I'm buying postcards, wading through racks of pictures featuring the familiar wild drunken revelers packing the streets of the French Quarter, overcrowding the balconies, and thronging the parade floats. You see the jazz bands with brass buttons, the red steaming crawfish on top of mounds of corn and potatoes, the nutty eccentrics in ludicrous costumes, the battered streetlamps. There's music, there's neon, and there's noise...and there's noise; above all, there's noise. Bourbon Street is a wall of color and sound. Those are the memories the postcards try to capture, and they're the same ones [View Full Entry]

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AAE Hostel It's turned cold again. Not very cold, but cold enough for me to feel like sitting here instead of walking around in the wind. So I'm spending the day working on a new watercolor and, in between washes, updating everybody on the accommodations I've found through Hostels.com (a web site you want to know about). AAE Bourbon House is on the corner of Annunciation and Felicity, which puts it just outside the Lower Garden District and within a few blocks of Magazine Street and St. Charles. This is a good location since you can pick up the streetcar on [View Full Entry]

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Whoever the Greek god of interstates would be, he's happy at the moment Now I'm in New Orleans. Not only was it the most uneventful drive on the US Interstate system I've ever taken, it was the easiest one I've ever heard of. If you've ever gone more than a hundred miles on I-Anything, the most vivid memory you probably have is the color orange. Orange cones, orange barrels, and orange signs. Slow or barely moving workers in orange vests, orange hardhats, and waving orange flags at you. Every state in the US claims the orange cone is their state tree, [View Full Entry]

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She crab soup Brain on the phone with parties unknown: “Yep, I’m taking them to Barbara Jean’s for the she-crab soup…“ Brain from the front seat, apropos nothing: “We gotta go to Barbara Jean’s for the she-crab soup…“ Brian lived in the Jacksonville area and Barbara Jean’s was the nineteenth hole for him and his friends on Sunday afternoons. There’s nothing like local knowledge when it comes to where to eat, so it looks like I’m having the she-crab soup. Thanks to Brian’s exuberance, it looks ever [View Full Entry]

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Does Ann know how cold that water is? You may be wondering why I, a good SEC fan, am traveling to the Gator Bowl to see Nebraska play Clemson. A fair question, and one that I hope to make clear at some point; but for now, we’re in Jacksonville, Florida and we need a late night liquor store. I know, “who doesn’t?” but on this occasion it’s proving a little more difficult than it ought to be. Finding a late night liquor store should be easy anywhere in the Christian world, just look for the part of town with the discount [View Full Entry]

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Observations from 3rd and Church Headed to Huntsville, Alabama tomorrow then on to Jacksonville for the Gator Bowl on January 1st where I will be a Cornhusker for a day. Current location: King's Market, a convenience store with cheap coffee and free WiFi at Church Street and 3rd Ave. North. This is also a favorite corner for the local homeless people to hang out and swap news. It’s a perfect listening post for what's going on in their world and what cities are having crackdowns or enforcing panhandling laws. Atlanta is cracking down again, so we have some new faces. In [View Full Entry]

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Eagle Battle at Tracy Arm I know this one is way overdue and I've had all the time in the world to put up some of the Alaska pictures, but a lot has happened since July of 2008. At any rate, here is a teaser. Tracy Arm (a glacial fjord) is located along Stephens Passage, just around the corner from the strange little capitol city of Juneau in "Big Southeast" (which would be better called "Big SouthWet"). You can find it on a map, but don't Google it for driving directions or you might get something like, "...drive onto float plane." [View Full Entry]

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The shirtless bus driver is having a blood feud with some guy right in the door of the bus, but you have to ignore this sort of thing. Greeks have blood feuds all the time and it doesn't stop them from cheerfully conducting business at the same time. Even if the tourists balk at entering the conversational blast radius, they will wave you in and take care of you with a smile just as they are inaugurating bitter hostilities with their own neighbors that will last a thousand years. I've seen this before. I approached a cab stand and saw two [View Full Entry]

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Ancient Wonders and Wondering Where They Went The Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes is very impressive…or at least it was. In 1856, long after the Knights of Rhodes had shuffled off to Malta, a gunpowder explosion did by accident what the Turks could only accomplish by negotiation. The concrete, I am sorry to say, is not original. Most of what stands there today is a replica of a medieval castle as imagined by twentieth century Italian fascists. Fascists have no gift for subtlety and, oh , do they love concrete. The Parthenon in Athens suffered a [View Full Entry]

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Worth the Wander After the last entry, you may be wondering what possessed us to go creeping along the winding, collapsing mountain roads of Crete. Brother Mark and I were looking for a small beach town on the Southwest coast called Sougia because it was the closest thing we could identify near Lissos. Lissos is an ancient site that's played host to a number of civilizations. The odd thing about Lissos is that, while it's marked on lots of maps (usually with a cartoon symbol that's supposed to suggest ancient ruins), there's almost no information about it anywhere and there's no [View Full Entry]

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