As part of our road trip through the western states of the US, Shirley and I found ourselves at the US / Mexico border this week, at the Tijuana / San Ysidro crossing – and a single image struck me as being somewhat emblematic of the relationship. We were just near the larger of two…
For most computer users around the world, Adobe is a software company that makes PDFs, and Photoshop, and Illustrator, and Lightroom, and Premiere, and for radio geeks like me Audition. But there’s another, much older Adobe. As you travel through the American south-west, you see a variety of architectural styles and building materials –…
It’s a funny thing – I grew up just a kilometer away from Maroubra Beach in Sydney – and when I was a kid, the suburb was nowhere near as filled-in as it is today. There were sand dunes everywhere when I was a pre-teen, and it seemed to me that they were endless. Of…
Take me out to the ball game! Today’s #travelpics feature will be short – we are supposed to be on the road again in 15 minutes and I have yet to finish packing up for the next leg of our trip – but I give you “The American Game”. Maybe. Baseball has long been considered…
When I was a young teen, I remember hearing about a loony American millionaire who had bought the London Bridge, and had it shipped to Arizona, brick by brick. We just put it down to eccentricity – one of those “Only in America” stories. Then, this week, Shirley and I drove across that bridge,…
It’s been called The Mother Road, the Road to Opportunity, America’s Main Street .. its been celebrated in movies, and songs .. and it exists, in its traditional form, in a mere handful of places. It’s Route 66, the legendary highway from Los Angeles to Chicago. One of America’s first national highways, the road connected…
So – The Painted Desert – I wonder why they call it that? Well, Duh! There have been people crossing the Painted Desert (which stretches from the Grand Canyon down to the Petrified Forest in Arizona) for millennia – but the name The Painted Desert was given to the region a bit under 500 years ago.…
If I ever had any doubt about the impact that popular music can have on the tourism industry, that was dispelled on Sunday, when Shirley and I rocked up to Winslow, Arizona. If the name doesn’t mean anything to you, you are either too young, or live in a country that never played The Eagles…
As an Australian – for whom patriotism is a quiet, abiding, but largely personal thing – the ‘in-your-face flag waving of Americans is a bit surprising at times. On our first visit to the US, we went to Hawaii – and one of the first things I noticed (and photographed) was the number of…
If you will excuse the indulgence, today’s #Travelpic is, in many ways, a bit like the relationship between me and my lovely wife, Shirley. I have always loved sandstone, and the way that single grains of sand can bind together under pressure – to create something sold and strong, and yet malleable and shaped by…
