I LIKE FAIRS, AND I DON’T CARE. I don’t care that some folks see state and county fairs as old-fashioned, or stale, or costly, hot, and unhealthy. I don’t even mind that it’s all true. Fairs do have a long heritage, and they do repeat their exhibits year after year on hot summer days for […]

MY SUMMER TRAVELOGUE COMES TO A CLOSE with another attempt to capture what it is about my little Pennsylvania home town that keeps drawing us back there year after year instead of going to Hawaii or to Europe with our friends. We don’t go specifically to see family, or friends, but just to be in […]

THE SCENE, TORONTO, CANADA, a craft brew festival across the street from the Eaton Centre, a massive three-story indoor mall that gets one million visitors a week. The Eaton Centre hasn’t much to do with the story, but I wanted to insert a reference to it because of its massive amazingness. It is the fourth […]

IF YOU’RE FOLLOWING THE VACATION CHRONICLE that I started last week, you know I’m lying in a Pittsburgh hotel on the South Side with a Headwich and chicken-wing hangover along with my wife, Susan, and traveling companions Bud and Sandy Donaldson. It was dawn of day two in our East Coast adventure. After a long […]

WIFEY AND I HAVE BEEN DOING SOME TRAVELING THIS SUMMER, so expect a few travelogue columns. We didn’t go to Rome, Paris, Athens or Prague. We traveled, as usual, to rural Pennsylvania, to the Allegheny National Forest and my little hometown of Ridgway. From there we took spur-route tours. I collected quite a few good […]

LAST WEEK WE LEFT MICKEY AND WANDA, our two young philosophers in love, quibbling on a windy mountain road late at night on their way to their first-ever romantic weekend. The debate was over the etiquette of road kill. Mickey had just run over a rabbit and kept on driving. Wanda wants him to go […]

MICKEY AND WANDA WERE DRIVING UP TO THE MOUNTAINS for their first camping trip together. The sun had just gone down. Mickey was driving and adjusting to the headlights on the winding mountain road. No radio playing. Wanda was mostly asleep in the passenger seat, a thin gray blanket over her shoulders, her knees pulled […]

MY LITTLE HOMETOWN OF RIDGWAY, PA., got severely flooded in late May, severely. Three inches of rain fell overnight. Only one other time in its history, back in 1972, was the water this high. It crested at 23 feet and 16 feet is flood level. There were boats on Main Street. People were walking in […]