Golden trees and black bears in Great Smoky Mountains and Cades Cove
November 28, 2022 On Halloween, we sought the warm colors of autumn — pumpkin orange, harvest gold, bonfire red — along the Blue Ridge Parkway and in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles the North Carolina-Tennessee border. And we found them too, despite the lateness of the leaf-peeping season, ...
Tree of Life, architecture, and jazz in New Orleans New Year
January 11, 2020 We rang in the new year in New Orleans, the U.S. city at the top of our Italian exchange student’s list of places to see, after New York and San Francisco. NOLA is only a 7-1/2-hour drive (with no stops) from Austin, so we rented an Airbnb, ...
Wildflowers for the dead at Sutherland Springs Cemetery
March 24, 2019 How did I forget the name Sutherland Springs? While passing through this town of 600 people on my wildflower drive last Thursday, a riotous carpet of flowers caught my eye. I hit the brakes and pulled into Sutherland Springs Cemetery, then got out of my car to ...
It’s not hard to enjoy the Big Easy
July 29, 2015 If you want to feel that you’ve traveled to a foreign city without leaving the country, visit New Orleans and stay in the historic French Quarter. We made the 8-hour drive from Austin a couple of weeks ago — our first stop on a family road trip ...
Guest post: Graveside mementos at Austin Memorial Park in danger of being prohibited
May 25, 2014 Revolutionary War veteran’s tombstone in Concord, MAMemorial Day is about remembering and honoring our veterans, but it’s an appropriate time for remembering our loved ones as well — visiting their graves, placing tokens of remembrance there, sitting for a little while on a graveside bench. I used ...
Nightlife in Terlingua, Texas: Ghost town and the Starlight Theatre
March 21, 2012 In my post about Big Bend National Park, I mentioned that I preferred the evenings, when the glaring sun slid behind the mountains and the stars came out. In the desert, perhaps it’s always been so. Evening is a time of coolness and relaxation, dinner around the ...
Tombstones, trees & Texas history at Texas State Cemetery
November 28, 2009 Morbid curiosity has nothing to do with my love for old cemeteries. I find them beautiful and interesting in a personal and historical sense, and on travels to older cities like Boston, Charleston, S.C., and New Orleans I’ll make time for a cemetery stroll. In Austin the ...
Magical history tour
July 16, 2008 View Larger Map 4,650 miles. 20 days. One car. Two kids. A ton of luggage. We just returned from a three-week road trip—an early-U.S. history tour, you could say. We wanted our kids to learn about the colonial era, the Revolutionary War, and the Civil War, and ...