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Take the Wheel, Kid- A Travel Loving Parent Shares the Rules of the Road

Texas Highways, March 2019

Dear Carlisle, Now that you are 13 and taller than I am, there are a few things I’m compelled to tell you before you someday take off on one of the greatest thrills of your growing freedom– the road trip.

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Lost in the Valley-- An Unplugged Travel Challenge Through The Rio Grande Valley

Texas Highways, November 2018

A tech-free road trip feels radical when most of the cartographic knowledge you’ve had for the last eight years has been contained on a 3-by-5-inch phone screen.

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A Return to the River

Texas Highways, July 2018

For three days, the blue heron leads us downriver. In the mornings we push off in canoes through the olive green water of the lower Guadalupe, made murkier by Hurricane Harvey’s visit just over a month ago.

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Hammin It Up in Flatonia

May 2018

Texas and Spain have joined forces in an unexpected four-legged way.

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Only in El Paso

Texas Highways, April, 2018

The Kentucky Club claims to have invented the margarita– one of many contenders for that honor, the veracity of which is not for me to contest.

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A Toast to Trost

Texas Highways, March, 2018

It’s dusk on South El Paso Street, the buzzing thoroughfare that connects downtown El paso to the Juarez bridge, and a man in a top hat and black coat strides down the sidewalk.

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Stitching Through Time

Texas Highways, December 2017

That simple action of sewing two pieces of fabric together, like a ritual, links practitioners over time.

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10 Epic Summer Travel Adventures: Get Inspired to Tackle Texas' Many Cool Outdoor Adventures

Texas Highways, May 2017

You don’t have to be a seasoned birder to thrill at the pink swoosh of a roseate spoonbill coming in for a landing near Rockport Beach. No experience is necessary to delight in the silhouette of a magnificent frigatebird flying over Aransas Bay….

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Beyond the Border: Diverse Works Converge at the El Paso Museum of Art

Texas Highways, April 2017

While drinking coffee in my room in El Paso’s hip new Hotel El Indigo, I can feel the pull of Mexico. From my window, I witness how the orderly concrete grid of El Paso’s downtown gives way across the border to a warren of pastel, one-story houses framed in mountains still purple from the sunrise. I watch cars scuttle back and forth toward the international bridge, heading for El Norte or south into Juárez. This is la frontera, a metropolis of almost 3 million people on both sides of the Mexico-United States border, and the buzz is infectious.

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Pancho Villa's Favorite Street: Shopping on South El Paso Street

Texas Highways, January 2017

Luis immediately spots the finger in the window—gnarled and gray in a hammered bronze box next to shelves crammed with jewelry, its longish fingernail still intact. A typed message in a wood frame next to it explains that this is indeed the forefinger of a “notorious bandit” and “ruthless killer” who was also considered a local hero. That’s a lot of human paradox wrapped up into one little crooked finger in an El Paso pawnshop.

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Our Favorite Main Streets, True Texas

Texas Highways, January 2017

When you sit at the bar at The Liberty Bell on the brick-paved Main Street in Nacogdoches, many things could happen. You could strike up a conversation with locals about their homemade apple-pie moonshine or where to find Caddo Indian mounds on the back road to Crockett….

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A Key to Understanding: A Visit to the National Museum of the Pacific War Brings History into Focus

Texas Highways, May 2016

But it is in the Victory Room where I understand at a gut level how this museum presents a personal story, too. Because it is in the video of the momentous September 2, 1945, surrender ceremony aboard the USS Missouri that I get to see my grandfather flying in a tiny black plane over the Bay of Tokyo.

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Poet's Paradise: Poetry at Round Top Inspires Springtime Bards

Texas Highways, April 2016

“Clayton, look at this moth” shouts the poet Sharon Olds, calling to me across the green lawn in front of the concert hall at Round Top’s Festival Institute. Despite having just met her, I am not surprised to have one of the world’s most renowned contemporary poets call out to me about a moth on a car.

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Magnetic Art: The Meadows Museum Transports Visitors to Spain

Texas Highways, January 2015

Watching as the setting sun cast circles of pink and orange around the Jaume Plensa sculpture outside, I vowed to try to be more like Goya, curious and open to learning more, despite changing circumstances, nostalgia be damned.

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Meet Your Makers-- Arts, Crafts, and Icons in the Lone Star State

Texas Highways, November 2014

In his song “Stuff That Works,” Texas troubadour Guy Clark pays homage to “stuff that holds up … stuff that’s real.” His description of a favorite blue shirt worn soft over time is enough to make you wince at the thought of buying a T-shirt made in an overseas factory. Clark’s sweet, simple lyrics honor things with integrity—the stuff that lasts.

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Oates Fun House

Tribeza --Architecture Issue, October 2014

While there is much to delight you when you first walk into the home of John and Sara Oates– a sweet country breeze, the smell of fresh espresso, a handsome trifecta of glass, concrete and stone walls framing the entryway– the thing that stands out the most is a child’s swing.”

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Olive & Well-- South Texas' Edible Oil Boom

Texas Highways, September 2014

“Apparently feral pigs like olives. I am walking through narrow rows of arbequina olives trees on the outskirts of Carrizo Springs with Jim Henry, the man who perhaps knows more about making Texas olive oil than anyone else in the state. It is late fall, pruning time, and piles of discarded  leafy branches and unpicked olives are scattered around our boots. ‘See that,’ he says, pointing to some scat near my foot. ‘Pig poop. Those feral hogs love to eat my olives.'”

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Hats Off to Ben's-- The Texas Hat Museum in Cotulla

Texas Highways, July 2014

“Every hard-earned crease, curve and water spot embodies a way of life that inevitably will be altered by one of the biggest oil booms in Texas history.”

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Horse Sense: Nurturing a Child's Equine Dreams in West Texas

Texas Highways, June 2014

“This is a different way to be together. Out on the trail, we are enjoying a freedom that our city living doesn’t allow, a fresh connection that feels more essential and satisfying. We smell the creosote, we spot a lizard, we urge a horse to stop eating and keep moving. Talking, but not a lot, we enjoy just being together.”

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Rambling by the River: San Antonio City Profile

Garden and Gun, February/March 2014

“The Alamo isn’t the only thing in San Antonio worth remembering.”

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Our Favorite Italy

Andrew Harper Traveler, Summer 2013

“How to pin down the magic of Italy? Is it the heady romance immortalized by Anita Ekberg wading into the Trevi Fountain in “La Dolce Vita?” It is the inimitable delight of its food, so fresh that to not indulge in multiple serving of carbonara and gelato seems criminal?”

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South America: Beyond the Backpack

Andrew Harper Traveler, Spring 2013

“There is an irrepressible energy in South America drawing all eyes below the equator.”

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Interview with John Waters

Eyemazing

“In what follows, Waters explains how bad film stills make great art, why contemporary art hates people, and what it’s like to pose as the Provincetown Town Crier.”

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"Foreign Affair"

Eyemazing , Issue 1, 2012

“What does it take, the photo makes you ask, to be that free from self-consciousness, to be so fully unabashed, to let your body and your delight be so exposed just as it is?”

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"Class Acts, A Guide to the Top Private Schools in the Capital City"

Austin Monthly, April 2012

“Sharpen your No. 2 pencils and get ready to learn—pedagogical diversity is alive and well in our great city.”

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"Jesus is Showing Me Amazing Things"

Eyemazing, Issue 04, 2010

“Snow’s floating coffin may symbolize the universal, but it simultaneously speaks to the very individual and isolating nature of mourning for those left behind. Like a sealed box, mourning is a closed off experience—you can’t fully comprehend any one person’s very particular loss. As Barthes writes, it is its own cruel country from which you may or may not find your way back.”

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"The Ultimate Gig"

Austin Monthly, December 2007

“It’s a crowded night at The Peacock. I’m burrowed in a corner with friends when a guy in a burgundy lounge jacket and dark sunglasses enters. With tousled hair and a confident swagger, he looks like trouble—the good kind.”

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"Free Range Kickin’"

Dwell Magazine, November 2007

“It takes grit to transform a sun-baked field in Marfa, Texas, into a small village of vintage trailers and yurts. The heat, the dagger-sharp yucca, and the scarcity of hardware stores and skilled trade workers (Marfa has only one plumber and he’s the most popular guy in town) are enough to derail the building dreams of many. Then there is the seductive inertia of Marfa time….”

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"Madrid"

BBC’s Olive Magazine, June 2006

“In love with tradition, Madrid is loyal to cocido Madrileno (the city’s famed meat and chickpea stew), suckling pig roasted in slow-burning ovens, jamón serrano and manchego cheese. Sun-filled plazas see locals lingering over long lunches—those famously social events that start with a good rioja and end many hours later with flan and a café con leche…..But change is bubbling up in the Spanish capital faster than a briskly shaken bottle of cava. “

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"In the Raw"

Spain Magazine, July 2004

“It’s amazing how early morning yoga, not to mention our amusing enema how-to demonstration, can bring people together.”

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Yes, the writing was immaculate. I can count on one hand the number of times that happens!

Editor at leading travel website
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