Photo Credit: Carol Madigan    I’d like to say that this kind of homage to the ridiculous can only be found in America. But the first one of these that I saw was in Liverpool, UK in 2019, and the only reason I saw that one was because Carol had seen this other one just […]

hopefully doesn’t happen anywhere else    A .50 caliber machine gun can fire between 450 and 1300 rounds per minute to a maximum range of more than 8000 yards. When the bullet impacts bone, the bone explodes in shards that themselves travel at the speed of a low-velocity bullet. In other words, when you’re hit […]

Photo Credit: Carol Madigan Omg!  I just looked at the date. The game is tomorrow!! We need to drive today!!    The frantic message came from Carol, while picking up the little Baileys three pack for our Spring Training road trip that we’d both programmed into our evidently derelict brains as beginning Tuesday morning. Her […]

   We were walking back to our hotel from a wonderful Florentine restaurant following an enlivening and lengthy happy hour near the famed Domo. In other words, we were buzzed, Carol had to pee, and then soon, we were lost.    I’ve written before about the hidden discoveries one can make while trying to find […]

While my incurious nature has gotten me off the hook from having to drag myself through some of the most renowned and beloved tourist attractions in the world, the one exception is any site related to my favorite authors I’ve read or movies I’ve seen. Thus, in Paris, have I sat in the Brasserie Lipp […]

   The last time my thumb was out was to indicate to the waitress that the eggplant parm was for Carol. Prior to that, you’d have to go back almost 50 years to the shoulder of Highway 90 just outside New Orleans, where the thumb of a freshly graduated college boy was outstretched alongside a […]

Carol and I have spent our first (and only we hope) Thanksgiving together without surrounding ourselves with family, either mine or hers. Instead we celebrated alone, in a small cabin located in a quiet, secluded hollow in the shadow of Yosemite National Park

As the Paris portion of our first trip together ended, it was already clear Carol and I were well-matched as traveling companions. And by this I mean, Carol is the polar opposite of the flake that I am. She’d made peace with my OCD approach to train schedules, and had gently nudged me toward finding […]

The one drain plug in this whole footloose, carefree and otherwise leaf blown approach to travel I outlined earlier presents itself when it comes to scheduled departures. Whether it’s planes, trains, busses or river ferries, the posted schedule has the same play on my neuroses pertaining to time as melting ice packs have for climate scientists.

At the time Carol and I took off for our first European trip together, I had completed two solo journeys of my own during my year of widowhood. I had not traveled solo since my vagabonding days of the early 1970s, and I immediately experienced the true “freedom of the road” again that traveling alone […]