A country with no cities, Papua New Guinea (or PNG as the locals call it) is the most rural place I've ever been. Even the capital, Port Moresby, has just a quarter million people and instead of the standard chokingly-filthy concrete wasteland that most third-world capitals are, it's lush jungle suburbs all the way. (Though high-enough crime that ( Read more... )

Thanksgiving for me was a week in Argentina. It's silly to go 6 time zones for one week of fun, but I'll take what I can get. I think we need a new term for the dizziness and wooziness that you feel as part of jet-lag, when you're not actually feeling sleepy per se, you just feel like your body arrived but its control systems are still in transit ( Read more... )

Hello from beautiful Milan ( Read more... )

   Hello from San Francisco again, where I've been for a couple weeks now, and where I actually plan to stay for a while, if the gods of job-hunting are kind to me.  I took a shorter route back (only 2800 miles), and this trip was as much about the people as the places I saw.

Wisconsin, with my folks, was almost the definition of comfort.  Not ( Read more... )

The second road-trip.  My folks wanted me to come out and visit them in Wisconsin, and there's tons of great stuff  between SF and there.  I hit Death Valley, Las Vegas, the Hoover Dam, bits of Grand Staircase - Escalante, the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City, Devil's Tower, Mt. Rushmore, the Badlands, and some roadside attractions.  January's road ( Read more... )

2007 is the year for road trips. Back in January, I road-tripped from Seattle to San Francisco with Michelle, taking four days instead of one, and recently I took an eleven-day trip from SF to Wisconsin.

The purpose of the first trip was to move back to the bay area for a job doing green design / engineering for a small startup, an offshoot of ( Read more... )

So, you may or may not know that we at Worldchanging wrote a book (called, unsurprisingly, "Worldchanging: a user's guide for the 21st century".)  Alex (the founder) and his assistants organized a book tour across North America, and I thought it sounded like a good excuse to go to visit friends, particularly the dear ones on the east coast that I ( Read more... )

You may have heard that the gulf coast is still broken from hurricane Katrina five months ago. It's definitely true--I know because I'm here, doing relief stuff with Hands On USA. I'm not writing to advertise anything, this is just another travelogue of my latest adventures. If nothing else, it's been nice to see the sun--not Seattle's wussy ( Read more... )

  Down in LA for a couple days for Borealis stuff.  The ride from the airport took me all the way up the 405, through all the cities I lived in here, and I was looking forward to seeing something familiar from that time, some building or store or geographical feature to spark a trip down amnesia lane.  Nothing.  I think I got a glimpse of the ( Read more... )

India has no sunrises or sunsets. At least where & when I’ve been, there’s such a thick constant haze in the air (of humidity and dust, and in the cities smog) that dawn is solidly day before the sun coalesces out of the haze, and likewise at dusk the sun fades into obscurity long before reaching the horizon. Though sometimes it will hang blunted ( Read more... )