Fish Canyon is open, and the waterfalls are flowing.      I want to write that first line in all BOLD CAPS.      Because that hasn’t been said in 30 years.      Fish Canyon, in the San Gabriel Mountains above Azusa and Duarte, used to be humming with people. Cabins were scattered along the trail […]

     They went and put the military base in the middle of nowhere, hidden between the low rocky hills and the wide open dry lake beds of the Southern California deserts, probably because they wanted to blow things up in peace and quiet.      I didn’t come to Fort Irwin to visit the military, but […]

Touring the Historic Los Angeles Theatre District      “There’s one million square feet of unused space in downtown Los Angeles,” said Larry, our tour guide, as we walked up and down Broadway, the old heart of the theatre district.      It was Thursday night, and Broadway was relatively quiet, except for the occasional homeless person […]

     Good Morning Therm. I can’t believe you haven’t been to London. It seems like every time I turn around you’re jaunting off to some South Asian country just to make me jealous.      So London. For a day. What should you do?      The list of stupendous things to do in London is endless, […]

     The Cabrillo National Monument is beautiful, but the name is deceiving. It’s considered a monument because there is a statue of Cabrillo here, but this area should really be called The Cabrillo State Park, or The Cabrillo Ecological Reserve.      The statue sits on top of a finger of land dangling south from the […]

     I went to San Diego’s Chicano Park to see the beautiful murals. What I found is a park that is beautiful, but not in the way parks are traditionally beautiful. Its beauty is not in huge expanses of rolling hills like Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, or disappear-from-the-city beauty like New York’s Central Park.      […]

After munching a few of my lunch crackers I stood up and continued my journey to Innisfree. Once past the river and bridge the path cut through a forest. The trees had thin trunks, like they were young, and the ground was smooth hard packed earth. As the forest ended there was a stonewall, with […]

     In Ireland the busses don’t run on Sunday. It seemed obvious to both Patrick and I once we heard this piece of news, but it meant we were stuck. It was Saturday afternoon and we were stuck in the town of Sligo. This town was supposed to be just a transfer point to environs […]

Southern Drawl      It seems that warm water is the defining characteristic of New Orleans. Water in the swamps, water in the Mississippi river, water flooding houses, water falling from the sky in bucket loads, and water thickening the air in the form of humidity.      Coming from a childhood in the deserts I was […]

     One afternoon while sitting in a bar in the French Quarter -nursing an Abita Amber- I over-heard a snippet of a conversation that went like this: “…and you can walk through the swamps with the alligators.”      Which was exactly what I had been looking for.      Who says you can’t find everything in […]

     After we found the cherry trees, I had a better understanding of how the map worked, so we decided to backtrack to the Polaroid house.     “So the house was built by Mr. Polaroid?”     “Yea Mr. Polaroid, the guy who made the film, I wonder if Mr. Kodachrome’s house is around here?”     We had no […]

     I woke up Saturday morning with itchy feet. I wanted to get out and do something, something outside, in the sun with life around and about. But I was supposed to sit in front of my computer and edit stories.     My computer screen stared back at me, and I thought of the places I […]