It described how up to 50,000 years ago, naturally occurring asphalt, sticky when warm, provided the optimal conditions for entrapment of small mammals, birds, and insects inadvertently coming into contact with it. The feet and legs of heavier animals at times were held fast, too, until they died of exhaustion or fell prey to passing predators. It sounded fascinating. However, with many of the La Brea exhibits outside and temperatures […]

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One thousand, nine hundred and thirty-four miles after he picked up our rental car in Seattle, Harry returned it when he flew back from Los Angeles to Cape Cod on Sunday. As he was heading for the airport, Sarah, Jeffrey, Mariah and I headed to Dodger Stadium to watch the LA Dodgers play the Anaheim Angels in a “freeway series.” It’s just like a Gotham City “subway series” but without the pinstripes. The fans were spirited, heavy drinking, and “Bar-Scene-in-a-Star-Wars-Movie” diverse. It was a good game, well-played in 90-degree heat by […]

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The combination of several long days spent driving along the west coast interspersed with internet-free accommodations has disrupted our blogging ritual. When Mariah last posted, we were leaving behind our lighthouse accommodations on a cliff in Heceta, on the coast of Oregon. From there we traveled to Gold Beach, Oregon to the Tu Tu’Tun Lodge on the north bank of the Rogue River. We stayed there for two nights without televisions or newspapers, and only very limited cell service. It was a gorgeous and exquisitely maintained property with attention paid […]

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Once we descended from our arboreal abodes, our next stop was Portland, Oregon. We arrived mid-Friday afternoon just in time to join a well-reviewed, two-hour, guided walking tour of several Portland neighborhoods. We learned that (a.) Portland has more than 700 highly regulated food trucks; (b.) The city has an obsessive relationship with doughnuts, and (c.) it would be close to impossible to match the city’s commitment to their hipster ethos. Portland’s food trucks are ubiquitous. More often than not they are parked, pressed together on vacant lots, side by side, forming […]

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We slept last night and will sleep again tonight in two treehouses in Issaquah, Washington.  These are not the treehouses you might have found in a 1960’s suburban backyard tree with a handwritten Girls Keep Out sign. These structures were built by Pete Nelson, self-described as “an American master treehouse builder, author and since 2013, host of the Animal Planet television show Treehouse Masters.’”  Harry and I are sharing a treehouse accessed by walking across a wobbly suspension bridge. It is called “Temple of the Blue Moon”.  Mariah and Sarah […]

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Yesterday, after leaving Medora (or was it The Lawrence Welk Show?) we squeezed in a short visit to the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Vast areas of the park’s rugged landscape are occupied by prairie dogs scurrying around, digging holes and standing on their hind legs to get a better look at who knows what. Visitors pull their cars over to the side of the road by the dozens all day long to gape at these little, hyperactive animals and take their photographs. My personal suspicion is that prairie dogs are […]

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Our day began with a visit to Minneapolis’ relatively new Museum of Russian Art. An entire floor was devoted to a beautiful exhibit of more than one hundred sets of traditional Matryoshka nesting dolls. We saw examples of pre-revolution dolls and learned that they were designed and manufactured under state control to ensure uniformity. In sharp contrast, the exhibit predominantly featured unique post-Soviet Matryoshka dolls that were created by artists without censure and inspired by subjects as diverse as politics, history, fairy tales, romance, and more. We then joined a […]

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The National Museum of Toys and Miniatures, located at the University of Missouri’s Kansas City Campus, contains 33,000 square feet of traditionally sized-toys, the world’s largest fine-scale miniature collection and one of the nation’s largest antique toy collections on public display. The miniature collection included room after room of incredibly small items created by artists from all over the world. Artwork painted on the tops of pinheads that one could only appreciate by looking through microscopes and teeny-weeny dollhouses filled special cases. The 21,000 plus (and growing) pieces in the […]

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Inexplicably, there are two large towns near one another that are both named Kansas City. One is located in Missouri, and the other is situated where it should be: Kansas. We are staying in the misplaced Kansas City in Missouri. I haven’t been entirely sure I am where I think I am since arriving wherever it is that I evidently am. Our day started off with a visit to the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum. The museum’s curatorial staff has done an impressive job gathering extremely cool items […]

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