Remote Control If you are like me, you grew up with a romantic notion of what remote control meant. It involved gas-powered airplanes, speedboats, race cars, and even the Zenith TV in your living room. It implied this amazing and exciting ability to sit back and relax while you do minimal work to make your fun take place in hyper-speed. In that dream, you know exactly how the machine (whatever it is) operates. You understand…
Pity Don Junior Supposedly, Donald Trump Jr. has now come to terms with the Senate Intelligence Committee. I feel bad for poor Don. My wife and I had the opportunity five years ago to be seated at an AON client event at the same table as Don Jr. My wife is the least likely person in the world to forgive and forget someone who prides themselves in photos taken of them out engaging in big…
Rick’s Cafe The worst part of any road trips are the detours. On this motorcycle trip we already suffered the disappointment of having Rt. 33 down through the Los Padres National Forrest and into Ojai closed for construction. Today we had to circumvent the fantastic Angeles Crest ride. Both times we detoured through Santa Clarita and up through Palmdale. Going down we went on Bouquet Canyon Road and today we went up on Lake Hughes…
The Emerald Iguana I manage to find some interesting places to stay when we travel. On a recent trip to Santa Fe I found this place called The Inn of the Five Graces. When we arrived it was a challenge to feel impressed since it was on a small side street and the rooms were spread across the street such that the bellman had to to walk us over to our room looking both ways.…
The Texaco Station Mark looked over at Jeanne as they came to the bottom of Rt. 190 out of Death Valley. They had been driving for two hours since leaving their motel at Stovepipe Wells, which was the cheapest place they could find. They were told not to miss having breakfast at the Alabama Hills Cafe in Lone Pine. “You still want breakfast?” Mark asked? Jeanne nodded with a smile. Mark would have passed because…
Free Falling One of the bucket list items from The Bucket List was skydiving. That’s not terribly original, but I assure you, it will never appear on any bucket list I produce. I like to say that I avoid activities that involve a lot of gravity. I know that Newton proved 300 years ago that gravity has the same impact on a falling object regardless of mass. I don’t believe it. When a toddler falls…
The Dude Mention The Dude and everyone immediately thinks of The Big Lebowski and the character played by Jeff Bridges. We know lots of things about The Dude, but mostly we know that The Dude abides. He accepts his lot in life and goes with the flow. That slacker mentality accounts for the popularity of the 1998 classic Coen Brothers film. By that date, much of the “Yutes” of America were in that frame of…
The Bottom of the Earth At -282 feet below sea level, Death Valley is the lowest elevation in North America, That compares to the lowest in the world at the Dead Sea in Israel, which is -413 feet. If you want to count water-filled depressions, then Lake Baikal in Russia is about -1,200 feet at its deepest point. But then why ignore the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean at -36,000 feet? If Zabriskie Point…
Desert Sunrise I was asked last night how I could work and still write stories every day. It’s 6am here in the desert and the sun is just rising. I am sitting and following my passion to write…each and every day. I not only write on days I work, but I write on days when I am not working (it’s Sunday today). I write in the morning. I write during breaks in the day. I…
Fire & Ice The beauty of planning an annual motorcycle ride in the Southwest in May is that you can usually count on warm and dry weather (it is mostly desert after all) and yet you are out ahead of the summer RV traffic, which can screw up any road trip. The downside of May is that those mountain passes can get pretty cold and wet and occasionally snowy and you are always fighting to…