I recently discovered two new joys of road-tripping: I-80 between Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and gas station potato chips. Not just any potato chips, but artificially flavored Italian Hoagie chips by PrimoHoagies. Do they taste like a hoagie? No. Yet, it makes your breath smell like you ate a footlong. How? Pennsylvania magic.
Continue readingMonth: May 2022
L.A.’s Lushest Library: The Huntington Gardens
Approximately 11.5 miles northeast of Los Angeles is one of my most favorite places in Southern California: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Encompassing 207 acres of land in the San Gabriel Valley, it is an Olympic feat to see it all in one day.
Continue readingHow much to tip your ambulance driver and other advice when traveling with COVID
After two years of successfully evading the virus, it finally caught me 4,000 miles away from home.
Driving between sublime places like Florence, Siena, and Lucca, you can catch a glimpse of the mundane side of Tuscany. The strip malls, the car dealerships. The industrial parks with empty loading docks. The barren fields with crumbling structures festooned with graffiti. The red tiled roofs of homes that dot the side of the highway. Details that never make it into brochures or into the stories you’ll share with your friends when you get back home.
I, on the other hand, was desperately trying to memorize it all. Making note of landmarks and highway signs, as they zoomed by the window of my ambulance.
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