Some years ago, my husband and I took a trip to Panama, and of course we visited the canal. Of particular interest to me was finding my great-uncle James (nickname Jinks) Jervey’s name, as he had been an engineer on the canal building project in about 1903. Sure enough, the list of names in the […]
Category: Travel Stories and Other Flights of Fancy
For topics that wander off the beaten path and won’t come back.
Remembering Lakeside
I haven’t been to an “amusement park” in over forty years, and I’m not about to start back up. I have two categories of amusement park: “Lakeside” and “everything else.” “Everything else” includes Kings Dominion, about an hour north of Richmond on I-95. When it opened in around 1976, we of course had to go. […]
The fourth state of matter
Weren’t we all taught in elementary school that there are three states of matter, solid, liquid and gas? It’s a nice neat concept for an elementary science lesson. You can demonstrate with a block of wood, a bottle of water, and a balloon. But along comes “plasma” to muck up the equation. First of all, […]
Adventures in caving
Southwestern Virginia sits on top of a magnificent system of limestone caves, some of which span multiple states. When I was growing up, one of our family vacations was going to Luray Caverns for the guided tour. We saw formations called fried eggs, drapery, soda straws. . .Luray had boardwalks, spotlights, vending machines, and, way […]
Would you like fire with that?
For about six weeks in the summer of 1980, I worked as a cocktail waitress in the Club Candalejas, a salsa (music) bar in Hollywood, California. I had worked as a waitress before, but this was my first time in the dog-eat-dog world of a bona fide cocktail lounge. Nobody had their own station: we […]
The longest short plane ride ever
How, you may ask, did a 45-minute plane ride from Twin Hills, Alaska to Dillingham stretch into six hours? Well, since you asked. . . I was in Twin Hills waiting for my flight to Dillingham, the first leg of my long journey home. One of the paraprofessionals from the school was waiting also. With […]
YouRube.com: Seattle layover
The titular gem you see here came from a typo. I was, of course, looking for YouTube, but accidentally typed it in as you see above. There must be many thematic ideas for YouRube.com. One promising idea is a travel blog seen through the eyes of a country bumpkin (“country bumpkin” being the first online […]
Planes, ferries, and the occasional automobile
For about three years I traveled eight times a year between Craig and small communities in Southwestern Alaska. First, I would take the ferry (45-minute drive plus three hours on the boat) or a small plane (30 minutes total but expensive) to Ketchikan. Then, I would sometimes spend the night at my mother-in-law’s house. I […]