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Our USA250 whirlwind trip is in the books! It was an amazing trip but after almost three weeks, it’s good to be home. We finished things up in Dayton, Ohio by touring the magnificent National Museum of the United States Air Force. Making that even more special, our good friends Rob and Patti Westberg met

After many miles under the tires, we are now in Charlevoix (pronounced sharlavoy) on Michigan’s lower peninsula. But let’s digress. As we headed east from TR’s badlands, the seemingly endless great plains opened before us. Somewhere between Fargo ND (where we stopped to see a small museum dedicated to the great Yankee slugger Roger Maris),

Eons of river flows, rain, snow, and wind, carved the Badlands of North Dakota. In turn, this unforgiving wilderness with its stark landscapes shaped, transformed, and hardened the man we know today as Theodore Roosevelt. Broken and grief stricken after his wife and mother both died in his New York City brownstone on the same

Those who believe there remains no howling wilderness in the United States owe themselves a trip to Idaho. Driving west from Missoula MT, we entered the Lolo pass on Rte. 12. On the Montana/Idaho border we visited a site where the Lewis and Clark expedition was known to have camped on September 14th, 1805, nearly

With a stop at Glacier National Park in Montana, our USA 250 road trip has officially begun. The day started with a beautiful trip to Logan Pass on one of the park’s famous red buses. Ours was manufactured 88 years ago in 1938. Every bend in the road greeted us with a spectacular vista. The

The weather on the morning of June 19th was overcast and rainy, hardly the conditions that the organizers of SAIL 250 were hoping for when the impressive assemblage of international tall ships was scheduled to weigh anchor at Lynnhaven Inlet at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay and proceed to Norfolk’s waterfront. The presence of the

A day without end! Tuesday started with a 3:30 AM wake-up in Istanbul for a 7:30 AM flight to Munich. After our Munich to DC flight was canceled for a mysterious maintenance malady, we were rebooked to Norfolk through Newark, which is where I started tapping out these paragraphs with very bleary eyes. But hey,

Well, I searched high and low for Hector but apparently, he left town when he heard I was coming. Mythology aside, it’s likely that there was a war fought here between the Greeks and Trojans in the 10th or 11th century BC, probably for the usual reasons – control of resources, expansion of territory, etc.

Ephesus (May 7th) Today we docked in our first Turkish city – Kusadasi – which is about a 30-minute drive to Ephesus. This city has a long history, but its main claim to fame was that the Apostle Paul spread the word of Christianity here from 53-56 AD. Apparently, he was a bit too successful

Holy history, Batman! Today we were in Heraklion, the largest city on the Greek island of Crete. We learned that this area has been continuously inhabited for at least 7,000 years. With its turquoise waters, the coastline is absolutely stunning. Perfect weather made it even more special. We got to visit what remains of the