By RICH GRANT Other than in movies, I had never seen someone actually get down on one knee and propose marriage. So it was something of a surprise to witness two proposals in two days – and in both cases, I was so close, I was asked to take the first selfie of the happy couple. But that’s the type
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By RICH GRANT It sounds like a trick question: Who’s buried in Buffalo Bill’s grave? However, there are some people up in Cody, Wyoming, who would have you believe that the body resting in the beautiful gravesite on top of Lookout Mountain, high above the town of Golden, Colorado, is not really Buffalo Bill Cody. They say Buffalo Bill’s body
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By RICH GRANT We did not want to go to Auschwitz-Birkenau. After all, it had taken us a lot of time and effort just to get to Krakow. The sun was out, and it was a perfect day. Pretty Polish girls walked by in summer dresses. The cafes of Old Town were buzzing and there were buskers singing and juggling
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By RICH GRANT There are many “Twilight Zone” episodes in which a road trip goes strange. A cute couple might be driving along and somehow, somewhere, they take a wrong turn and find themselves (as Rod Serling would put it so magically) “traveling through another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A
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By RICH GRANT It would be difficult to overestimate the strange appeal that the American Civil War holds on some people. Historian Ken Burns notes that more than 50,000 books have been written on the conflict. There are obscure books on the buttons of the Civil War, the horses, even the weather. There are eight Civil War magazines and hundreds
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By RICH GRANT “Wild Bill” Hickock was such a romantic figure, it is hard to believe he really existed. Of course, through dime novels, movies, HBO, television shows and merchandising for 155 years, his image has become a caricature of the real thing. But look back at what contemporaries wrote about him, and you can understand why he became so
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By RICH GRANT There’s a small brick basement in Philadelphia that is to mystery and horror fiction readers what the basement clubs of Liverpool are to fans of the Beatles. Though obscure and a little off the tourist path, it was in this basement and the small house above it that everything we call mysteries, detective stories, science fiction and
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By RICH GRANT Just a dozen miles north of New York City, on the western side of the Hudson River, there is a three-mile hike that for wild, scenic beauty and geologic wonder rivals any national park in the country. Most visitors to New York would be amazed that within sight of the city’s skyscrapers and the Empire State Building,
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By RICH GRANT THE COLORFUL FALL COLORS OF COLORADO There are more than 2 million acres of aspen trees in Colorado — one billion trees that if placed together would cover Rhode Island and Delaware. Rocky Mountain aspen leaves don’t just turn color in the fall, they positively glow a bright luminescent yellow gold, almost as if they had
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By RICH GRANT Everyone knows Charleston, South Caroline, is one of United States’ most historic cities, but there’s a lot more than history occupying the town’s 1,600 pre-Revolutionary War buildings, including new breweries, distilleries and clubs. Charleston has become a Williamsburg with bars. And James Beard award-winning restaurants. And one-of-a-kind shops and galleries. Of course, there’s still plenty of history
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