Postcard from McCarran Airport, Las Vegas

Setting: Hudson News stand, departures terminal, Vegas airport. I stopped into buy the Pepto Bismol I’d been seeking for about 24 hours. Aside — you’d think they’d sell that stuff in vending machines on the casino floor, next to packets of Alka Seltzer, rehydrating drinks, and a hefty array of painkillers, but I was striking …


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Of Time and Guidebooks

Several years ago at a book sale in a small and pretty town in Austria, I bought a stack of Baedeker’s red guidebooks. I have four of these fragile, red cloth bound little volumes. I also bought a Flaxman Hand-Book of English and German Conversation. The Flaxman’s is from 1907, the Baedeker’s are also from …


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With Liberty and Justice for All

My possibly shaky understanding of the history of Alki Beach is that the settlers who chose the banks of Puget Sound as their new home envisioned this place as the New New York, that here a city would be built to rival any east coast capitol. Our own Lady Liberty, on the beautifully renovated plaza …


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Mistakes Rookies RVers Make

Disclaimer: BC Ferries and Camping and RV in BC sponsored our travels. With a week of RV camping behind me, I realize there’s still loads I don’t know about traveling by RV. I had wrongly assumed that because I have been a seasoned camper for many years, I would take to RV life as though …


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Damaged Goods and Dented Credit Cards

Disclaimer: BC Ferries and Camping and RV in BC sponsored our travels.

“Now’s the time,” I said to Walter, a positively bubbling 50 something man with a German accent, “when you tell me the worst you’ve seen.”

“You want the worst? The absolute worst? One time, I went to pick up a RV up in the Yukon and the entire side had been peeled away. The bathroom? It was completely gone. The whole thing was torn open. I had to tape up the sides. The guy I picked it up from said, “You have to DRIVE this back? GOOD LUCK!” This is when you look straight ahead, not to the right, not to the left, so you don’t see the people driving next to you shaking their heads and saying, “Stupid tourists!” What you’ve got here? This is nothing. Really. It’s nothing.”


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