Exploring the American Landscape
While it may be an exaggeration to characterize trips lasting fewer than 48 hours as “road trips,” we rounded out our 2025 travel with two short road trips to the mountains. While brief, our third and fourth mountain getaways of the year took us back to places we visited earlier in the summer, but with … Read more
Moving to Winston-Salem has given us two new calendars to govern our lives. The first is the seasonal cycle, featuring four honest-to-goodness seasons, each with distinctive delights and challenges. The other is the academic calendar. Several of my volunteer activities are university-affiliated, and my library gig is work-from-home this summer while renovations are happening on … Read more
Despite having been planned as an eastern version of the great western national parks, and sitting within a day’s drive of millions of East Coast dwellers, somehow Shenandoah National Park was one that we had not managed to add to our list of national parks visited. Until now, making it #33. After completing our northbound … Read more
After our last airplane/train/city adventure in Chicago, we decided it was time to take the edge off the summer heat with a mountain hiking trip. We also wanted to do a “big” trip to celebrate our 20th anniversary, but without the hassle of plane travel. Thus was born the idea of a leisurely road trip … Read more
Judging by today’s numbers, Winston-Salem doesn’t seem like a powerhouse in North Carolina. With a population of about 250,000, it ranks as the fifth-largest city in the state and isn’t even the largest in its immediate region, with Greensboro taking top honors in the Piedmont Triad. But today’s population figures obscure the significance of Winston-Salem … Read more