In the tradition of my friend at The Daily Bacon, I’m posting a year in photos to remember and celebrate 2008. For me, the year started in Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park, where I lived for six months starting in Oct. 2007. It took me through Argentina, Boliva, Peru and Ecuador with my sister […]
My parents’ Spanish came a long way during their visit to Chile this month. My mom can now say “Mucho gusto” with a perfect Chilean accent (context isn’t THAT important, is it?), and my dad can get around pretty well with the word “postre” (“dessert”). During their two weeks here, I introduced them to all […]
ESCAPING THIS PRISON would be as easy as crossing the front lawn, stepping off the property and hitching a ride to Moody’s Diner down the road for a slice of four-berry pie and a phone call. At the Bolduc Correctional Facility, Maine’s prison farm, the fences serve to keep the cows in the pasture and […]
“Here, we fill our spirits, seek inspiration, and continue the journey toward what we know is right. In Gatlinburg, we Reach Higher Ground.” – The Gatlinburg Chamber of Commerce If the Smoky Mountains National Park were to have an opposite, it would be Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the city at its doorstep. In just a few short […]
To celebrate my 33rd birthday last week, my mother, sister and I convened in the region where my my mother was born and raised and my sister and I spent many summers growing up. The northern California coast, from San Francisco south to Monterey, kept us happily busy for a week straight: We kayaked in an […]
Lighted coals smoking in his beard, the pirate Blackbeard terrorized the Atlantic seaboard for years, stealing merchant ship cargo and murdering all who challenged him. The savage pirate met his demise near Ocracoke Island, the southernmost of North Carolina’s Outer Banks in November 1718 at the hands of British Navy Lieutenant Robert Maynard. According to […]
Living in a yurt is much different from not living in a yurt. It’s colder, for one. Only a thin layer of canvas separates you from the 20 below outside, and you consistently find yourself wearing multiple pairs of pants. Secondly, it’s a lot more work. You begin tossing around pioneer words like “fetch,” “haul,” […]
Laura, Alexis and I summited Mount Everest the other night under a full moon. Ok, so we weren’t actually in the Himalayas, and the mountain was a few thousand feet shorter, but we saw snow, we saw crevasses and there were ropes and crampons involved. It was basically the same thing. We climbed Vallanaraju, an […]
Find original story here. Photos by Adam Wickham. For Fred Wahl, the best part of building commercial fishing boats for a living is rolling his finished products, painted and polished, down to the water along the northeast edge of his Reedsport boatyard and seeing them pop half an inch off their cradles for the first time, floating. “Then […]
Photos by Talia Galvin A veil of rain moved toward us, then over, as we cranked our loaded touring bicycles along a two-lane road in Eastern Oregon. My cycling partner, Donnie Kolb, and I still had 10 miles to go before we reached our campsite along the John Day River, and we knew if we […]
Packing the Crystal Ballroom in Portland on Saturday, whiskery men pitted their facial hair one against another at the 2012 West Coast Beard and Mustache Championships. They competed in categories that included natural mustache, chops-style mustache, freestyle mustache, full natural beard and partial beard. In honor of the competition, which the “Portlandia” blog covered here, […]
Find the original story here. “It’s very disheartening, very anticlimactic and very frustrating,” said Charlotte resident Theresa McCormick-Dunlap of the mistrial announcement in the voluntary manslaughter case of a white North Carolina police officer who killed an unarmed black man in 2013. McCormick-Dunlap was one of many supporters of the victim, Jonathan Ferrell, who held […]
The waitresses at The Big Texan Steak Ranch in the panhandle city of Amarillo wear sheriff’s badges and leather vests and let loose hearty howdies when you walk in the door. And, they offer a challenge many can’t refuse: the 72-ounce steak. Patrons who eat this $250-value in an hour or less get it for […]
It was 5:30 a.m., too early to be awake, let alone dressed head to toe in spandex. But there I was, walking in the dark toward a field of bicycles, wearing more skin-tight elastic than a cheap hooker. I participated in the 2008 all-women SheROX triathlon a couple weekends ago at the Latta Plantation Park, […]