Often our old friends date back to childhood neighborhoods, or school, or sometimes work. The great thing about long-term travel is that you meet people (often folks from your own culture) who are uncommonly attuned to life, since meaningful journeys have a way of bringing that out in a person. Last month Kiki and I…
I’ve come to the point where I feel nostalgia for videos I first watched on YouTube. Not traditional media clips uploaded to the platform, but clips I know only from having watched them on YouTube. With the major-league baseball postseason now underway, I’ve been reminiscing about the 2014 American League Wild Card game — a…
Back in 2005, when I moved into my prairie double-wide in rural Kansas, I bought a sturdy used desk at the local DAV Thrift Store for $35. Over the course of the next 20 years, I worked at that desk almost every day, when I wasn’t off traveling the world — and in fact I…
One interesting footnote to the journey Kiki and I made through Switzerland and Austria a few months ago was that we accidentally traversed the micro-nation of Liechtenstein as our train made its way from Chur to Innsbruck. Liechtenstein didn’t announce its borders (nor were its flags flying in any of the communities we passed through),…
Amid our Vienna sojourn a few months ago, Kiki and I saw all manner of kitschy Mozart and Freud and Klimt socks for sale — and at the Leopold Museum Kiki splurged on a pair of socks depicting Egon Schiele’s 1910 “Self-Portrait with Striped Shirt.” I have a weakness for these socks myself. While visiting…
My Deviate podcast has been, since its inception, a pretext to explore topics I don’t typically cover as a travel writer. Granted, a majority of my episodes have nonetheless been about travel (or travel writing), but by its very name, Deviate gives me the opportunity to veer away from what I’m supposed to write about as…
Here’s a curious look into AI image enhancement technology, in relation to how we once captured images. It’s a story that dates back more than 37 years. In early 1989, not long after Kansas native Barry Sanders won the Heisman Trophy as the top player in college football, I had the chance to pose with…
When my mother, Alice Potts, died last month, part of the process of working through my grief came in digging into the archive of digital files I have collected over the years to document her life. This ritual was in part an endeavor to eulogize her in a way that honored who she was, but…
Though I’ve never aspired to be a visual artist — or even studied art history in a formal way — I’ve always been enchanted, as a traveler, by modern art museums. I recall being so fascinated by what I saw at the 1997 Gwangju Biennale in Korea that, more than one decade later, I bought…
Kiki and I visited the Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-Strasbourg in Alsace, France, the same week I watched Orson Welles’s quirky 1973 essay-film F for Fake, where, in the context of another French cathedral, Welles noted: This has been standing here for centuries. But, it is without signature. …It might be just this one anonymous glory, of all…
The first copy of Vagabonding I ever held in my hands sits in this display case at The Atlanta Hotel in Thailand. The story of how it ended up there is inseparable from the tale of my own travels in that part of the world. As was the reflexive habit among young budget wanderers passing…
