Featured Quote: Harpers Ferry

"The passage of the Patowmac through the Blue Ridge is perhaps one of the most stupendous scenes in nature... worth a voyage across the Atlantic."

~Thomas Jefferson, 1783, regarding Harpers Ferry, WV

Photo Highlights from the Magic Kingdom

A few highlights from my trip to the Magic Kingdom in 2009... 

...like the riverboat, the Liberty Belle, which seems to be the sister of the Mark Twain in Disneyland in California...

Featured Quote: Discovery

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

Marcel Proust

Belgian draft horse in rural Ridgedale, Missouri

Alice in Wonderland

I found a hilarious Alice in Wonderland mug at the Annapolis Bookstore, right on Maryland Avenue in historic downtown Annapolis. The Annapolis Bookstore is a gem. I have found scores of used and nearly new Agatha Christie novels, a like-new copy of Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters (a gorgeously illustrated Cinderella-style story set in Africa, which I loved as a kid), and some neat, engraved "This book belongs to..." bookplates, not to mention an old-style inkwell, gold-colored ink... just about everything that can draw book lovers in like magnets.

The Story of Busch Gardens, Williamsburg, Part II

Continued from The Story of Busch Gardens, Williamsburg, Part I.

The Loch Ness, as seen 

from the Aeronaut sky ride

In 1978, Anheuser-Busch constructed the Loch Ness Monster, a steel roller coaster that took three exciting honors. It was the world's tallest coaster, the world's steepest coaster, and the world's only coaster with interlocking loops. Although two other coasters with interlocking loops later opened (the Orient Express and the Lightening Loops), they have since shut down, so Nessie again holds the honor as the world's only!  

Ode to Ohio

The sprawling farmland surrounding Lebanon, Ohio, is verdant and welcoming to the weary road vagabond.

Whizzing past farmland just 
outside Lebanon, OH

Lebanon is beautiful rural area of the state, a quiet haven less than an hour northeast of the city of Cincinnati.