Parnell, Texas—it’s a ghost town now—a collection of old concrete foundations, dilapidated lumber, some sheets of corrugated tin that once served as roofs, all barely visible above the tall weeds. It was April of 2006, and my buddy Clark and I were taking a final mountain-bike ride down the lower portion of the Caprock Canyon […]
We’re calling it The Wheeler Challenge, an attempt by our Finishers group to climb New Mexico’s highest peak. So at 5:00 a.m. MDT, August 25, when we strap on camelbacks and headlamps at the Taos Ski Valley trailhead, my adrenaline will be in overdrive. One, because I love peaks—the views, the discovery, the challenge. And […]
Why is Finishers successful? I will do a workshop in a couple of weeks when I’ll be expected to answer that question. My first response is to be cautious. We don’t know yet how well it’s working. The fast growth is promising, but we’ll know we’re successful when the data say we are—when students involved […]
They call themselves Finishers: A group of Amarillo College students who are changing their worlds, and mine. It started a year and a half ago. For some time I had been visiting with colleagues about a dream I had to form a student support group—students helping students reach those elusive academic goals. We talked, analyzed, […]
Am visiting my youngest child this morning—in his own town, in his own house, with his own family—and it has me thinking. About times with my dad when I was Jeremy’s age. We’d sit out by the pool in Phoenix in the early morning, Dad with his coffee and me, well I never developed the […]
Place. Got to thinking about it while riding Amtrak’s Empire Builder between Seattle and Chicago. Does a place shape its people? Are the folks in Wenatchee, Washington (the sign says “Apple Capital of the World”) different from the anglers and loggers in Flathead, Montana (Flathead Lake is the largest fresh water lake west of the […]
What if the train is not merely a vehicle to get us to our destination? What if the train is the destination? Then unplanned conversations with strangers would not be ancillary to those much anticipated visits with family and friends we’ll have along the way. In fact, maybe these train talks are planned, only by […]
“Live huge.” It’s how Ginny Auer’s husband Troy signed his last letter to her. That happened a little over a year ago when Troy succumbed to a rare form of cancer. According to Ginny, “live huge” was the philosophy her husband lived by. Every day was a time to “suck the marrow from the bones […]
The consequences for almost missing our train? Two words—More expenses: For the change fee at AmTrak For an extra night’s lodging (and hotels aren’t cheap in LA) For two extra meals And two cab fares Yep. Seems you don’t want to even almost miss your train. On the other hand . . . Back in […]
They’re the first words that popped up when I googled “What if I miss my train?” It was Monday a couple of weeks ago, I was doing research on traveling by Amtrak and noticed that many trains run late—I mean seriously late, two or three hours late. And then I remembered I had given us […]