Get Your Motor Runnin’: 10 Terrific Road Trip Tales
Low gas prices plus a strong economy means that a record number of folks will be hitting the road this summer. And why not? The road trip is the ultimate American getaway. See all that our country has to offer on your own schedule: incomparable national parks, quirky small towns, and miles of scenic history.
Get inspiration for your trip from these 10 tales of highway travel. Whether you’re already plotting a week on Route 66 or just want a good staycation read, stories from the road are always impossible to put down.
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Life Is a Wheel
by Bruce Weber
Life Is a Wheel chronicles the cross-country bicycle trip Bruce Weber made at the age of fifty-seven, an “entertaining travel story filled with insightful thoughts about life, family, and aging” (The Associated Press).During the summer and fall of 2011, Bruce Weber, an obituary writer for The New York Times, bicycled across the country, alone, and wrote about it as it unfolded. Life Is a Wheel is the witty, inspiring, and reflective diary of his journey, in which the challenges and rewards of self-reliance and strenuous physical effort yield wry and incisive observations about cycling and America, not to mention the pleasures of a three-thousand-calorie breakfast. The story begins on the Oregon coast, with Weber wondering what he’s gotten himself into, and ends in triumph on New York City’s George Washington Bridge. From Going-to-the-Sun Road in the northern Rockies to the headwaters of the Mississippi and through the cityscapes of Chicago and Pittsburgh, his encounters with people and places provide us with an intimate, two-wheeled perspective of America. And with thousands of miles to travel, Weber considers his past, his family, and the echo that a well-lived life leaves behind. Part travelogue, part memoir, part romance, part paean to the bicycle—and part bemused and panicky account of a middle-aged man’s attempt to stave off, well, you know—Life Is a Wheel is “a book for cyclists, and for anyone who has ever dreamed of such transcontinental travels. But it also should prove enlightening, soul-stirring, even, to those who don’t care a whit about bikes but who care about the way people connect” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
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Roads
by Larry McMurtry
As he crisscrosses America — driving in search of the present, the past, and himself — Larry McMurtry shares his fascination with this nation’s great trails and the culture that has developed around them. Ever since he was a boy growing up in Texas only a mile from Highway 281, Larry McMurtry has felt the pull of the road. His town was thoroughly landlocked, making the highway his “river, its hidden reaches a mystery and an enticement. I began my life beside it and I want to drift down the entire length of it before I end this book.” In Roads, McMurtry embarks on a cross-country trip where his route is also his destination. As he drives, McMurtry reminisces about the places he’s seen, the people he’s met, and the books he’s read, including more than 3,000 books about travel. He explains why watching episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show might be the best way to find joie de vivre in Minnesota; the scenic differences between Route 35 and I-801; which vigilantes lived in Montana and which hailed from Idaho; and the history of Lewis and Clark, Sitting Bull, and Custer that still haunts Route 2 today. As it makes its way from South Florida to North Dakota, from eastern Long Island to Oregon, Roads is travel writing at its best.
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The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America
by Bill Bryson
An unsparing and hilarious account of one man’s rediscovery of America and his search for the perfect small town.
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Assassination Vacation
by Sarah Vowell
New York Times bestselling author of The Wordy Shipmates and contributor to NPR’s “This American Life” Sarah Vowell embarks on a road trip to sites of political violence, from Washington DC to Alaska, to better understand our nation’s ever-evolving political system and history. Sarah Vowell exposes the glorious conundrums of American history and culture with wit, probity, and an irreverent sense of humor. With Assassination Vacation, she takes us on a road trip like no other — a journey to the pit stops of American political murder and through the myriad ways they have been used for fun and profit, for political and cultural advantage. From Buffalo to Alaska, Washington to the Dry Tortugas, Vowell visits locations immortalized and influenced by the spilling of politically important blood, reporting as she goes with her trademark blend of wisecracking humor, remarkable honesty, and thought-provoking criticism.
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Reservation Blues
by Sherman Alexie
Coyote Springs is the only all-Indian rock band in Washington State—and the entire rest of the world. Thomas Builds-the-Fire takes vocals and bass guitar, Victor Joseph hits lead guitar, and Junior Polatkin rounds off the sound on drums. Backup vocals come from sisters Chess and Checkers Warm Water. The band sings its own brand of the blues, full of poverty, pain, and loss—but also joy and laughter.
It all started one day when legendary bluesman Robert Johnson showed up on the Spokane Indian Reservation with a magical guitar, leaving it on the floor of Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s van after setting off to climb Wellpinit Mountain in search of Big Mom.
In Reservation Blues, National Book Award winner Alexie vaults with ease from comedy to tragedy and back in a tour-de-force outing powered by a collision of cultures: Delta blues and Indian rock.
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Blue Highways: A Journey into America
by William Least Heat-Moon
Hailed as a masterpiece of American travel writing, Blue Highways is an unforgettable journey along our nation’s backroads. William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about “those little towns that get on the map-if they get on at all-only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi.” His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he encountered along the way amount to a revelation of the true American experience.
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The Longest Way Home
by Andrew McCarthy
WITH ABSORBING HONESTY AND AN IRREPRESSIBLE TASTE for adventure, award-winning travel writer and actor Andrew McCarthy takes us on a deeply personal journey played out amid some of the world’s most evocative locales. Unable to commit to his fiancée of nearly four years—and with no clear understanding of what’s holding him back— McCarthy finds himself at a crossroads, plagued by doubts that have clung to him for a lifetime.
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The Book of Wanderings: A Mother-Daughter Pilgrimage
by Kimberly Meyer
When Kimberly Meyer gave birth to her first daughter, Ellie, during her senior year of college, the bohemian life of exploration she had once imagined for herself was lost in the responsibilities of single motherhood. For years, both mother and daughter were haunted by how Ellie came into being-Kimberly through a restless ache for the world beyond, Ellie through a fear of abandonment.
Longing to bond with Ellie, now a college student, and longing, too, to rediscover herself, Kimberly sets off with her daughter on a quest for meaning across the globe. Leaving behind the rhythms of ordinary life in Houston, Texas, they dedicate a summer to retracing the footsteps of Felix Fabri, a medieval Dominican friar whose written account of his travels resonates with Kimberly. Their mother-daughter pilgrimage takes them to exotic destinations infused with mystery, spirituality, and rich history-from Venice to the Mediterranean through Greece and partitioned Cyprus, to Israel and across the Sinai Desert with Bedouin guides, to the Palestinian territories and to Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt.
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Long Way Down
by Ewan McGregor
Eighteen countries. Five shock absorbers. Two bikers. One amazing adventure… After their fantastic trip round the world in 2004, fellow actors and bike fanatics Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman couldn’t shake the travel bug. Inspired by their UNICEF visits to Africa, they knew they had to go back and experience this extraordinary continent in more depth. And so they set off on their 15,000-mile journey with two new BMWs loaded up for the trip. Their route took them from John O’Groats at the northernmost tip of Scotland to Cape Agulhas on the southernmost tip of South Africa. Along the way they rode some of the toughest terrain in the world — and met some of the friendliest people. They rode their bikes right up to the pyramids in Egypt and visited Luke Skywalker’s house in Tunisia. They met people who had triumphed over terrifying experiences — former childhood soldiers in Uganda and children living amidst the minefields of Ethiopia. They had a close encounter with a family of gorillas in Rwanda and were nearly trampled by a herd of elephants in Botswana. Riding through spectacular scenery, often in extreme temperatures, Ewan and Charley faced their hardest challenges yet. With their trademark humor and honesty they tell their story — the drama, the dangers and sheer exhilaration of riding together again, through a continent filled with magic and wonder.
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Driver’s Education
by Grant Ginder
Finn McPhee edits a reality TV show. His father, Colin, is a screenwriter. Both are adept at spinning fictions, a skill passed down to them by McPhee patriarch Alistair, whose wild yarns never failed to capture Finn’s youthful imagination;even as they cast a fragile veil over a past marked by devastating loss, unbearable love, and an incessant longing for a life whose heroic proportions could measure up to the breathtakingly vivid color of Alistair’s dreams. As Finn embarks on a road trip across America with his best friend, Randal, and a three-legged cat named Mrs. Dalloway in a last-chance bid to make his grandfather’s dreams come true, he will finally learn that the truth, though not always stranger than fiction, can sometimes make the best story of all.
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What's the Deal with Saturated Fat and Cardiovascular Disease Risk?
Host: Alan S. Brown, MD, FNLA
Dr. Alan Brown welcomes Dr. Penny Kris-Etherton, Distinguished Professor of Nutrition at Penn State and Past President of NLA. Dr. Kris-Etherton reviews the current dietary recommendations for saturated fat for the population at large and for reducing LDL-C levels. The two discuss the evidence to support these dietary recommendations and optimal replacement nutrients for dietary saturated fatty acids (SFAs).
The Total Grilling Manual Recipe: The Perfect Burger
Treat your barbecue guests to the best burger with this simple recipe that lets you know when they are perfectly done. From The Total Grilling Manual: 264 Essentials for Cooking with Fire.
2 lb (1 kg) ground beef (your choice of grind and cut)
4 hamburger buns (your choice of type)
Flavor additions, toppings, and condiments (your choice)
Makes 4 servings
PREHEAT Prepare a charcoal or gas grill for direct-heat grilling over medium-high heat. If using a gas grill, soak wood chips (such as hickory, mesquite, or a combination of the two) for at least 30 minutes. Drain, transfer chips to a smoker box or foil packet, and place on the fire at least 5 minutes before cooking.
SHAPE Add any additional flavoring agents (if using) to ground beef and mix in with hands. Divide meat into four 1⁄2-lb (225-g) portions. Shape each portion into a patty a little wider than the buns you will be using. Press a wide, shallow dimple into each patty (so burgers will cook to even heights when centers expand with heat.) Season with salt and pepper, as well as any other seasonings you prefer.
GRILL Place burgers on grill rack and cook, without turning, until browned on the bottoms, about 4 minutes. Turn and cook the other side until browned and burgers are cooked to desired doneness, about 10 minutes total for medium-rare. (Place cheese, if using, on the burger just after the first flip.)
REST Let burgers rest away from the heat for 5 minutes. Transfer to buns, layer with desired toppings, and serve.
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Fat Burning Food Plan Diets
Fat Burning Chef RecipesPreview Fat Burning Exercises Legs Shopping NowThe Fat Burning Food Plan Diets will help you remove all the disturbing and troublesome body weights. Dr. Charles D.C as the author of this program will provide you with much information about fad diets as well as diet items, such as for example pill and drops. He will explain that the foundation of this plan is the liver,
How Physical Activity Can Help Kids Learn
Art Glenberg of the Laboratory for Embodied Cognition at Arizona State University has found that kids who solved math story problems by acting them out were better off than kids who simply read them. Maria Montessori had it right: the body is an important part of the learning process, if you know how to use it. Learn more from How the Body Knows Its Mind.
Consider this math problem Glenberg gave to third graders:
There are 2 hippos and 2 alligators at the zoo.
They live by each other, so Pete the zookeeper feeds them at the same time.
It is time for Pete to feed the hippos and the alligators.
Pete gives each hippo 7 fish. (Green light)
Then he gives each alligator 4 fish. (Green light)
The hippos and alligators are happy now that they can eat.
How many fish do both the hippos and the alligators have altogether before they eat any?
Students who acted out the problem, who actually counted out the appropriate number of little toy fish and distributed them to the animals, were two times more likely to solve the problem correctly than the kids who simply reread the story.
But here’s where the data get really interesting: a third group of students, who counted out Lego pieces whenever there was a green light, didn’t do any better at solving the math problem than the kids who simply reread the story. One of the surprising lessons of this research is that it’s not just any movement that produces understanding. The third graders in the Lego group were still moving objects, but these objects were unrelated to the plot of the story problem: the Lego pieces were not shaped like fish, nor were there figures of hippos and alligators to distribute the fish to. When there isn’t a direct connection between words and objects, the power of action is lost.
Interestingly, the use of blocks and other objects, or manipulatives, is becoming more and more popular in classrooms across the nation (especially in more elite schools): students are taught to count with blocks or sticks as a way to solve math problems. Originally created in the early 1900s for educational use, block play is being touted by teachers and parents alike as the new cureall for our educational woes, and national school suppliers have added a ton of new block-related products to their catalogues in the past several years. Private schools now use their blocks as a recruiting tool. Manipulatives are even advocated by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics as a way to enhance students’ grasp of basic math concepts like subtraction and addition. Yet while the block movement represents a renewed faith in incorporating active play into learning, how exactly this block play is carried out determines what kids learn. It’s not simply the handling of blocks—or Legos, as we saw in Glenberg’s study—that’s important. Rather, as Glenberg’s work clearly shows, manipulatives have a positive learning benefit when they can be directly connected to the content of the problem students are trying to solve.
Why does the direct linking of children’s actions to the story content matter? Consider the word each, which Glenberg thinks children have a particularly hard time with. Understanding this word is actually quite complicated: the word must be connected to the correct set of objects, and the objects within the set need to be seen as distinct entities. It is not enough when reading each to note that there is a group of alligators. The reader must also realize that there are two alligators and that they are fed individually. Physically manipulating the relation between the fish and the characters in the story makes this individuation pretty clear, because the child has to count out fish for each of the alligators. It’s less obvious when kids don’t do this sort of story-relevant counting. In fact Glenberg found that the most typical error among kids who counted with Legos was to say that the hippos and alligators had eleven instead of twenty-two fish before they ate any of them. It’s as if the kids failed to realize that each meant that the eleven fish had to be doubled to get the total for the two alligators and two hippos. By acting out the story with relevant manipulatives, children come to understand symbols (such as the word each).
Random hands-on activities are no panacea for educational woes, but carefully structured action experiences can help children learn. Kids don’t have to walk around with a toolbox of toys for math and reading in order to get an action benefit. Glenberg and his research team have also shown that, once children have some action experience, they can imagine performing the actions in the stories and still get a benefit. When the connections from words to actions are in place, it is easy to capitalize on them.
Of course, cognitive scientists weren’t the first to tout the educational benefits of movement. Maria Montessori, the founder of the Montessori educational movement, wrote a hundred years ago, “One of the greatest mistakes of our day is to think of movement by itself, as something apart from the higher functions. . . . Mental development must be connected with movement and be dependent on it. . . . Watching a child makes it obvious that the development of his mind comes about through his movements. . . . Mind and movement are parts of the same entity.”
In Montessori schools, kids learn the alphabet by tracing letters and, just as in Glenberg’s reading lessons, learn grammar and vocabulary by acting out sentences their teachers read to them. For decades the emphasis that the Montessori method placed on a dynamic learning environment was largely ignored by mainstream educators, but recent advances in neuroscience and psychology show how critical movement is for understanding. This new research in embodied learning helps provide a road map for how to structure educational activities to best help kids learn. The mind is not an abstract information processor largely divorced from the body and the environment. It is highly influenced by the body and movement.
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Fat Burning Green Tea Smoothie
Fat Burning LeggingsPreview Fat Loss Diet Guidelines Top QualityThe Fat Burning Green Tea Smoothie can help you remove all of the disturbing and troublesome body weights. Dr. Charles D.C because the author of the program will give you much information about crash diets along with diet items, such as for example pill and drops. He’ll explain that the foundation of this plan is the liver, because
How to Inspire Creativity and Focus at Work
Creativity often requires quiet and concentration–elusive qualities in today’s full-time-access multimedia world. To foster creativity, this entrepreneur created a quiet space at his company’s headquarters where employees must leave their gadgets at the door. From Wild Creative: Igniting the Passion and Potential in Work, Home, and Life.
An entrepreneur like Brian Faherty, founder and creative director of Schoolhouse Electric & Supply Co., knows the power of cultivating a quiet space. Faherty founded his wildly successful company on the premise of returning to a handcrafted industrial lighting and home aesthetic. In a few short years, his company grew out of a small storefront into a 125,000-square-foot headquarters. He created a “digital-free zone” in his offices and named it the “Fire + Water room.” Faherty found that balance between his digital and analog world was crucial to being a more effective leader and creative thinker. “I only have so much bandwidth myself, and if too much of it gets used up doing digital things, then I don’t have any room left for the other areas that are more important to me.” With a wood-burning stove set against a weathered brick wall and couches sporting wool blankets, the Fire + Water room is designed as a retreat for “the creative mind to work unencumbered by technology.” Anyone who enters must leave digital devices behind, but they are welcome to add wood to the fire.
Consider finding quiet space in your own way each day, with electronics set aside. Setting down distractions and nurturing a connection with your inner creative space is a loving act toward the creative potential within. If this inner place has been neglected, it may feel awkward at first to be in this stillness, requiring effort not to be pulled by outer distractions. But in the quiet is where you reconnect with your own creative impulses. Build in creative space and time in your life—even schedule it on your calendar—in order to reconnect with the inner muse and wellspring of your creativity. And once you find the inner stillness, stay in contact with it. In the words of Deepak Chopra, “Wherever you go in the midst of movement and activity, carry your stillness within you. Then the chaotic movement around you will never overshadow your access to the reservoir of creativity, the field of pure potentiality.”
Where is the quiet space in your home?
Where is the quiet moment in your day or week ahead?
How will you carry your stillness with you?
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Natural Sexual Aphrodisiacs: The Good, The Bad, and The Deadly
Host: Michael Krychman, MD
There are many herbs and supplements that have gained popularity as natural sexual aphrodisiacs. While many are sold over the counter nationwide to enhance sexual function, a surprising number of supplements can cause ranges of serious side effects. Which aphrodisiacs have been proven effective, which are safe, and which are potentially deadly? Host Dr. Michael Krychman joins Dr. Elizabeth West, a resident physician at the University of California-Irvine, to talk about the spectrum of natural herbs and supplements, from foods like honey and chocolate to herbs such as ginseng and macca, and their known sexual health benefits vs risks.
Fat Burning Exercises At Night
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Fat Burning Foods Natural
Fat Burning RepsReview Fat Loss Factor System Free Download Looking For Great Deals.The Fat Burning Foods Natural will help you remove all the disturbing and troublesome body weights. Dr. Charles D.C as the author of this program will provide you with much information about fad diets as well as diet items, such as pill and drops. He’ll explain that the building blocks of this plan may be the