A shorter day — we detour to Santa Fe for a picnic lunch, try some wild chile-covered Mexican candy, and then head to Albuquerque. The vibe shifts from small-town Route 66 to something more urban. If you’re planning this trip, this is the day to plan ahead.
📍 Stops: Santa Fe, NM, Albuquerque, NM
We cruise through Amarillo, pass the Route 66 midpoint in Adrian, TX, and cross into New Mexico. The day ends in Tucumcari — neon signs, abandoned motels, and the landscape shifts to wide-open desert. We’re officially in the West now.
📍 Stops: Amarillo, TX, Wildorado, TX, Vega, TX, Adrian, TX, San Jon, NM, Tucumcari, NM
We start the morning making breakfast at camp and then push west through the last of Oklahoma — past Clinton, through the ghost town of Texola, and into the Texas Panhandle. Shamrock, McLean, and Groom bring us the quirky Texas side of Route 66.
📍 Stops: El Reno, OK, Hinton, OK, Hydro, OK, Clinton, OK, Texola, OK, Shamrock, TX, McLean, TX, Groom, TX
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/ ↩
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.
