On the Road from Chicago to Washington, D.C.

Am currently working on the itinerary for the road trip that my friend Brendan Cass and I will be making from Chicago to Washington, D.C., in early March! This trip ties in with a number of disparate and exciting projects that I am involved with. 

A big part of this trip for me and Brendan will be promoting our publishing company, Skirmisher Publishing LLC and visiting establishments in every state on our route where people can find our books, games, and other products. First place place we will be stopping is the Geek Bar in Chicago, a cool watering hole where customers can indulge their love for role-playing games, sci-fi, and fantasy while having a nice drink and good meal. We are still working out which other places we will be stopping at but they will include a number of game stores and, as things stand now, be in Fort Wayne, Indiana (where we will be visiting Rob Stone and his GameQuest store); Columbus and Cambridge, Ohio; Wheeling, West Virginia; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Rockville and Wheaton, Maryland; Alexandria, Virginia; and Washington, D.C. 

On the way we will be keeping our eyes out for historic or interesting hotels we can stay at (including the McLure Hotel in Wheeling), eateries where we can sample good local cuisine, and unique sites that we can visit — all of which I will be writing about and commenting on here. Sites we plan on spending time at include the Field Museum in Chicago and the Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum in Wheeling, both of which I have been wanting to visit for several years. Other people can help make a good road trip what it is, and I am hoping to cross paths with paranormal researcher Dale Kaczmarek and my friend Patrick Barnes, who I met when we were each making a pilgrimage to the Normandy battlefields in France in 2004, in Chicago; some Varhola cousins in Ohio who I have traded messages with but not yet met in person; and my friends Stefan Rice, Megan Irvine, Jonathan Reichman, Rico Nardini, Chris Snyder, and J.D. Prose in Pittsburgh. 

Suffice it to say that I love a good road trip and all the cool and unique things that can be accomplished with it. Keep your eye on this spot for updates as we continue to prepare for this one and then cover the places we are visiting, staying, eating at, and adventuring in. 

I Love Texas Hearts

To me, Texas Hill Country is a place that is very romantic, in the broadest sense of the word. With its rolling hills, deep wooded ravines, and slow-moving rivers, it seems as mysterious, ancient, and alluring as any rural Mediterranean province in Italy or France.

This romantic sensibility is most profoundly expressed, I think, by the local custom of referring to indigenous clam fossils as “Texas Hearts.” (OK, so fossilized clams might not be the most romantic thing I could have written about in recognition of Valentine’s Day, but the only other thing reminiscent of Texas I could think of would have been something related to beef hearts, to which my wife responded with “Yuck!”)

During the Cretaceous period (c. 145 million to 65 million BCE), the area of south-central Texas that we know today to be profoundly hilly was instead part of a warm, shallow sea, and inhabited, among other things, by a wide variety of now-extinct shellfish. The calcium from the shells of such creatures is what ultimately formed the native limestone that characterizes the area — to a depth of more than 1,000 feet in some places — and over the millennia it was uplifted by geological processes and gradually formed in to the land we know today.

Texas Hearts are, in short, fossilized bivalve clams that date to this extended geological period. And they do, in fact, look very much like actual hearts, and even a little bit like the stylized images that appear on Valentine’s Day cards and are used as used as shorthand for the word “love.”

The term “Texas Hearts” is sometimes also applied to fossilized sand dollars, sea urchins, and other marine organisms, but these do not actually look much like hearts at all, and are more properly referred to in my mind as “Texas Stars.” All such fossilized remains are, in any event, fairly common throughout Texas, from San Antonio to Fort Worth, and are a selling point for visitors.

“If you pay attention to where you walk in these limestone hills, you’re pretty apt to find all sorts of fossils,” the Bandera Convention and Visitors Bureau says on its website. “If you are lucky, you may even find what we call a ‘Texas Heart,’ which is a fossilized clam and looks just like a heart. Usually, they are about the size of a large apple.”

“One of the best places to fossil hunt is along the creek and river beds where the water has washed away the soil,” the Bandera CVB advises. “Another good place is along the road where the earth was cut back to build the road.” Anyone who has driven along appropriate roads on nice weekend days has very likely seen people applying this methodology.

And anyone taking an observant walk through Hill Country can find Texas Hearts and other fascinating evidence of its ancient and very different past; beyond the fossilized clams I have discovered over the last year-and-a-half, the most prized treasure I have found is the fossilized tooth of what must have been a gargantuan shark.

Not everyone’s own heart is, of course, stirred by such things … But, if yours is, then you will likely enjoy Texas Hill Country all the more.

Happy Valentine’s Day! 

A Haunted Roadtrip Through San Antonio, Austin, and Texas Hill Country

To anyone who followed my travels over the summer, particularly the Aegean Odyssey that took me to Athens and five islands of Greece in August, it might seem that I have been uncharacteristically quiet for the past few months. Amid a particularly busy year of travel, conventions, and speaking appearances, however, I have been working to finish up my Ghosthunting San Antonio, Austin, and Texas Hill Country, the latest title in publisher Clerisy Press's America's Haunted Road Trip of guides to reputedly haunted places people can visit. Anyone interested in the fascinating history and ghostly lore of this area should be sure to pick up a copy of this book when it comes out and in the meantime can find previews of most of its chapters at the site dedicated to it. 

As of this writing I have submitted all the chapters and most of the front and back matter to my editors and have just two miscellaneous sections to finish up for Ghosthunting San Antonio, Austin, and Texas Hill Country.

I have organized the 27 feature-length chapters into four sections, San Antonio, which includes downtown and everything within the 1604 Loop that surrounds the city; Greater San Antonio, which includes sites in the counties surrounding the city; Austin, which covers sites in the state capitol; and Texas Hill Country, which covers sites in the wooded highlands to the north and west of the city. In addition to its 27 feature-length chapters, it was also important to me to include a robust section of Additional Haunted Places that has brief writeups on another 60 sites throughout south-central Texas, which helps give this book a comprehensive nature. I will also support it indefinitely through the Ghosthunting San Antonio, Austin, and Texas Hill Country blog, which will include things like historic images of sites, new things I learn about places covered in the book, additional haunted sites I discover, and my ongoing paranormal adventures in the title area.

As things stand now the release date for the book is set for September 24, 2015. That might sound like a long time, but a lot of editing, layout, design, promotion, and marketing needs to take place between now and then. I have also got an exceptionally busy new year scheduled already, to include a roadtrip from Chicago to Washington, D.C., in March — which I will, of course, cover here with articles and photos! 

Top, the entrance to what is now the giftshop of the Alamo, which has long been believed to be haunted by the spirits of its slain defenders. Above, the sumptuous lobby of the Menger Hotel in San Antonio, which has a ghostly history going back to the middle of the 19th century. 

On the Trail of 'The Lord of the Rings'

I originally posted this piece about "Lord of the Rings" and "Hobbit" sites in New Zealand on October 24, 2013, shortly after I visited them. With the release of the the final segment in the Hobbit trilogy, however, I thought it would be appropriate to update this one a little and post it again! 

WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND — One of the most enjoyable things I did on my recent trans-Pacific voyage from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Sydney, Australia, was to take a tour in Wellington, New Zealand, that took me to a number of the sites where The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies were filmed, to include a visit to Peter Jackson's Weta Studios! Following are some representative photos from this experience. The New Zealand fantasy film industry was, in fact, one of the things I spoke about during my tour of duty as Destination Lecture about the Royal Caribbean International vessel Radiance of the Seas, and is one of the things I will spoke about at a number of 2014 conventions, including Dallas Comic & Pop Expo (March 1-2) and Comicpalooza (May 23-26). Above right is the entrance to the municipal park where several of the scenes associated with the departure of Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin from the shire were filmed. 

 

Above left, Ted Guise of Wellington Movie Tours displayed on a laptop scenes filmed at the various spots we visited. Above center, a scene from the Lord of the Rings shot in the tree pictured in the upper right corner of the first image; above right, me and Diane Varhola recreating the scene in question with props provided by Guise.  

Above left, Guise also brought story boards depicting stills from The Lord of the Rings, this one showing the scene in which the Hobbits roll down the hill into the woods after being chased by Farmer Maggot. Above right, our recreation of Frodo and the Hobbits where they landed on the road, played by me and a trio of au pairs. 

Above left, in the foreground four tour goers recreate the actions of the Hobbits as they hid below the road, while in the background four others represent the Dark Rider, its horse, and the roots and tree depicted in the scene — which were artificial and created for the film! Above center, the clever Guise showed our group how to replicate the image of a Dark Rider in silhouette. At right, our actors can be seen in their guise as a Dark Rider. 

Above and below left, some of the life-sized Troll statues displayed at the Weta Cave, which provide ample opportunities for amusing fan photography. 

Above center, the Weta Cave has on display numerous props and models from The Lord of the Rings and other movies produced by the studio. Above right, we had the opportunity to go beyond the red door while we are at Weta Studios, where we learned about props and models created for their movies! Photography was not allowed but anyone who cares can buy me a beer and I will tell them about all the wonderful things we saw there.  

Above left, a glimpse at the massive green screen at Weta Studios — note that the wall it is built on is made of stacked up-shipping containers! Above right, some of the rocks along the shore of Wellington Harbor that were used as models for the stonework in the lair of Shelob the giant spider. 

If you are in Wellington, New Zealand, or will be visiting it, be sure to check out the Lord of the Rings tour to see all of this and more yourself. Otherwise, be sure to check out one of my great presentations during the convention season in 2014! 

Aegean Odyssey: A Brief Retrosepctive

A big trip like the one my wife and I have just returned home from makes me contemplate, for good reason, the purpose of travel. To me, it is to learn about the world and better understand one's own place in it; to make connections with people from other lands, both natives of the areas visited and fellow travelers; and to share ones' experiences with others, both in person and through venues like this. Ideally, a person will come back from a trip of this sort with new ideas, a new perspective on their old ones, and a reinvigorated sense of purpose. Suffice it to say that we accomplished with our Aegean Odyssey everything we might have expected. 

In the ancient world of the Mediterranean, hospitality and how people treated strangers was extremely important and was, not to put too fine a point on it, integral to the continued existence of civilization itself. Commerce with other lands could not take place if travelers were subjected to theft or violence or were not able to obtain from their journeys things commensurate in value to what they had expended on them. People like our friends Dimitri Kremmydas in Athens and Michael Townsend in Crete may just be mortal people but, in that they invited us into their homes and made our journey more fulfilling, they follow in the steps of paragons like Aeolus, who used his winds to carry travelers on their paths across the wine-dark sea. 

Many other people bear mentioning here and they include friends Richard and Laura Allan, who journeyed from their home in Scotland to spend six wonderful days with us in Santorini, our fourth reunion since we met them on a Nile River cruise in 2006; my friend Brendan Cass, who made monumental efforts to come to Kos Island for just a day-and-a-half so that he could experience it with me; Nathan and Alison Richards and Toni Symonds, who along with Michael Townsend made our time in Crete much more enriching; the staff of the Atlantis Hotel in Santorini; Stamatis Patiniotis at the Asimis Kolaitou Art Gallery and Giorgia at the Lignos Folklore Museum in Santorini; Mary, Voula Mavrea, and the other staff of the Small Village resort on Kos Island; teacher and caretaker Julie, who shared her knowledge of the Hippocrates Garden with us and her friend Dora, an archaeologist who discussed history and mythology with me; and Sophia Stavrianou at the Porfyris Hotel, who provided excellent advice that helped us make the most of our time on the island of Nisyros. Thanks also to Tracie Conner for getting us to the airport on our way out and to Karen Holmes for picking us up there and to Taylor Conner for taking such good care of our cats while we were on the road. And there are undoubtedly other deserving people I may have neglected to mention in this quick recap of our trip and I beg their forgiveness and will be sure to add them as I update it! 

We encountered villains in the course of our travels as well and, while their impact was much less than that of the good people we met, they bear mentioning. These scourges of the Aegean include the swine that lurk at the port of Santorini and other islands and will not answer polite questions while trying to sell overpriced shuttle rides; the many shiftless taxi drivers of Rhodes, who will drive past visitors hauling luggage up the street in favor of giving ride around town to cruise ship passengers; the gypsies who create distractions with their drugged and abused children while their compatriots pick traveler's pockets; and the restaurants that provide substandard service and food to strangers because they do not think they will have to deal with them again or prefer to deal only with those who speak particular languages. Heracles, Theseus, and the other heroes of antiquity would certainly have wreaked a terrible vengeance on them all. 

Many friends followed our journey, commented on it, and provided encouragement to us during it and I would like to thank them for that. Interestingly, a number of friends commented in response to my posts during this trip about how I don't stop working even while on vacation, which points to the fact that of all the things a prolonged trip like this is to me a vacation is not really one of them. Yes, a journey like this can and ideally should have elements of fun and relaxation, but our four-week odyssey through the Aegean was often physically demanding, was expensive, and was attended by elements of uncertainty and hazard. If we just wanted a vacation we could have much more easily, inexpensively, and quickly gone to Port Aransas on the Gulf Coast of Texas, Disney World, or a hundred other places. 

So this trip was much more than any mere vacation could have been, I achieved my goals with it, and, while I am physically exhausted, I have been mentally stimulated -- and am hitting the ground running with an eye to finishing up projects I set aside when we went overseas and to jumping into ones that are exciting and altogether new. And being inspired and invigorated by a trip is, I think, the most someone can expect from it. 

Aegean Odyssey Day 27 (Kos/Athens)

Took an early morning flight from Kos to Athens, checked into the Sofitel at the airport, and spent the afternoon with friend Dimitri Kremmydas discussing everything from culture, politics, and religion to wargaming and learning how to make phyllo dough and spanokopita! 

More to come! 

Aegean Odyssey Day 25 (Nisyros)