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…
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…
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…
Pete Goes Berber “I have no idea what I’m doing,” Pete thought as the Air Maroc flight from JFK to Casablanca lifted off. Pete had never even had a passport before about a month ago. He had never been outside the U.S. and had only been west of the Mississippi once before. In fact, it had never occurred to him to go overseas, but when the opportunity arose, his wife Nancy and his sons…
Changing Their Stars In 2009, as a board member of the international relief and development agency, CARE, I went with my family to India. We started in Jaipur, headed east to Agra and on to the Bay of Bengal and then north to Calcutta. We finished on the religious day of Holi in New Delhi. The entire trip was centered around visiting the CARE projects underway in those parts of India. Our job was to…
The Isle of Staaten It’s been about a year since Kim and I moved back to Manhattan after a three-year stint living on Staten Island. I think about it often since it was an unusual place to move (there was a very particular reason for it) and an unusual place to live. I have an office that stares out to New York Harbor and watches the Staten Island Ferry go back and forth to…
The Raid on Entebbe Entebbe juts out into Lake Victoria and is the main airport for Uganda. The only reason any of us know the name is because of the 1976 Arab-German hijacking of an Air France airliner enroute from Tel Aviv to Paris. It was less about the fact that the terrorists landed at Entebbe and sought sanctuary from Idi Amin, than it was about the 100 Israeli commandos that executed a near-flawless and…
Spring Break This is Easter Week and I guess that for much of the world, this is a good week for a vacation. I find it a funny time to take a vacation. I also understand that for people with kids in school, you take your vacations when your kids’ school holidays are planned. Both of my ex-wives were quite rigid on the subject of taking kids out of school to take family vacations. For…
Three Shawermas to Go The Middle East is my kinda place. I used to go twice a year for two weeks at a go. Sometimes I would get a day off (Fridays, the holy day for Muslims) and sometimes I skittle up to someplace like Istanbul where they seem to care more about keeping to a Western workweek schedule than taking off their Sabbath. I never went in summer and I was always careful…