The Distracted Wanderer

"There's beauty in being unique and different." The Little Red Caboose by Marian Potter, published 1953.  If you're planning a visit to the Amish Country in Pennsylvania and want to stay somewhere out of the ordinary, check into the Red Caboose Motel at Paradise Station in Ronks where you can sleep in an authentic 25-ton railroad caboose!  The concept for the Red Caboose Motel began way back in the summer of 1969 when hotelier Donald Delinger placed a bid on 19 cabooses that had been decommissioned and were being sold off as surplus by the Pennsylvania Railroad. Six months later he found out that he had won the auction and on Mother's Day in 1970, his nostalgic concept came to life. In February of 2016, the iconic Red Caboose Motel & Restaurant was bought by the father and son team of Todd and Tyler Prickett who, along with their wives Debra and Katherine, continued to take great pride in offering guests a unique and exceptional experience in the heart of Am...

Salem, Massachusetts may be known as "Witch City" due to its horrific historic past as the site of the worst case of mass hysteria ever in Colonial America which led to the deaths of over 20 people, but there's a lot more to this Massachusetts North Shore destination than the Salem Witch Trials including a lot of great places to eat. As many times as I've eaten in Salem - and it's been a lot! - I have never once had a bad meal in a wide variety of restaurants. Not. Even. Once.  During one of my many wanderings to Salem, my Distracted Sidekick and I decided to check out  the  Ugly Mug Diner  as even though I am an admitted classic diner snob, I'm never adverse to trying out a diner that isn't housed in a historic dining car made by the Worcester Lunch Car Company or Fodero or Jerry O'Mahony or Kullman or … well, you get the picture! Out of all the possibilities laid before us in Salem, the Ugly Mug Diner had two things going for it that made me decide...

Earlier this year, when I took a much-needed two-week vacation to America's beautiful Southwest, one of the sights I really wanted to see during my wanderings was Monument Valley on the Arizona-Utah border. A frequent filming location for television commercials and movies (particularly back in the time when the western genre was in its heyday), the area's towering sandstone buttes are as iconic a symbol of the American West as one can get.   Not a valley in the conventional sense of the word, Monument Valley is a wide, flat, and sometimes desolate landscape interspersed with crumbling sandstone formations that rise hundreds of feet into the air, the last remnants of the sandstone layers that once covered the entire region. One of the grandest landmarks in the United States, Monument Valley (Tse’Bii’Ndzisgaii meaning 'Valley of Rocks') is located within the Navajo Nation - a land base of 27,000 square miles which extends into Arizona, New Mexico, & Utah. Home to the ...