Monthly Archives: November 2014

Yes, it’s that most wonderful holiday of the year – Thanksgiving. And we get to celebrate it at Thanksgiving Central, New York City!

We have now been on the road in three segments for a total of almost nine months, and there is one thought that keeps me company as we drive through America. I wonder a lot about the very roads we have traveled. Why are they where they are? How long have they been there, and who firstContinue reading “About those roads…”

Lest our dining discoveries distract too much from all the more significant things we found along the way, at one point I decided to save them for a wrap-up post. Towel art has not made it to this part of the world, and much of the hotel art you will have seen before, so splurge onContinue reading “Tableside attractions”

We are in Columbus, Ohio, near the end of our trip. As with our other legs of this American journey, we have collected some samples of the genre known as motel art, for the connoisseurs among us.

Whenever we are in Columbus, we try to visit the childhood home of James Thurber, one of America’s wittiest satirists and someone we have both always enjoyed.

If you lived anywhere near Ohio in the last 50 years, it would be hard to escape the name of Bob Evans.

We went north today and crossed the Ohio River into our home state of Ohio from West Virginia. Right on the river is the city of Marietta, which played an important part in settling this part of the country.

You don’t have to be a serious student of American history to have heard of the Hatfield and McCoy feud, that took place in a corner of Kentucky and West Virginia called the Tug Valley. The Hatfields were on the West Virginia side of the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, and the McCoysContinue reading “Bad blood”

How else to describe Eastern Kentucky? On one hand, there is the blight of coal mining and the decades of few protections for the men who did it. (But I must whisper this as we are still in a place where Coal is King and don’t-you-dare-say-a-word-about-it.)

There are many. Let’s start with Daniel Boone – famous backwoodsman who helped open up what we now know as Kentucky, by guiding settlers through the Cumberland Gap.