I care very little for Salzburg and not at all for the archbishop; I shit on both of them. – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart The train to Salzburg was canceled due to a blizzard in Bavaria. Munich was getting hit with its heaviest snowfall in twenty years. The ticket agent said there was a later train…
Vienna
The pessimistic Austrian view of life is expressed in the verdict:‘Es wird schon schief gehen,’ or, ‘It’s bound to go wrong.’ – Gordon Brook-Shepherd 24 hours in Vienna. It sounds like an action movie, but there was no action unless you count weight gain. Hayley and I subsisted on a tourist diet of schnitzel, streusel,…
Book Release 2020
My latest book, Leaving Tucson: Travels in an Uncertain Time, has just been released (available on Amazon in both e-book and pocketbook editions). An early version of the story Getting the Shaft in Mexico, which first appeared on this site, is included in this latest volume. The book covers several excursions around the desert southwest as…
Getting the Shaft in Mexico
HAYLEY AND I MOVED SOUTH, trading the cold desert of Wyoming for the hot desert of Arizona. We traveled through more desert along the way, starting with the Red Desert near the Colorado border. Geologists refer to this region as an endorheic basin. Any rain that has the misfortune of falling here cannot look forward to…
African Camelot
BY THE TIME WE REACHED GONDAR I felt like I’d found my sea legs in Africa, meaning that I’d adjusted my expectations downward and put my guard up. We’d only been in Ethiopia for four days and already I was on a diet of soup and tea. Still, once we’d located a hotel and gotten…
James Perry 