Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.

Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.

No one knows, incidentally, why Australia's spiders are so extravagantly toxic; capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space.

To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.

Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.

Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal.

Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?