Blogs from United States, North America - page 6517

Greetings! Have you ever felt the chains of bondage breaking? My traveling has officially has begun! I've left my home and job and friends in Ohio and have space and time in front of me to explore the world a bit. Most of my possessions went to Goodwill or other people. It was bittersweet to leave 'my' acreage, but sometimes you just have to start over. That has been quite liberating. I've never felt so free in my life. My first stop was Milwaukee for the Midwest Social Forum (http://www.mwsocialforum.org/). I am so glad I went because it was amazing. In a nutshell the forum is a meeting of progressive movements and groups addressing issues ranging from human rights, social justice, racism, privatization of public resources, environmentalism, to media problems, political corruption, and abuse of corporate ... read more

About 30 miles before we reached Anchorage things began to change rapidly. Instead of country roads and trading posts we began to see expressways, shopping centers and subdivisions. Anchorage is a modern city of about 300,000 people and looks less like the last frontier and more like a city in the lower 48. We heard the joke here is that Anchorage is a great place to live -- you are in a modern city with lots of things to do, yet you are only 30 minutes from Alaska. Anchorage sits at the top of Cook Inlet and, like most of Alaska, is surrounded by gorgeous mountains. The southern boundary of the city is Turnagain Arm, an arm of Cook Inlet, so named by Captain Cook because it was another dead end in his quest for the ... read more

As mentioned in my Pirates of the Caribbean entry, me and Armin decided to go diving on Sunday. I started out at approx 7:30, hoping to reach Armin by 8. I arrived, and since all the equipment was ready from the night before, we got in the car and proceeded south on the 101 heading for Monterey. We hadn't gone far before we spotted a police car. I slowed down, but too late, he had already spotted us. He came up behind us, lights flashing and told us to head to the Marsh exit over his speaker. I proceeded to the exit and pulled over. He approached the car on the passenger side, and informed us that he had stopped us for speeding, proceeded to ask for my drivers license, insurance papers and registration. I handed ... read more

Had a lot of meetings so only had a little free time to go off and see some sites. Hadn't been to the National Shrine to the Immaculate Conception at Catholic University in a while so on Friday a friend and I headed out for a look. It's the classic Catholic cathedral. Very beautiful but bordering on over the top. Huge, massive structure. It's supposedly the largest church in the Western Hemisphere and the 7th largest religious structure in the world (according to wikipedia)! Very beautiful inside with strong gold colors. There is a crypt in the basement as well with a cafeteria and gift shop. It's a fairly new church having only been finished in the late 1950s. If you're in DC and looking for some site seeing outside the Mall area, you should go ... read more

Boston, the so called "hub of the solar system", this may be true but both me and Claire ‎have been ill and therefore didn't see much of the city at all. ‎ One day Claire was ill so we sat in the park, one day I was ill so ....... we sat in the hostel ‎and then in the park. ‎ The few occasions when we did venture out we made it as far as the Cheers bar the ‎inspiration for the US sitcom or just down the main street. ‎ On Sunday we watched the world cup final, we made our way to the Italian area the place ‎was really bustling but we couldn't get anywhere near a TV screen. We watched some of ‎the game in the city square on the big screen but ... read more