After yanking our motor out of our van for the 5th time and having it fixed in Mashhad, Iran, we headed east driving about 600 kms deep...

We had bought a van in Kathmandu and drove it through Nepal, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. [See previous posts] We’d been on the road...

It is amazing how quickly something can turn from the mundane to the lethal . . . From Amritsar in Northwest India, we took a mini-bus to...

So Steve Bastrom (Basmo) and I bought an old VW combi back in Kathmandu from a Canadian couple, Randy and Linda. We planned to drive it...

Beginning the Overland, April/May 1978 - I’d had a few days of traveler’s stomach, so was watching what I ate. My trekking partner,...

Kathmandu seemed like a blur. It was a noisy, busy market—a bustling city, bursting at the seams—so many things happening, different...

I walked out of the Kathmandu airport and grabbed one of the old, dented taxis to take into the city. Arriving at the Asia Hotel, I...

The Dent du Midi from Leysin, Switzerland It was 1973—the Vietnam War was ending slowly and the hippie movement had transformed into...

I wrote this on Kuta Beach in Bali on March 5, 1978. It relates my adventure on the Trans-Sumatran Highway just a week or so earlier. I...

I heard someone say the best proof for intelligent life out in space is that the aliens haven’t tried to contact us. I guess they know...

MORE SHUTDOWN MUSINGS . . . The best thing about the Corona virus (Wow! Did I really just say that?) is that it has given me a chance to...

If you, like me, are currently hunkered down at home to avoid contact with other humans I suggest that between the Netflix movie...

Sitting at a bar in Singapore years ago, a friend of mine told me that his life was over since he’d had kids and they had grown. He told...

Freedom an Existential Point of View I’ve written before about ethics and morality and the idea that one may be ethical without being...

Michael Jackson, the world respected whisky writer (not the pop star), wrote that when he was young an older colleague, “warned that the...

A recent editorial in the Washington Post by Kate Cohen, “Pete Buttigieg, Please Don’t Equate Religion With Morality,” touches on an...

Ambiguity, Faith, Superstition, Belief in the Supernatural. I was thinking of something that happened to me many years ago. After I came...

Now it is easier than ever to learn how to play the guitar and even how to fingerpick. There are instructional videos on YouTube and you...

“Let’s have a shot,” says my friend. We’re at the bar, drinking beer, and it is that time in the late afternoon to have a wee bit of a...

Map and Compass rather than Phone App GPS . . . “Where the fuck am I?” When I used to say this back in the old days I’d look around for...