Notes from the Road

Mount Etna beyond Taormina, seen from the ancient Greek theatre where the chase for this story begins.

Marina Corta, the old fishing harbor at Lipari town, the largest settlement in the Aeolian Islands.

Cefalù appears from around a bend on the coast road east of Palermo, its pastel walls creeping up the cliff sides of the La Rocca promontory.

A narrow alley in Palermo's old quarter.

My original travel watercolor palettes after more than two decades of field sketching.

Sicily Map — watercolor, first painted in 2014 and updated in 2026 for the Citrus Kingdom articles.

Aeolian Islands Map — watercolor and Copic marker, depicting the seven volcanic islands of the Tyrrhenian Sea north of Sicily.

Chili Peppers of the World — a hand-illustrated guide featuring 176 peppers from across the globe.

A hand-painted map of the eight main Hawaiian Islands, created with watercolor, Copic marker, and Adobe Fresco.

The El Portal Motel sign in Beatty, Nevada — part of a later generation of roadside design, built to last rather than impress.

The Devils Hole pupfish — perhaps the rarest vertebrate on Earth — occupies a single flooded cavern in the Nevada desert.

Río Guayabo, Costa Rica — where a morning's fieldwork becomes an argument about what holds the world together.

Moore's argument depends on counting ignitions.

Lago Angostura sits in the shadow of Turrialba Volcano — a place where the invisible architecture of freshwater ecosystems becomes briefly legible.

The Eastern Hellbender — North America's largest salamander — is a sentinel species for cold, clean, highly oxygenated streams.

A ridge-headed salamander on the cloud forest floor below Turrialba — one of many species whose existence depends on the fungal networks working invisibly beneath it.

Minneapolis, February 2026 — flowers, photographs, and handwritten notes at the memorial site for Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.

The polar bear has become a proxy battle in the climate debate — but the science of what is actually happening to Arctic sea ice is not ambiguous.

A Costa Rican Red Leg Tarantula on the cloud forest floor — a predator embedded in a system of decomposition, nutrient cycling, and fungal communication it will never be aware of.

The cloud forest on Turrialba's slopes — where a mixed flock moves through the canopy like a single organism, and the invisible work of biodiversity becomes briefly audible.

The number of Atlantic hurricanes each year has not significantly increased.

The road from Zaghouan to Tunis passes through a compressed history of North Africa — Berber hillside villages, Roman hydraulic engineering, Ottoman architecture, and a coastal plain thick with flamingos.

The Tunis Medina — a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose street plan was designed, among other things, to be impossible to navigate at speed.

Sibovia pileata leafhopper captured mid-launch, firing a droplet of honeydew at high speed.

Sidi Bou Said — the blue-and-white hill village above Tunis that has been mandatory painting material since Paul Klee visited in 1914.

Portland's protests against ICE operations became famous for their visual inventiveness — a tradition that continued through 2025 with no sign of fatigue.

Moore's argument for nuclear energy rests on a claim about radiation biology that is not supported by the mainstream scientific literature — and hasn't been for decades.

A running record — the kind that depends on no single source and cannot be dismissed as partisan curation.

Watercolor map of Tunisia — painted to accompany the Notes from the Road series on travel through Tunisia's north, Zaghouan, the Medina, and the Saharan south.

In M'dina and Gozo's fields, ġbejna completes an 8,000-year Maltese journey through history.

From Neolithic seafarers to modern refugees, the hidden history of Malta is written in cheese.

A watercolor map of the Maltese Islands—Malta, Gozo, and Comino—showing the archipelago and its major towns, painted to accompany my travel stories.

A night hike in Bisti/De-Na-Zin reveals one of Earth's best windows into the Cretaceous—an exposed fossil delta where the Western Interior Sea once flowed.

Ganghwa Island's tidal flats host the endangered Black-faced Spoonbill—and an overlooked case for cooperation amid rising nationalism and isolationism.

Paria Canyon glows with color and silence.

Drawings, field notes, and sketches from my time traveling through cities, coastlines, and countryside in Korea.

A barge and tugboat have crushed a protected coral reef—and Bakers Bay Club refuses to act.

Industrial alleys, tomcats, weird economies and the machines of memory in Seoul's Euljiro neighborhood Read the full story on Notes from the Road →

A guide to yucca species from around the globe, brought to life with charming hand-drawn sketches for plant enthusiasts and nature lovers.

Paddling across Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island of Hawaii to visit Captain Cook's memorial and snorkel the pristine reef beneath it.

My sketches and illustrations of Venice and the Venetian cities of the Adriatic include notes and sketches from Venice, Croatia and Slovenia.

As we ascend the Santa Marta Mountains in Northern Colombia, I offer my defense of colorful words and language.

Notes from the Road investigates each chapter in Patrick Moore's latest book, asking whether readers have been bamboozled by pseudoscience?

In Venice, Istrian Croatia and Slovenia, I imagine the challenge of building cities as elegant as those of the Venetian Empire in tomorrow's world.

While exploring Baja Sur's magical freshwater wetlands, I find the telltale signs of development and tourism spilling into the fragile ecosystem.

While hiking in the Vermilion Cliffs, I dive deep into the ancient geological epochs that created these beautiful rainbows of stone.

A complete guide to all the world's hot sauce types, with hand-drawn sketches.

Notes from the Road urges author Bruce Haedrich to abandon his indefensible thesis on EV batteries.

A backpacking trip to the solitary wilderness in southwestern Washington feeds my love of campfires.

On the Greek Island of Paros, I explore whether a musical improvisation master might have built up a following in the ancient Mediterranean.