Laurie's light travel travel tips

A drive from San Antonio into the tiny towns of South Texas means passing miles and miles of stark, stuck-in-time landscape, replete with tumbleweeds and cacti. Dead armadillos are a given. Ditto deer heads at your local rest stop. My late mother was a fifth-grade teacher from Alice, Texas, about 45 minutes west of Corpus, two and a half hours southwest of San Antonio. Although I know the names Violet, Three Rivers, Robstown and Kingsville intimately, I had not heard the name Uvalde until the tragedy the other day. But that didn’t stop me from living the experience as I would have in Alice, when as an eight year-old I was ruminating in a summer school math class, miserable, missing my dad; or when I was a four year-old running from bats on Northwood Street or being pulled in the red wagon by next-door neighbor Mickey Hans. I had also lived with my grandparents Mama Sue and Pop, and "Unkie" Norman for the summer I turned one, while my parents visited my paternal relativ...

I was supposed to write about Arlington Cemetery in Part 3, but it's been a busy summer between trips out of town (Chicago, New York, Milford, CT), an intense work schedule, and preparing for grad school in a few weeks. So instead, let me tell you about something that happened across America, and which I happened to enjoy if not in "totality" in near totality. The solar eclipse. It was as if the world had suddenly become children again, and our sense of wonder was restored for those precious hours watching the moon slowly cover the sun. I was at my beloved haunt, the Air & Space Museum , where the kind staff handed out free eclipse glasses (Nasa certified!) with no thought of letting anyone go without. Thank you, Smithsonian! So the sight of all these folks looking up in their glasses was a treat, reminiscent of the 60s, when the new space program also inspired a sense of wonder and skyward gazing. I realize I can't recommend coming to DC to watch the ecli...