Deadly Invitation
And what might we guests be served, after smelling the charred meat wafting from the kitchen and spending an hour hearing all about how cheap it can be to have our human ribs burned to a crisp? For surely they would not feed us first and hope we would stay for the ghoulish presentation afterwards.
Adios Muchachas
It must have caused an Indianapolis scandal that June morning in 1962 when my mom piled us into our Ford Woody station wagon with enough Cheese Nips to make it to the Mexican border and said Adios to her husband. I was only 13. It was a road trip that would make me a lifetime traveler.
Round-the-World Irish Biker
Ciarán O'Reilly is reknowned as co-founder of Manhattan's thriving Irish Repertory Theatre with Charlotte Moore.. But his wildest performance was braving thirst, hunger, bandits, sandstorms, crashes and concussions, altitude sickness, charging bull-camels, hypothermia, hijackings, border intrigues, dirt-clogged bearings in a motorcycle trip around the world.
Moving Into Cyberspace: Happily Homeless and Hi-Tech
In these pandemic times of downsizing, throwing junk out, working from home or hitting the road, my 1997 story on moving out of my Montreal apartment and into cyberspace and a vintage Volkswagen camper van has an ironic resonance. But now with so many evictions and company bankruptcies, it's even hard to find a storage space!
Peig Meets Dame Gitane
The vehicular story of how my mother Peig graduated from buying an old Borden’s milk wagon to a vintage Volkswagen pop-up camper. All it needed was—an engine!
Driving a Time Machine
Restoring a 1970 VW camper and learning to drive it--in French-- is not for the faint of heart. After ten months of sleeping with John Muir’s How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, and a harrowing stick-shift lesson on a quiet autumnal morning in Montreal, I braved a Halloween romp south of the border. Terrified!
Cockpit Follies - in a Flight Simulator
I always wondered how anybody could learn to fly and navigate a humongous jet plane—especially one filled with nervous passengers. Then I got a chance to try a CAE flight simulator. With the mere touch of the image-generator button, you could switch continents, airports, altitudes, speeds, times of day and weather and air-traffic conditions, and simulate aviation mishaps like fires and failed engines.
Rounding those UK Confoundabouts
The North American driver's instinct is always to look to the left when entering a roundabout - but the onslaught of oncoming British traffic is always coming from the right ! And you have only a nanosecond to figure out which lane? When? And how? And where - to get off the thing. Even going to sleep with Her Majesty”s Highway Code under your pillow doesn’t help!