At Home In The Wasteland Travel Blog

Whenever I fly into Palm Springs “International” Airport, I am consistently amazed at the amount of development that is proliferating throughout the Coachella Valley below. Huge housing developments, resorts, big box stores, and golf courses now occupy land that was mere sand and desert scrub several years ago. As more people move to the desert, [...]

How do you go from glasnost and perestroika to repping Louis Vuitton bags? Yeah, that’s right, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev is featured in Louis Vuitton’s latest series of advertisements: Russia plans big nuclear expansion: Though there’s talk of technology breakthroughs, such as breeder reactors that produce more fuel than they use, the new stations [...]

I finally got my act together and uploaded the rest of my photos from Ukraine. Got a few more Ukraine-related posts and then I’ll start on the Poland photos.

Look familiar? Yeah, “In here, it’s always Friday” I’m a big fan of Eastern European food, but often find myself suffering from borscht and pelmeni fatigue when traveling in the region. Sometimes you just need deep-fried potato skins stuffed with massive amounts of cheddar cheese and bacon. And really, you can’t celebrate America’s birthday with [...]

With the visit to Pripyat over, our tour of the exclusion zone was slowly drawing to a close. We stopped at the 10km exclusion zone checkpoint, where a guard ran a Geiger counter along the side of the bus and gave us a thumbs up to proceed back to the city of Chernobyl. Before heading [...]

“Stay off the moss. Very radioactive.” We were standing on another bridge outside the city of Pripyat, this time surveying the lush green landscape below, hoping to catch a glimpse of the rampaging packs of wild boar that were apparently proliferating throughout the exclusion zone – or so our guide claimed. We didn’t see any. [...]

In the city of Chernobyl there stands a simple memorial to the liquidators who rushed to reactor number four in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. “To those who saved the world.” The firefighters who initially responded to the disaster on the morning of April 26, 1986 were unaware that they were entering a radioactive [...]

“Are you ready to go to the ghost city of Pripyat and die a painless death from radiation?” These were, more or less, the first words that greeted us on a beautiful July 4th morning. Most Americans spend their Independence Day holiday grilling burgers and dogs, drinking beer, eating CostCo sheetcakes that resemble American flags, [...]

I’ve uploaded all 220 of my photos from our “ecological tour” of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, including reactor no. 4 and the “ghost city” of Pripyat: I’ll post more about the tour later. Read more about the tour: 1. Dispatches from Chernobyl, Part I: Dude, where’s your Geiger counter? 2. Dispatches from Chernobyl, Part II: [...]

Oh, British Airways, I didn’t mean to cheat on you, but other airlines tempted me with their lower fares that popped up on Orbitz. So I did it. I booked with Polskie Linie Lotnicze LOT, discounting all those fine flights we’ve had together these past few years: Russia, Croatia, and who could forget the 11 [...]