The Vagabond Library
Reach up, reach in, reach beyond, reach out.
Articles Guaranteed to Stretch Your Mind
Sit by the fireplace, have a drink and a good read
with curious people like you.
Driving Mexico’s Baja 1000 - Part One
Dispatch XXIV
Another perfect San Diego morning. From Mission Beach we hop Lyft to the Mexican border. There Cyn and I climb out of the car and stand like a couple of waifs on the street corner and struggle to get our bearings. We find a sign: Border Crossing and follow with bags on our backs to revolving metal doors. Above us the simple massive word: MEXICO.
Beyond the doors we pass through a dark, vaguely sinister feeling hallway. Had I seen too many movies about nasty border guards in Spanish speaking countries? Arrive at a counter with plexiglass windows. Very standard. The moment we open our gringo mouths a slim, crisply dressed uniformed border guard pulls us aside, and sits us in a room nearby. Oh-oh.
Thelma, Louise, the Ancient Ones and Four Corners
Dispatch XXII
The morning was damp and gray. We left Monticello’s Grist Mill and the Maverick Gas Station behind to drive to Canyonlands National Park. It was important to see the sights there. On the way we needed to track down the place where Thelma and Louise had met their fate in the movie named for them, the one that launched Brad Pitt’s career and memorialized the last ecstatic moments of Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis. Miles and miles of flat, rocky plains surrounded us when we pulled off the main highway and snaked canyonward.
Riding the Zephyr, Skirting the Colorado, Exploring Arches
Dispatch XXI
Before Fraser, CO the Zephyr snaked into a six mile hole in the ground called Moffat Tunnel and for 10 minutes we disappeared into blackness. Half way into the tunnel, our conductor announced that we were as deep beneath the ground as anyone one on earth could be. Above us sat 2000 feet of solid rock. To create it engineers had blasted the tunnel right through the continental divide between 1923 and 1928. As we entered the tunnel all snow, rain, water, creeks and rivers tumble to the Platte and the Missouri Rivers onto the Mississippi and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. But on the other side, every drop of water flows to the Pacific.
The 10 Greatest Travel-Adventure Books Ever
Traveling is wonderful, but there are some places you simply can’t explore because time has left them behind. Luckily we have writers, adventurers and books. Over the years I’ve read a few. These are my 10 favorites. Each one changed the way I looked at the world. My guess is they’ll change your life too.
If you have a favorite travel book you’d like to add to our Vagabond list of classics, drop us a comment or send us an email and we’ll happily share them!
Something Different
Dispatch XX
Many of you have been kind enough to say thanks for the Dispatches I began sending the first day we bounced our bags down Smallman Street in Pittsburgh to catch the Amtrak train that began our 7-continent journey. We have, however, encountered a problem. I am way behind on those Dispatches. But I think I have a solution ...
Spirits, Devils and Wyoming
Dispatch XIX
The sky was big in Montana, just as its license plates say it should be as we skirted its western border and headed south to Wyoming. We rolled along a secondary highway past ranches and seas of grass waving in the crisp November air. Its was relaxing. Hours passed and the sun had set when we made it to the little town of Huelet. The hotel lobby was festooned with the heads of magnificent elk, bison and deer now no longer with us that ran up and around the big staircase that led to our room.
Remembering Close Encounters
45 years later, Close Encounters of the Third Kind still entertains and thrills audiences. It’s a sci-fi classic with an epic, landmark location that audiences never forget. Steven Spielberg’s choice of Devils Tower for the finale of Close Encounters of the Third Kind remains one of modern cinema’s biggest, mind-blowing final reel moments.
Cowpokes, Roughriders and Teddy Roosevelt
Dispatch XVIII
In full sunlight Medora looked as though it had been dropped whole from a Warner Bros. studio lot, with its one and two story clapboard buildings lined up against the raw mountain cliff behind it waiting for a gunslinger to emerge. The town boosted my fascination with the sanitized west I recalled as a kid. Being a boomer, my boyhood brain had been filled with shows like Gunsmoke, Maverick, Cheyenne, Wyatt Earp, Bonanza, the Lone Ranger.
Cathedrals and Motorcycle Heaven
Dispatch XVII
Who would have ever thought excitement and adventure would come to Sturgis, South Dakota? But today, is a beloved place in the American west, the motorcycle capital of the world where every summer the town of 7,000 morphs into a metropolis of more than 600,000 fun-loving, hard-drinking, hog-roaring bikers.
The Wild West rides again.
George Armstrong Custer
In 1874, Colonel George Custer announced that gold had been discovered in the South Dakota's Black Hills, inspiring another one of the west's famous gold rushes. Nearly overnight the nearby city of Deadwood had been established and grown to more than 5000 inhabitants. The only problem? An earlier treaty gave those lands to the Lakota. Surely this wouldn't lead to conflict…
A Prisoner of Sand
They crashed in the Sahara desert without food, water, a radio or anything but their wit and stamina to save them. The last night they began to freeze in the night wind, unable to move enough blood through their coagulating blood streams to summon up warmth. In the cold their throats closed, their saliva retreated, their tongues turned to cloth and they waited for death. But it did not come … This is rates as one of the great adventures ever.
(Photos by Chip Walter)
The Legend of Crazy Horse
Dispatch XV
In the summer of 1857 a light skinned, 17-year-old Oglala Sioux brave whose mother nicknamed Curly, decided to go on a vision quest so that he could understand the future path his life should take. His father, sometimes known as Worm, was a respected shaman in the tribe. He made arrangements and accompanied his son on his quest so that he did it the proper Sioux way. They rode away, fasted and set up a sweat lodge where they spent time and discussed his future…
The World’s Most Remarkable Journey
Sometimes adventure exacts a steep price.
Is is difficult to imagine a tougher, or luckier, man than British adventurer Apsley Cherry-Garrard. At the tender age of 23 he finagled his way onto Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova expedition hoping to become among the first humans to reach the South Pole. Scott and several members of the team died. But this story is about an even more harrowing expedition — what Cherry-Garrard called the Winter Journey to retrieve the eggs of Emperor Penguins in the dead of the Antarctic Winter. It is one of the most astounding adventure stories I have ever read. I think you’ll agree.
Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills of Dakota
Dispatch XIV
The story behind Mount Rushmore isn’t what you think it is.
In 1924, historian Doane Robinson asked famed sculptor John Gutzon de la Mothe Borgum to create a series of monumental sculptures depicting great heroes of the American West. The project was to represent “not only the wild grandeur of its local geography but also the triumph of western civilization over that geography through its anthropomorphic representation.” The Lakota Sioux held a very different point of view…
Oddballs & Badlands
Dispatch XIII
If you never heard of Wall Drug, a uniquely American place in the middle of nowhere that 2 million people a year visit, read on. And then learn about South Dakota’s Badlands, which look more like the moon than planet earth.
The eerie, terrible beauty of South Dakota’s Badlands. Last stop before we worked our way west to Mt. Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota.
Corn Stalks, Wind Gusts & Country Music
Dispatch XII
The curious Corn Palace of South Dakota. We found it as we headed across the American Midwest into the Badlands of South Dakota and Mt. Rushmore.
Traveling Small (Part 1) - The Best Bags and Suitcases in the World
You might not be planning to travel all seven continents, never by jet, like me and Cyndy are, but if you have any kind of travel in your future, you need the right luggage, clothing, gear and occasional gadgets to make life easier. After all, it’s the journey that counts, right, and you can’t enjoy the trip if your gear fails you.
Trekking One Corner of the Flat Earth
Dispatch X
Cyndy Mosites and I journey to one of the four corners of The Flat Earth, the wilds of Bonavista Newfoundland.
Vikings!
Dispatch IX
Most of us think that Christopher Columbus and his crew were the first to stumble across North America in 1492. That turns out to be quite wrong. Five hundred years earlier white men encountered native Americans on the North American continent. We learned where they met, and the story behind how.