On my last full day in New York I decided to give my daughter a break from me while I went off on my own for a few hours to see some sights that only I would enjoy. I realized this was a good idea the previous day when she and I were walking around Midtown and I asked if we could detour to see inside the Penn Station train terminal because I wanted "to see if it was really as bad as they say it is." As I said it, even I could sense how weird that request sounded, [...]

This time the trip to New York City was about helping Gwenna, now twenty-two, move there to start a new life. She and I were flying there, so I suppose my greatest contribution was to let her use my two suitcases for more of her stuff, while I lived from a carry-on bag for my four-day stay. Otherwise, she was clearly fine on her own, taking the lead on airport chores and negotiating subway routes. Clearly, I was the follower on this trip, and happily so. She had found a sublet of a three bedroom apartment she would be sharing [...]

  The McKees were passing our second day in the Italian resort city of Sorrento, across the big bay from Naples, with different notions about what to do with our time. We had just returned from a morning visit to the ruins of Pompeii and I was still sort of haunted by the idea of all those lives ended abruptly by something as capricious as a volcano blast. I felt the need to seize the day by doing something extraordinary, so I proposed a driving adventure to the Amalfi Coast, just a few miles away on the other side of [...]

Pompeii and Mt Vesuviuspartners in one of the grand human stories All four McKees wanted to see the legendary ruins of Pompeii, the Roman city preserved just as it was on a random summer afternoon in 79 A.D. when nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted and covered it in twenty feet of ash. In this way a time capsule of a day-in-the-life of a typical Roman city was left for the world to later discover. Despite a few tunnels created by looters, the place was left mostly intact until a small archaeological exploration in 1599 discovered it and then a [...]