Our biggest day yet — three states in one episode. We leave Springfield, MO, dip through the short Kansas stretch of Route 66 at Galena, and spend the rest of the day in Oklahoma. We talk about what makes a great roadside attraction, the future of road trips, and end at the Rock Cafe in Stroud (yes, the one that inspired Cars).
📍 Stops: Springfield, MO, Ash Grove, MO, Carthage, MO, Galena, KS, Afton, OK, Vinita, OK, Chelsea, OK, Catoosa, OK, Tulsa, OK, Sapulpa, OK, Stroud, OK
We leave Illinois behind, passing through the abandoned storefronts of Litchfield and crossing into Missouri at St. Louis. From there it’s into the Ozarks — Devils Elbow, Cuba, and all the little stops in between — ending the day at a KOA in Springfield, MO.
📍 Stops: Litchfield, IL, Mount Olive, IL, Livingston, IL, Collinsville, IL, St. Louis, MO, Rolla, MO, Cuba, MO, Devils Elbow, MO, St Robert, MO, Springfield, MO
Day 1 on Route 66 starts in a rainy Chicago and heads southwest through the classic small towns of Illinois. We hit the Gemini Giant in Wilmington, explore the murals of Pontiac, and end the day in Springfield. These little towns are the heart and soul of Route 66.
📍 Stops: Chicago, IL, Joliet, IL, Wilmington, IL, Gardner, IL, Dwight, IL, Pontiac, IL, Atlanta, IL, Springfield, IL
We’re hitting Route 66 — Chicago to LA — and this is Day Zero. We set up camp near the Indiana Dunes, test out the Subaru camping setup for the first time, and explore the World’s Fair Homes before the real journey begins. Two weeks, one car, zero kids, and a whole lot of road ahead.
📍 Stops: Indiana Dunes, IN, World’s Fair Homes
I survived one pointless war in the Middle East, and I have no interest in sending my sons to another pointless war in the Middle East.
We all understand that the world is full of bad actors, and no one would defend the actions of those who seek to terrorize the majority of people in the world who are peaceful. But our elected representatives have a duty to deal with bad actors using the least force necessary.
There is no indication that Iran poses an imminent threat to the United States or our allies. Last June, the White House told us — in detail — that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated.”1 The President, the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, the IAEA, and independent nuclear experts all confirmed it. If that was true then, what imminent threat justifies a new war now? If it wasn’t true, then the administration misled us. Either way, we deserve an answer.
The White House, “Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated — and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News,” June 25, 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/06/irans-nuclear-facilities-have-been-obliterated-and-suggestions-otherwise-are-fake-news/ ↩
I took a lot of photographs in 2025. It makes sense. I took an unusually large number of photos of the local Masonic Temple before and during its demolition. We spent three weeks driving Route 66. My oldest son was married. I was involved with some political campaigns. And, I was working on building a portfolio of photos that could become commercial prints.
The chart doesn’t reflect it, but I set a personal record for the number of pictures taken in 2025. This is the first year that I filtered my retrospective chart. I excluded the digital photos that I took for reference purposes. When we traveled Route 66 I snapped pictures of signs and other details that I wanted to refer back to when editing our travel videos. I also took a lot of photos of the Zeiss Ikon Ikoflex III as I performed a complete rebuild of it. Without filtering the EOS RP and iPhone 13 would be in the second and third spots, respectively, on the list. And, we wouldn’t want two digital cameras in the top three positions, would we?
I finally found the right circumstances to take a long summer trip with Heather. Thanks to the shaky economy I was able to pull away from work for a bit, Heather was naturally on summer break, and my boys were home to watch the dogs. As you already know from the title, this trip would be on the famous Route 66.
We traveled all 2,400 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica. Along the way we took over 1,000 photos and videos. No one wants to sit through a slide show that long, so I have distilled it down to 25 photos. With this collection I have tried to balance showcasing my favorite individual photos with giving an overall impression that matches the road trip.
The former Masonic Temple in downtown Barberton is within walking distance from my home, which makes it a convenient subject when testing cameras. So, I have quite a few pictures of its exterior, and I have photographed it with all of my favorite cameras. Now that the building has been demolished, I thought that I should share some of those pictures, including some of the demolition process.
I’ll miss having this interesting old building around to photograph. But, if I’m entirely honest, the exterior of the building was a little boring. I have seen this building in every season and every lighting condition, and yet almost every decent picture I have of it centers around the northwest front door and the railing leading up to it. Perhaps the understated nature of the temple matches the ethos of its builders; I’m not a Mason, so I can’t say for sure.
This roll of Fuji Super HQ 200 is probably the best roll of expired film I have ever shot. I really love how the photos turned out. The grain is amazing and the colors have a contrasty, vintage look that is not skewed too far towards one color. The 2000 Canon EOS ELAN 7e (and the FPP C-41) paired nicely with the Super HQ 200.
The film was shot at ISO 80, as per my rules of thumbs for shooting expired film.
A year and a half after I arrived back stateside from my expedition to Iraq I was asked about my deployment experience. The child of a friend of a friend needed to interview veterans for a project they were working on, so I agreed. The thing I remembered about my response, and what made me think of this questionnaire many years latter, was my memory of how Iraq smelled. Usually memories are visual, but these memories had an olfactory component to them. This was brought back to mind by Jon Stewart’s recent efforts to highlight the ill effects veterans are suffering from burning shit in Iraq.
At our first forward operating base we had burn toilets prior to receiving chemical toilets, but I think the rear elements had to burn the waste while we were out running missions. The thing people probably don’t realize though is that the baseline pollution level in Iraq, the baseline in combat zones, is considerably higher than what we enjoy here in the United States. Perhaps urban air quality in the late 60s, prior to the EPA, was similar to what I experienced in Iraq.
Of course it may have been worse in Iraq due to the dusty, arid environment. There was always something in the air. We lived in an old government building which perhaps contained asbestos, who knows, I doubt anyone tested for that. What we do know is that the building was famously bombed by Tomahawk missiles on the first night of the war. Those missiles were probably tipped with depleted uranium. We would laugh every time a mortar bounced off of the sturdy building. But, the so-called insurgents might get the last laugh; each of those mortar hits would stir up dust in the unventilated building. The Army should have given us N95 masks rather than gas masks which literally went unused, because, you know, there were in fact no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The Appalachian Trail is sometimes referred to as the green tunnel. The truth is that many of the backpacking trails on the East Coast run under the cover of deciduous forests and have few scenic overlooks. One backpacking area within driving distance of Northeastern Ohio which breaks out of the green tunnel is the Dolly Sods Wilderness. Dolly Sods has a rough, barren appearance which is partially the result of its unique ecology and partially the result of a long history of exploitation and abuse by European settlers.
Prior to civilization creeping up to it’s borders, Dolly Sods was an inaccessible region covered with spruce, hemlock, and mountain laurel. The expansion of the railroads brought the lumber industry into the area. As the lumber industry clear cut the forests they left behind a landscape barren of trees yet fertile for fires. Fires destroyed vegetation which survived the lumber companies. By the late 1920s little of value was left and the companies moved on. The Civilian Conservation Corps started planting spruce in the 1930s, but in 1940s the US Army rolled in. They were preparing for war in Europe and needed a place to practice destroying things with artillery shells.
On this site I write about, what I like to believe is, a diverse set of topics. The normal way of presenting posts using a sequential list does nothing to help people discover other material on the site which they may also be interested in. I wanted to provide visitors with a list of links to content which is similar to the page they are currently viewing. However, due to limitations in the platform I’m using, there was no option to simply turn this on. So, I wrote some code and implemented an algorithm to solve this problem.
