Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
I am sitting at my airline gate. I have been waiting here since the Peloponnesian Wars. I am people-watching because there is nothing else to do while I wait for my plane. The main person I am watching is a guy in the seating area. He is maybe mid-80s. With him are six children. He appears to be the sole adult in their company. There are no other grownups with him.
It was late. I was leaving South Carolina, where I’d just made a speech in Columbia. I had an all-night drive ahead of me.
We sped through Amish country on our way to meet our friend Kris at a restaurant called “Funck’s.” My wife, Jamie, was convinced the name of this restaurant was an unfortunate typo.
Automobile-pulled travel-trailers have been around almost as long as passenger trains. But locomotive rail travel is nearly extinct due to excessive government regulations, freight traffic conflicts and costs. Time might be right for creating Travel-Trailer-Trains – coupling together multiple travel-type trailers that have been made into full trailers (wheels at each end).
We arrived in New York City and tried our best to avoid the chaotic crowds of pedestrians downtown. But this proved to be difficult inasmuch as our cab driver was driving on the sidewalks. We tried to ask him to slow down, but he was too busy on a video call.
I received a seething email from a man in Baltimore, Maryland. He apparently has a political bone to pick with the state of Florida, and he read that Florida is where I’m from.
For the first time in decades, Washington should be safe and clean enough to visit—just in time for the 250th celebration of independence.
It’s weird. Being back in America again. For one thing, they don’t call it “America” over in Europe. It’s bad form. They call it “the U.S.”
I wonder who is watching me right now.
Someone must be watching me because I, too, am watching others. I am in the Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas airport. We are leaving Spain after spending the better part of a month here. And I am engaging in my second favorite pastime: people-watching.
I don’t know how I got into this. No, wait. I remember.
My wife, that’s how I got into this. That’s how every crazy, halfcocked idea in my life starts. With her. Bungee jumping in Mexico is only one example.
We had a three-hour layover in Santiago de Compostela where we had nothing to do but sit in an outdoor cafe, downtown, watching hordes of pilgrims arrive at the cathedral and publicly rejoice in Santiago Square.
The ancients called this place the end of the world. And that’s what they believed it was.
The first time I visited the Florida Everglades, I was entranced. Layers of beauty, patterned chaos, teeming wildlife, and that unmistakable feel-good energy. It is roughly 1.5 million acres of subtropical wetland often referred to as the “River of Grass”. A place with endless complexity that invites one to contemplate our natural world. While there are …
It is among the grandest churches in the world. It is one of the greatest achievements of man that took so long to build that architectural periods changed several times throughout its construction.
Even so, when you walk into Santiago de Compostela the first thing you see is not the cathedral. You neither see the gilded grandeur, nor the ornate.
The first things you see are pilgrims.
Things I’ve seen in Spain.
Little children, deviceless in public, making blatant eye contact with adults, behaving ten years more mature than their age.
Lugo, Spain, is a mini metropolis compared to the remoteness of the Camino Primitivo. For days we have been hiking in isolated mountains and faraway countrysides. It’s startling to see a city suddenly emerge from the landscape.
I have learned that everyone walks the Camino for a reason. This is my second Camino, and thus far I have not met anyone who approaches this 1,500-year-old path without a spiritual and emotional objective.
The reasons are not always clear. Sometimes the reasons are even unclear to the person walking. But the reasons are there. They walk so they can find something. Something unnameable.
What is God?
This single question underpins all things on the Camino de Santiago, a trail inhabited by us full-time pilgrims whose lives are contained in backpacks.
Rain. It never stops coming. Rain, rain, rain. Sometimes it seems like all it does is rain.
It’s been raining for two days now on the Camino Primitivo. And there is no end in sight. Spanish news channels on television, which are wonderful media organizations whose reporters dress exquisitely, speak rapidly, and replay the same four news stories every six minutes, are predicting rain each day this week.
