DISPATCHES FROM THE ROAD

Well, I’m home now for a few weeks, writing up my travels and planning Phase Two of the great John Steinbeck Travels with Charley tour of America, which begins in the second week of July. 
Steinbeck struggles against poverty, but the publication of Tortilla Flat changes everything.
Was it Google Maps that led me astray? Last week, on the way to Athens, Ohio, I took a wrong turn.
A Distant View of the Falls of Niagara by American artist, John Vanderlyn, 1804.
Thomas Jefferson said it is worth a trip across the Atlantic to see Niagara Falls. Although he never got there.
When Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders returned from their heroics in Cuba in August 1898, they were quarantined at Montauk Point at the tip of Long Island.
I don’t know what I expected when I drove my Airstream into Cooperstown, New York to visit the National Baseball Hall of Fame. It was an emotional day.
Clay's personal cartographic detail of his Steinbeck journey through New England the last two weeks.
Clay’s personal cartographic detail of his Steinbeck journey through New England the last two weeks. Over the next few months, Clay is shadowing Steinbeck’s 10,000-mile trek around the USA (and making a few detours of his own).…
Sitting in the Airstream, Rocinante. I had a delightful interview with Steinbeck biographer Jay Parini of Middlebury College in Vermont.
It’s too early to draw conclusions about the country’s mood, but this is what I have heard in two weeks on the road.