Unless a bag of money falls on my head, I’m probably never going to see the Valley of the Kings. So I’ll just tell myself it’s overrated, even though it’s obviously not. Meanwhile, if you are feeling the same way and are a resident of Northern California, you can simulate the experience of visiting Egypt. […]
Yesterday, my neighbor told me there’s a rampaging mountain lion in our area. Well, not rampaging exactly, just causing some trouble for a few of the neighbors, but he likes us to be cautious. Mountain lions aren’t really a danger to people, especially when there are so many deer around. Because they do occasionally take […]
If you’re traveling through the vast, boring — I mean unspoiled — desert of Nevada and you need somewhere to stop, Tonopah is an oasis amongst tumbleweeds. Actually it’s not, it’s a slightly larger spec of a town between the last spec of a town and the next spec of a town on a very […]
As a science writer, my official position on ghosts and aliens is that they Do Not Exist. As a layperson who really likes to watch Ghost Adventures, I love ghost stories and tales of alien abduction. It’s all fiction, of course. Officially. In case you’re wondering, and you’re not but I’m going to tell you […]
Las Vegas is full of weird little corners. Like underground Venice, where you can take a lame ride on a fake gondola for like half the cost of a whole day at Disneyland. An Uber Eats service that takes two and a half hours to deliver food from Panda Express and then expects you to […]
It seems wrong to visit the Grand Canyon and not write something about it, especially since I’ve written something about every other national park we visited in the American southwest. But what can I say about this place that hasn’t already been said? Hmm, this seems like an exercise in “finding an angle.” Here’s my […]
On our way to Flagstaff, we started to encounter speed limit signs: “Motor vehicles: 50mph. Meteors: 26,000mph.” My kids did not notice, of course, because they had their faces buried in their stupid phones. As usual. But at least there are minor benefits to the phone stuff because when we pulled into the parking lot […]
The first time I heard the name “Petrified Forest,” I pictured an actual forest with upright trees made out of stone and, I don’t know, like fossilized pine cones littering the floor or something ridiculous like that. I don’t mind saying that I was an adult at the time, either, because let’s face it the […]
I have a kid who loves ghost towns and abandoned places, so every time we go anywhere we end up hiking down some overgrown, abandoned railroad tracks or getting way closer to a crumbling former hotel than we’re supposed to. So driving through Nevada was kind of like going through a time portal in the […]
I love castles. I mean, I would never live in one because ghosts, but I love the stillness of a centuries-old stone building, the scale, and the history that you can feel in your bones even if not much of it has ever been written down. Anyway, America is great and everything but it doesn’t […]
