A Stop at Thoreau’s Walden Pond Near Concord, Massachusetts
Sunday, May 12 2024
Clay stops to visit Thoreau’s Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts as part of his Travels with Charley road trip.
- Published in Dispatches from the Road
Visiting John Steinbeck’s Home in Sag Harbor, New York — Video Dispatch
Thursday, May 09 2024
Clay visits John Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor home where the noted author began his 1960 cross-country journey, immortalized in Travels With Charley.
- Published in Dispatches from the Road
John Steinbeck’s True Motivations for Hitting the Road in 1960
Thursday, April 25 2024
As Clay begins his great Travels With Charley journey, our resident Steinbeck specialist, Russ Eagle, weighs in on what spurred the Nobel Prize-winning author to take to the road in a custom truck camper and his dog in 1960.
- Published in Features
Shakedown Cruise: The Great Adventure Begins
Tuesday, April 23 2024
April is the cruelest month, says T.S. Eliot, perhaps because it brings you some false spring that often enough is put in its place by late blasts of winter. This is certainly true on the Great Plains. But I am leaving on my big John Steinbeck Travels with Charley Tour on April 27 …
- Published in Dispatches from the Road
John Brown: A Remarkable American Story
Monday, April 01 2024
Hero, terrorist, martyr or madman? Clay examines the dramatic life of John Brown.
- Published in Features
Rereading Blue Highways — An Enduring Backroads Journal
Monday, March 25 2024
Originally published is 1982, Clay says William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways is still our best backroads manifesto.
- Published in Books
Reading Orwell’s 1984 In 2024
Thursday, March 07 2024
The question is: how prophetic was Orwell? What does he say to us in the age of “fake news” and “alternative facts”?
- Published in Books
Notes on Geert Mak’s In America: Travels with John Steinbeck
Saturday, March 02 2024
Mak’s In America: Travels with John Steinbeck is without question the best book written about retracing the 1960 Travels with Charley journey.
- Published in Books
Printed Maps and an Atlas: Old School, Indeed!
Friday, February 23 2024
We’re hard at work detailing plans to follow in the footsteps of John Steinbeck’s journey chronicled in Travels With Charley.
- Published in Dispatches from the Road
My Life as a Space Junkie
Sunday, February 18 2024
I’ve been captivated by humanity’s exploration of the heavens since I was a boy growing up on the plains of western North Dakota.
- Published in Dispatches from the Road