1. Intro. 8/13 mid-morning. 105 South near Grayland, Washington.

There's always that moment in a road trip where the initial giddiness and chatter and celebratory vibe suddenly ends and everyone grows quiet and thoughtful as they look out the window. That's how it is right now as I write these...

Headed out this Father's Day--my first--to the three forks of the Snoqualmie River to sun ourselves after what seems like five straight months of rain.

Took the squirt boat along with me for--as we carpenters say--shits and giggles.

Confluences of rivers are always magical places, sacred...

Why is it that we mythologize the places we grew up in? That, after traveling and living all over the globe, we persist in the kind of thinking that goes: "the hottest place in the world is that soccer field we used to play on in Cobb County, Georgia," or that our hometowns always had the sweetest...

5 – 9 – 08 Elwha River Valley

Just after dawn and cold but baby Layla is warm and happy after her first night of camping. The frogs’ nocturnal chorus mixing in and out of the Elwha River flow.

Will she remember this? Her 8-month birthday was...

It wasn’t just seeing the Dalai Lama. 

Or hearing his words—“The 20th century became like the century of bloodshed. This century should be the century of dialogue.”—swirl through a stadium filled with 55,000 other people. 

It wasn’t just the Salish Elders, original inhabitants...

On certain days it’s possible to see the outline of your dreams.

It takes being tired. Not just tired from a day of work or days of work, but from weeks and months working exhaustively. Neglecting yourself and those closest to you.

Until one morning—after being up all night because the baby has...

No waves here to surf or rivers to paddle, at least not within walking distance, which is really the only distance that defines where you are.

Here is just Green Lake.  Semi-impounded wetlands. On the west side there's an old bathhouse converted into a theatre, and just beyond that, a mini-arboretum...

My good friend Alex Harvey and his crew from Athens, Georgia are participating again this year in the 2008 Total Vertical Feet Competition. TVF is a whitewater competition; the goal is to descend as many vertical feet as possible on whitewater rapids on 8 days during February to April.

9,200 ft. 70 mph Niwot wind. Waist high snow drifts just off the piss trail. Boots flung off beside the door. Slab of coals in the wood stove. Chunks of fir and pine in the tin tub. A stack of mauls and axes and hatchets, handles propped against the wall. A poster above with Christopher...

Partly because of the big stoke I have that Tim Patterson is down in El Bolson right now, I wanted to republish a piece I wrote for the local Nederland, Colorado newpaper (The Mountain-Ear) here at Matador. This was part of a column I used to write entitled "Mountain Lookout," and was...

For some of us it's the words that keep us alive. Words and music and rivers and waves and mountains. Everything else, from health insurance to where and how we will make money and live for the next six months, simply falls into place however it may, as long as those "Higher...

The coffee shops here (Seattle's Ballard / Green Lake neighborhoods) all play indie rock that sounds like R.E.M. from the Reckoning or Life's Rich Paegant era. Or maybe it’s just me. I’ve only been here ten days, sleeping on my buddy Kevin’s floor, and haven’t really figured out anything...

I picked up a copy of Smile When You're Lying yesterday. Has anyone else seen this book? Caption off the back cover: 

"Travel writer, editor, and photographer Chuck Thompson has spent
more than a decade traipsing through thirty-five (and counting)
countries across the globe, and he’s had...

Feliz 2008 mi gente,

Just a quick stoke to the whole matador community: I know you're out there with your friends and families, or maybe on the road, or far off of it, keeping warm around campfires or dancing in clubs or waking up on boats at sunrise and seeing views that no photograph or...

I’m not a fan of pleasant people. Give me someone foul-mouthed, belligerent, opinionated. Give me someone self-effacing, hilarious, or shy. Give me someone confused, hypersensitive, intellectual, distrait, whatever. But don’t give me someone who just stands there with his glass of diet coke and pretends...

Our first first group-written article "Best seasonal jobs for traveling" has had over 10,000 hits in the last two days!

(Check it here: Best seasonal jobs for traveling

We'd like to put out a second collection of jobs--there's certainly room for more. Here's how the first article began:...

For now it’s the quiet apartment on the ninth floor overlooking Parque Lezama. Lau and Layla are out doing final errands before we fly back tomorrow night. As always, we can’t leave here without a party. We have empanadas on the way. Bottles of Tempranillo and Pinot Noir. A bowl full of cherries....

(note: Shoah or Ha-shoah, השואה, is the Hebrew word for the Holocaust)

The Shoah museum was the last stop on the Jewish Tour of Buenos Aires. We'd already been to the cemetery in Recoleta. We'd been to La Amia (Israeli-Argentine center) and the memorial of the Israeli embassy (both...

To achieve a freer traveling lifestyle I've worked as a vallet, carpenter, ski resort parking lot attendent, camp counselor, freelance writer, and English Teacher, among other jobs. What seasonal jobs have you had? What's worked best for you? What would you recommend for or against?

I'm...

F*#k Disneyworld, our two month-old's first trip was to Patagonia. Harnessed into her little carseat as we drove the empty stretches of dry pampa, or tucked in the sling was we hiked along beaches amongst waddling Magellanic Penguins: she absorbed the sounds and breathed the coastal air...