J.E. Knowles's Blog

I had been thinking about Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania since the last time I was there, in 2017. As readers of The Discreet Traveler know, on summit night I turned around at 5,200 meters above mean sea level (=17,060 feet), which is nothing to be ashamed of. Kilimanjaro is the highest freestanding mountain in the world. The problem for me was that I kept thinking it had affected me, my ability to go on and pursue other goals—even to get up for work in the morning! I had let Kili get in my head, a...

 It was our first trip to a new country since we came back from traveling to 29 countries in 2019. Like a lot of people, we had things disrupted in the past few years, especially travel. Cruising to Norway was one of those things that T. and I had talked about doing for years, and when we weren't able to spend Christmas together, we decided to give each other this trip to the fjords.

Few countries in the world can have undergone as complete a peacetime transformation as Norway. While Norwegians' ...

“…the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.” 
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild

When I first read Cheryl Strayed’s memoir ten years ago, I thought it was the story of her hiking alone on the Pacific Crest Trail. Recently, I reread it and realized it’s about grieving her mother, who died at the age of forty-two. Of course, it is both.

I notice different things now because, as for Cheryl Strayed...

And so it’s farewell, to a classy individual who caused people to dress up, stand and march in straight lines, and brought us together in unity, while exhorting us with old-fashioned values. I speak, of course, of the recent death of my high school band director, Bill Scott.

 

Clarinets, state funeral procession, 19 September 2022

Mr. Scott preached “class,” a word that sounded old-fashioned even at the time, especially in America. “Show some class,” he would urge us at a band competition. Other ba...

 When the BBC news started playing audio of Steve Kerr, the head coach of the Golden State Warriors, I knew he wasn’t going to be talking about basketball. The NBA playoffs are not prime time news in Britain. Kerr was talking about gun violence—specifically, attacks that had just taken place in a Buffalo grocery store, a church in California, and a school in Texas. He was expressing the frustration that many people, in America and in its friends and allies abroad, feel about the seeming inabilit...

Dawn cracked over the Wigwam Motel. I heard a rooster crow. Still have no idea where that was coming from.

We were on Foothill Boulevard, Route 66 west of San Bernardino. Decades ago this was lined with fruit trees. Now a lot of it is modern sprawl, though there are still things to look out for.

Art Deco Standard Oil station, Rancho Cucamonga

Rancho Cucamonga is, first of all, a great name for a town. Picture it as it was in Route 66’s heyday: orange groves, vineyards, wineries dating back as far a...

 First, I’ve made a correction to my last post. Albert Okura, who bought the town of Amboy, California and restored Roy’s Café, is a U.S. businessman. (He owns the Juan Pollo chain of restaurants, which explains why the Barstow Juan Pollo location is also called “Roy’s” with a sign to match.)

Amboy Road northbound

We were on our way back on the Amboy Road towards the final stretch of Route 66. There was a political sign, somewhere near Noels Knoll Road, that one wouldn’t associate with as “blue” a...

Arizona continued to overdeliver on Historic 66. If we hadn’t wanted to stop or have a look at anything, Jane the navigation app was happy to have us continue for 85 miles without a turn!

Burma-Shave signs west of Seligman

But of course, we did stop. First in Peach Springs, headquarters of the Hualapai Reservation, whose fish and game ministry is housed in a hundred-year-old cobblestone building. I went in the general store next door which, I was happy to discover on purchasing them, had doughnuts...

 Our last few miles of Route 66 in New Mexico were scenic, winding up the sheer side of Devil’s Cliff. The state line at Lupton, Arizona has long been home to colorful trading posts.

On our detour north we’d seen billboards for McDonald’s 80 miles apart. We therefore knew that McDonald’s was the modern scale for judging the size of a town. But for much of this day we saw tacky billboards from the old Route 66 days, as we followed the Little Colorado River—and, inevitably, I-40.

 One section of the...

 If you look up the Four Corners Monument on travel advice sites, people say don’t go out of your way to visit there. They charge you $5 each to line up and take a picture, and it’s really hot, and there are vendors hawking stuff all around.

Well. We were on our way to Monument Valley and literally passing the turnoff for the Four Corners Monument, and it wasn’t hot, and in November 2021 not remotely crowded. Indeed, I was worried no one would be around to take our picture! The only oddities were...