In the summer of 1960, my family took a cross-country road trip from Canandaigua, New York to Pasadena and back. Six of us – my parents, and me (age 9) and my three sisters – Kendra (13), Carol (12) and Christine (7) in a mint-green Chevy station wagon. It was a great adventure. In the summer of 2005, the Chicago Tribune in their Tempo section asked for readers to share their summer vacation road trip adventures. On a lark I submitted the poem I had just written for a poetry class I was...

Ken Joy (1917 - 2008) A few years before my dad died my three sisters and I helped him to write “Born on the Hill,” which is his memoir of growing up on a hard-scrabble farm in upstate New York, going on to Ag School at Cornell and then becoming a pilot in the Army Air Corps. Here he recalls his three most memorable flights: In a fifteen-month period we had followed the invasion of Kawajalien, Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima, Okinawa,...

As I reported in my previous blog post, last year my friend Cam persuaded me to participate in Ragbrai – a weeklong bike adventure across...