At Home In The Wasteland Travel Blog

While on our pool purchasing expedition to Woodbridge, I decided to stop at a Shell station and fill up the gas guzzling XTerra. I wasn’t exactly on empty, but I have this odd quirk in which I must fill up my gas tank if the needle shows that I only have a quarter of a [...]

On Sunday, my roommate Jamie and I saw an ad on TV for a 16ft diameter inflatable pool that was on sale at Big Lots. “Dude…” So we hopped in my terrorist mobile (the nickname apparently given to my SUV by aforementioned roommate. Hippie.) and drove to the nearest Big Lots, which was 20 miles [...]

The Communist Party in Russia (yes, it still exists) isn’t very happy about the latest Indiana Jones movie, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”: Russian Communist party members condemned the new Indiana Jones’ film on Friday as crude anti-Soviet propaganda that distorted history and called for it to be banned from Russian [...]

Senator Barack Obama on Friday called for greater engagement with Cuba and Latin America, saying the long-standing policies of isolation have failed to advance the interests of the United States or help people who have suffered under oppressive governments. [...] “Don’t be confused about this. I will maintain the embargo,” Mr. Obama said. “It provides [...]

OK, so winter is over, but there’s always next year. An ad popped up on my Gmail for a company selling valenki, the traditional winter footwear adored by Red Army soldiers, peasants, and gulag inmates throughout Russia. These valenki, however, are suitable for “winter walking on 5th Ave all the way to Rodeo Dr” (why [...]

A warning to all the Italians who will be visiting the United States, you might end up like poor Domenico Salerno, a Roman lawyer who intended to visit his American girlfriend but instead spent 10 days in a Virginia jail thanks to a few Customs and Border Patrol officers on a power trip.

Fort Reno Park, the site of this season’s wiffleball Sundays, has been shutdown by the Feds due to high levels of arsenic found in the soil: Research geographer Dr. Terry Slonecker said he was doing follow-up work on the clean up of World War I-era munitions and chemicals discovered in 1993 in the Spring Valley [...]

This is an article from the Washington Post, not The Onion: President Bush said yesterday that he gave up golfing in 2003 “in solidarity” with the families of soldiers who were dying in Iraq, concluding that it was “just not worth it anymore” to play the sport in a time of war. “I don’t want [...]

Someone has taken the Obama girl video and replaced Obama with Russia’s new president, Dmitry Medvedev: More on this video from the Moscow Times: The video opens with a then-candidate Medvedev promising a United Russia party congress that he would cooperate with former-President Vladimir Putin and, if elected, be true to Putin’s policies. But the [...]

Last month, I toured the ConocoPhillips refinery located on the Delaware River in Trainer, Pennsylvania, which is just outside Philadelphia. The Trainer refinery has a processing capacity of 185,000 barrels a day, and processes light, low-sulfur crude oil from West Africa, Canada and the North Sea. I have previously toured an LNG terminal and a [...]