From Washington, Highway 100 stretches toward Hermann like a clothesline, draping over bluffs and peeking down ravines at your road’s companion, the Missouri River. The river was the major highway when John Colter traveled upstream with Lewis and Clark. Later, … Read More
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
“Blues is the roots. Everything else is the fruits.” —Willie Dixon. Only a few steps into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame we found this: Jim Morrison’s Cub Scout uniform. Iconic. Ironic. Morrisonic. We moved deeper… The Rock and … Read More
A Higher Power
I warmed my hands by the fire. The crisp fall day had ushered me through rolling loess hills, past newspaper offices whose names are as vibrant as their communities: Stanberry Headlight. Fairfax Forum. Tarkio Avalanche. I learned that Tarkio is … Read More
Mother turns 100
Route 66 has provided much of the wallpaper to our lives. Music and food. Art and architecture. Grapes and wrath. This year the Mother Road celebrates her 100th birthday. She’s aged in fits and starts, triumphs and tragedies, but we … Read More
Panhandlerama
Two icons along Route 66 point to a third. Sticking up like a wart on the flat windy Texas Panhandle, where dust is a commodity spread liberally along the armpit of Oklahoma, a leaning tower teeters, posing for shutterbugs intent … Read More
When a restaurant becomes more than a meal
Heading west on I-44, we hit a late-spring snowstorm that quickly turned the roads into a luge run. So we retreated to a town called Traveler’s Repose to let the snowstorm pass. Well, that was the name of the town … Read More
Runagroundabout
If your groundhog saw this, you’ll get six more weeks of stuck. A rare sighting of a runagroundabout somewhere in Harrison County.
Tragedy on the Big Island
We passed a rocky shore, the scene of two tragic events. On April Fools Day, 1946, a Tsunami smashed into this spot at Laupahoehoe, Hawai’i, killing 24 people, including nineteen schoolchildren. Eighty years earlier, a lifeboat crashed into this ragged … Read More
America’s Next Big Water Park
The location of Missouri’s next proposed water park may surprise you. It’s not in a resort or even a town. But it’s the doorstep to more than five dozen Missouri communities, and three quarters of the state’s population. A few … Read More