Three-fer Friday: An Artist I Met Along the Way…

Looking at art is always nice. Well, usually. Spending time with an artist who created work you like or love? Well, that’s a treat beyond belief. Time slows down and speeds up and your synapses start firing off like crazy. Things just shift a little to the left. Here, some artists we’ve been lucky enough [...]

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A Beer in the Hand That Cost Two on the Strip

Yes, law and order and restrictions on drinking in public and open container laws have their place. I mean, without all that, the U.S. would be like one giant post-frat party college campus. But, now and again, it’s so nice to leave all classy and elegant behavior behind and walk down the street with a [...]

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A Year in the Life: Lasso Guy Edition

Anybody know what the usual career trajectory is for a lasso expert? It’s not something I ever figured I’d think about but a travel-related coincidence brought the question on. Last February, I spent some time at the Tanque Verde Ranch in Tucson, Arizona. One highlight of the trip–and there were many–was lasso expert Loop Rawlins’ [...]

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The First Time Ever I Saw This Place

The phrase popped into my head, in Roberta Flack’s voice, and hunkered down, becoming a solid earworm. “The first time ever I saw this place.” It seemed like a good title for a Three-fer but for the life of me, I couldn’t nail down what we should write about to fit the title. So, rather [...]

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Jenna Is With Elvis

No, no .. she’s not dead or hunched over a toilet (as far as I know). She’s in Las Vegas (Viva!) and her laptop seems to have had too much fun … it’s gone nonfunctional, and writing a post for you in the hotel business just isn’t feasible. So until she is back home this [...]

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What Makes a Place Home?

If you could live anywhere in America, where would you live? Atop a mountain in Colorado? By the beach in California? Nestled among lakes and trees in Wisconsin? In a small town? A big city? Los Angeles? New York City? Oxford, Mississippi? Providence, Rhode Island? I think about that a lot when I travel, both [...]

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Reader Appreciation Three-fer Friday: Of Pucks and Paddles

So this whole Flyover America thing kicked off a year ago. A whole year. One of the best bits about writing Flyover America is, post posting, waiting for the comments to come in. The back and forth with all of you is just great fun (and you crank up our I-want-to-see-that! in a big way). [...]

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The Art of the West

I’ve never been a huge fan of Remington and Russell, the brand names in Western art. Oh, I recognize their importance and talents, but their cowboys ‘n’ Indians artwork strikes me as kitsch, and not my favorite flavor. So I was lukewarm to the idea of Western art until I visited the Whitney Galleries at [...]

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Louisiana's Retail Trinity

Gift shops and grocery stores. When traveling, both are musts for me. The first cause, ok, I’m a trinket whore with a fierce shopping habit and the second cause I don’t think there’s any better place to find out how people live their daily lives. But, Louisiana’s keen on The Trinity so it just makes [...]

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Someplace Old, Someplace New

Our calendars are (nearly) bare, waiting to be filled with this year’s adventures. But now we wrestle with the eternal conundrum of travel planning: Return to a place we have loved or explore a place we’ve always wanted to see? Both types of trip have merit. (Don’t you get a strange little thrill when you [...]

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