Due to Travelblog.org's site crash, the memory of this blog was lost and had to be re-published. Apologies for the missing material and all articles will be up in time Day One’s Nuclear Resolution Another Sunday, another city—the highlife of Dublin deep in the Temple Bar district of an old city—and another Irish spring day, south within the Republic of Ireland. A layer of clouds hid the morning sun with a chilled line of pavement beneath our feet. As dawn’s stiffness flexed its weary muscles, the sound of cracking toes echoed down the empty spaces of Grafton Street. The small group of thirteen international Peace Walkers moved north out of Ireland’s capital and reversed the colloquial saying of the land. It was an old Gaelic Éire, now with a new face and a new meaning: All ... read more

Due to TravelBlog's memory failure and crash, this article had to be re-published. Sorry for any inconvenience. The End & The Beginning Lying on his back, yet he didn’t know it. He didn’t know he was that turtle, tipped over on his own shell, by his own shell. His mother looked down at him, not knowing what to do, what to say, except the family proverb: “Perry, you don’t have a pot to piss in.” With a bad back, handfuls of Advil, disgruntled relationships, heavy debts, and not a hand on the twig to snap the curse of his current predicament, New York Times contributor Perry Garfinkel was on “the path”. Yes, it was his own crumbling path and before long, just at the right moment in Time, Perry would uplift himself at the tipping point. ... read more

Spitting heat upon pale skin. Dust swirls, thick and ominous like mountainous fog, yet there is little silence and zero solitude unlike the celestial palaces where the clouds’ nebulous movements waver. Where a hermit might dwell, there doesn’t exist this exhaustion, this thumping surge of sprawling land and sea convergence. It’s bright and hot, alighting the nonexistent patterns as people and their many motors crush upon the littorals of humanity and culture—their culture. It is their land; the noise and debris, the rising dust-clouds into the eternal heat, the rapturous signals, the stoplights and padding feet across cracked pavement before the next race of holly exhaust pipes flood the streets. The young pubescent girls standing in a 50s truck bed and the workingmen folding leathery hands in deep cooling shadows. Coronas, Pacificos, Dois XX an... read more

I walk the streets of the city. I’m traveling, yet I’m stationed within a foreign land, one I’ve become accustomed to for the last three months. Above me, in usual winter fashion, the sky is gray, dark with threatening rain. But the people are out, for it’s after noon as the weekend begins. Here, after the social nights of Friday, the parisien rises to find a bistrot among family and friends. Stomachs rumble with the digest of the previous evening’s soirée. As I take my wandering path through Paris, I stare through the plumes of condensation ascending from my mouth into the domains of the café, brasserie and restaurant. Platters of food arrive: steaks & frites, an arrangement of greens topped with baked chevre, and a terrace of steamed clams and mussels falling into a buttered ... read more

It is one thing to be by yourself. It is another to be together. It’s one thing to have only yourself to turn to. It’s entirely another to have others there with you. It is one; the loneliest number that could ever be. It is one multiplied by any number other than itself; friendship, companionship, support. Traveling can be extremely difficult, especially while on the solo track. You find yourself confounded by a deep-seated loneliness and you discover you have nobody, nothing—no idea of what to do, how to do it, and when you end up there, wherever there might be, will anyone ever find you? I was on that boat, that churning rail-line on a one-way track. The currents carried me, the waves thrashed my vessel. The track rose up, and the track fell down. ... read more