Highway 61 is the famed two-lane road that carried poor rural musicians and sharecroppers out of the dusty Mississippi cotton fields in the 1930s and ’40s. This ‘Blues Highway’ led them north towards Memphis and St. Louis, where audiences first clamoured for the raw, emotional singing and guitar playing that emerged from the Jim Crow …
The Blues Highway Make a pilgrimage to a mythical musical crossroads Read More »
NASCAR racing is said to be the most popular spectator sport in the U.S. It all started in 1936, when Daytona Beach mechanic Bill France entered a local stock-car race on the beach. Two years later, when nobody else wanted to promote a follow-up, he took the reins. In 1947, when racing resumed after the …
The Daytona International Speedway, Daytona Florida Read More »
Even if one goes to Vegas only to gamble and be entertained, one mustn’t ignore the local shops! As a top tourist destination, the shops are designed to cater to a broad range of people, and retailers have made it easy to amuse oneself with the plethora of unique goods. Certainly there are upscale shops, …
An icon of American criminal culture and history, Alcatraz (‘The Rock’) was perhaps America’s best-known prison from 1934 to 1963, when it housed such notorious criminals as Al Capone, Robert ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly and Robert ‘The Birdman’ Stroud (who looked nothing like Burt Lancaster in the 1962 movie, and was not allowed to keep birds …
Take a trip to the island prison known as ‘The Rock’ Alcatraz Island Read More »
Sculpted by the turbulent, pounding waves of the Pacific, Oregon’s 362-mile coastline is one of nature’s masterworks. Thanks to a far-sighted state government in the 1910s, the entire length of the coast in Oregon was set aside as public land, which has left most of it, especially in the central and southern regions, largely undeveloped. …
Mackinac Island boasts a rich history—as American Indian summering grounds, as the center of the North American fur-trading business and as a colonial fortress—but it’s the gilded Victorian era the island preserves like a living postcard that is the most striking. Horse-drawn carriages clip-clop down vehicle-free streets. Pedestrians stroll and bicyclists pedal past Main Street …
Mackinac Island Travel back in time to a Victorian fairy tale Read More »
Seaside Heights in the Jersey Shore packs lots of action into its 16-by-4-block beachside area, pulling in crowds with its whirl of fast-paced activity. The boardwalk here is one of the busiest at the Shore, thanks to two amusement piers, a water park, wall-to-wall arcades, souvenir shops, informal dining like the Sawmill – think pizza, sausage sandwiches, clams on the half shell – and lively evening entertainment.
