Tag: passenger pigeon

I think yesterday was so lovely I didn’t have room to tell you all about it. Let’s backtrack just a bit.  I crossed the Mississippi River, heading west. The river forms a notional boundary between the forest area (to the east) and the Great Plains (to the west). Obviously it’s not a hard and fast…

It’s been a long day – starting in Indiana a bit west of Indianapolis and ending in Kansas a bit west of Topeka.  You can tell it was a long day when I say that the first words I heard were from the satnav saying ‘stay on the I70 for 200 miles’ which only got…

The ospreys, herring gull, turnstone and swallows could have been in Scotland – even the brood of goosander ducklings and the distant great northern diver could have been Scotland, but these were common merganser ducklings and a common loon. And they were with hooded merganser, spotted sandpiper, ring-billed gull and purple martin so we were…

The Mio Motel, in Mio Michigan, hasn’t got uniformly great write-ups on TripAdvisor but I liked it.  The guy in charge is a bit brusque I agree – but by the standards of British customer care he is in the ‘eccentric and a bit curt’ category – no worse. And my room had photos of…

Driving around, and I’ve already done a fair bit of it, you need things to keep you entertained. Music is one thing, listening to US radio is another, reciting all 50 states of the USA is another. My car has Texas license plates so I’ve already had a few ‘You’re a long way from home’…

Today is Bob Dylan’s birthday (although for British readers – that was yesterday) so I started the day with Blood on the Tracks, whose first track (Tangled up in Blue) starts ‘Early one morning the sun was shinin”.  But it wasn’t first thing today, although it did for a lot of the day. I drove…

I liked Coshocton very much, and if I find other places as nice, that would be good.  I am, now, in Wisconsin, which means I have done a lot of driving today. I drove through Chicago with Ol’ Blue Eyes on full volume, and on ‘repeat’, singing ‘My kind of town, Chicago is…’ over and…

The highpoint today was success in a cemetery – but that’ll be going into the book so it’s a secret. Much of today was doing domestic stuff.  I bought some water to keep hydrated as I drive, and filled up with gas at the same time. A nice lady at the gas station and I…

Today I had the worst breakfast I’ve ever had in the USA so the names and locations in this tale have been changed to protect the guilty.  But the food was not the worst part (there are happier bits later in the blog). The coffee wasn’t good, the eggs were only OK, the toast wasn’t…

One of the noticeable things about America is the number and variety of churches.  I don’t go to church but I am quite proud of my local church at home.  It has an impressive spire, medieval wall paintings and has dominated the landscape for hundreds of years.  If I come home after dark I can…