Road Writer Blogs

Tag: Travel and Discovery

  • 40th Anniversary Adventures in the Campervan!

    Mary and I are off on another adventure, this one for our 40th anniversary together!  Our primary objective is to explore the Channeled Scablands, a spectacular geology feature of Washington State formed when a glacial ice dam broke in Montana and spilled a million billion gallons of water across the landscape of Washington toward the…

  • Time in Minnesota

    Isn’t time interesting?  We don’t really know what time is or where it comes from, but, as we grow older, we start to feel its irreversibility.  What’s more, we humans love to write and read stories that play with time, perhaps more commonly than any other science-fictiony idea. Mary and I encountered time on our…

  • Science Fiction and the RoadWriter Life, Part 2:  Abandoned barge canals and lost civilizations

    What stirs reader imagination or exploratory longings more than a good adventure story about a lost civilization?!  Your starship lands on a primitive world where you discover mysterious structures half buried in the jungle that hint at forgotten technological prowess. (Star Trek, anyone?).  Floating down the river on your noble quest, your fellowship of travelers…

  • Science Fiction and the RoadWriter Life,  Part 1:  Finding Trilobites

    Today I’ve been thinking about what makes science fiction, science fiction (spurred by my recent publication of a ghost story-science fiction crossover, “A Visit from Old Earth”, in S’more Spooky Stories, published by Owl Hollow Press).  Thinking about science fiction makes me think about trilobites (of course), long abandoned barge canals, and my campervan. Let…

  • Campervan Road Adventures!

    Adventure means more than hiking past rocky outcrops, visiting old haunts, and seeing family!  Adventure means stumbling into challenging circumstances! We were in Florida to help our son move into his new apartment in Orlando for his new job with Lockheed-Martin when the lock failed on the rear doors of our van!  We could not…

  • Campervan Adventures in Old Haunts!

    When my wife and I were “courting” way back in graduate school days in Tennessee, we took a trip to Fall Creek Falls on the Cumberland Plateau and hiked through the woods through a steady rain, boasting to each other about which of us had the better raincoat (learning how to share life challenges together!)…

  • Spontaneity:  Joy of the Road!

    My wife and I began planning our joint retirement four years in advance (calling those four years our freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years of retirement, building up to a sense of beginning rather than ending).  As the senior year marched toward graduation, we decided that it would be great fun to get a little…