en route to D.C., in words and pictures
Last weekend I said goodbye to a city that had just started to feel like home. Sadness and excitement tumbled at the edge of my emotions, keeping real tears at bay. As the burritos and…
Category Archives: travel
road food part V: fool’s gold
In Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, young Winfield gets mocked for thinking fool’s gold the real thing. Having been on the road for 6 weeks, I’ve come to a similar conclusion about restaurant food: pretty as…
road food part IV: meet the Virnigs
I’ve safely arrived in Eagle, Colorado, but before I get to the amazing food here, let me tie up the last few days of the Missouri leg. In my last post, I’d begun to wax…
road food part II: breakfast saves
In the “buckle of the Bible belt,” touting food as the harbinger of salvation could be seen as sacrilege. After a five-day string of meals I’d plot somewhere between barely edible and “for sustenance only,”…
road food part I
A warm —read: stifling — foodie greeting from Nixa, Missouri, land of chain restaurants, strip malls and “Authentic Mexican” food. The quotes around that last one are meant to hint at the painful truth that here,…
one lunch
In Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, there’s an entire chapter named after “One Onion.” In it, the ubiquitous allium becomes a symbol for generosity, goodness, and salvation. Recently, one lunch blew open some big questions in my own life. Perhaps not…
images of israel
I’m back home, but still dreaming. Travel will do that. Linger relentlessly, populating your dreams, disturbing your sleep patterns. Syracuse is folding into spring rather reliably, but I am slow — crawling, not skipping, back into…
milk and honey
…so I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and…