When a Race’s Logo Foreshadows its Own Cancellation The orange goo oozed down the windows, casting the cabin in an eerie Halloween glow. I had never been on a plane while it was being de-iced before. It was an airplane that was supposed to be on its way to Little Rock, Arkansas, where the next… Read More »
An Evening in Chicago with the Living Dead Chicago is known for its vibrant amateur theater scene. Usually low budget and unvarnished, the stereotypical performance is clever and quirky (or at least aspires to be) and takes place in a subterranean space where maybe the heat works, and maybe it doesn’t.
I hadn’t been this apprehensive about a trip for a long time. We were traveling to a place we had never been before and I was on edge. This foreboding foreign land for which we were bound was the four-star accommodation. For the first time, we were going upmarket.
It cuts through the center of the city and the short hop from our stop north of the center to the downtown stations convincingly made the case for calling the train a tour bus on rolling stock. There were great views of several guidebook attractions: the Botero sculpture plaza, the Plaza of Light, the bustling pedestrian malls. I felt vindicated as they got more than 85¢ worth of oohs and ahhs from me and my wife.
Black Rock Hot Spring If you google “Black Rock Hot Spring”, one of the first pictures you’ll be treated to is that of a group of naked hippies covered with mud.
A Musical Tour Through Downtown Chicago The Rock n Roll Marathon Series is a corporate entity spawned in the late 1990s. One of their first races, a June marathon in San Diego, was a disaster. Marathon day was much warmer than expected, there wasn’t enough water, and at a post-race press conference the race director, in… Read More »
So we had to decide: was our decision to raise the children with an open-minded sense of adventure just crazy drunk talk, or would we step up to the challenge? We followed the lead of our newborn and decided to take baby steps: we went to Puerto Rico.
A Weekend at Sleeping Bear Dunes The college girls came bouncing past us in their bikinis. Itsy-bitsy, teenie-weenie, and polka-dotted. I was propped up against one of the only trees large enough to create any appreciable shade. I didn’t have the energy to ogle the polka-dots. I sighed and dragged myself to my feet
But that vacation would be missing the Dutchest experience I had while I was there, because Van Gogh never painted a picture of an exhausted family on bicycles pedaling furiously through the dark and the rain, fueled on by a lunch of fried horse meat.
At that point the only thing that would have pulled them back to the waterfall was a grizzly bear showing up to fish for spawning salmon. And that would have been unlikely, given that we were at the Osaka Japanese garden on Chicago’s south side.