The 135 mile Great Allegheny Passage trail was completely unknown to me when I arrived in the Cumberland Visitor Center. Seen as the extension of the C & O canal towpath, it is part of the larger network of hiking/biking trails called the Potomac...
Read MoreCumberland, Maryland, straddled between West Virginia and Pennsylvania, is the terminus of one great historic trail, the C & O Canal towpath, and the beginning of another, the Great Allegheny Passage, or the GAP as it is affectionately called. Encompassing both is a larger network...
Read MoreLarge numbers of people choose to experience only the familiar - the known. They’ll download a favorite song; attend a museum exhibit of artist they “know” about, or attend a concert they know already (or one that their friends “know” to be good). They’ll limit...
Read MoreI wasn’t planning to even go to Gettysburg, much less write about it. “No National Parks” I said (though technically, it’s a national military park). Not much of a civil war buff, I thought to myself, “I’ve visited Vicksburg; they’re both pivotal civil war burgs,...
Read MoreAs a descendant of the Schorr brewers of Lonnerstadt Bavaria, over 300 years of beer making runs through my veins. Family legend purports of a Richard Strauss connection …but I digress. As a Schorr, I feel it is my duty to expand the palette of...
Read MoreWhen we talk about “land”, we use solid topographical descriptors, conjuring up fixed landscapes whose changes evolve far too slowly to notice. However, Mother Nature dramatically transforms the landscape with much more frequency and regularity – day by day – most noticeably season by season. Think...
Read MoreThe culture of place is more than the sum of impressive buildings and institutions. Culture may emanate from place but it takes passionate people with strong beliefs to make a life in a place. To me, some of the most culturally interesting parts of Dallas...
Read MorePhiladelphia, Pennsylvania is a complex city that contains a multiplicity of cultural realities. Wealth, prestige and the idealized American historical backdrop butts up against the most abject poverty, I have ever seen. I have recently moved here, for a while at least, to work for a...
Read MoreUntil recently, Dallas has not been known as a cultural city. Yes, it has its share of cultural institutions, the opera, the symphony, and museum, but these do not define the culture of Dallas. Its evolution has been long coming. I live here, I travel...
Read MoreWhen one thinks of time lines, we tend to think in terms of an all encompassing history book. Looking back, we omnisciently view the concurrency of events in Britain, China, France and Peru. We forget that until the last century, our ability to know what...
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