At some points, engulfed in the rush of the ride, “your head feels like it’s going to pop off your shoulders,” said 2026 Remember the Removal mentor Freida Saylor. 

Saylor participated in RTR in 2025, a three-week, approximately 950-mile bike ride that traces the northern route of the Trail of Tears — one path of forced removal of the Cherokee people to Oklahoma from their Southern Appalachian homelands — following the 1830 Indian Removal Act signed by President Andrew Jackson.  

Hello from Room 216 at the Holiday Inn Express & Suites on the southern edge of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. It’s 9:30 a.m. Gazing out the window of the hotel, I can see the ancient ridges of the snowy Park Range Mountains surrounding the community in this high desert corner of the West. 

At 9 a.m. Wednesday, the alarm went off from the smart phone on my nightstand. Reaching for the contraption and reading the morning text messages, it appeared our weekly editorial meeting set for 10 a.m. would shift to Friday. And yet, before I could roll back over to sleep a little more, another message pinged on the phone. 

I had just finished a 3.3-mile jog along the backroads of Clinton County. The afternoon sun was quickly falling behind the snowy peaks of the Adirondack Mountains in the distance. The slow shadow of winter night soon enveloping the Champlain Valley, my parents’ Upstate New York farmhouse smack dab in the middle of it. And it was at this moment my mother asked me a question. 

Hello from my folks’ farmhouse out in the countryside of Upstate New York. It’s been mighty frigid here in my native North Country since I arrived home last week. At one point, ‘round midnight on a recent evening, the temperature dropped to around -22 degrees. Daytime temps hovered at zero for several days, with wind chills from the Canadian Arctic making critters outside hide and remain silent and those inside huddled near the fireplace, waiting out the cold.  

Whirlwind. Virtuoso. Rollicking. Heartfelt.

Those were some of the sentiments I had ricocheting around my mind watching Bronwyn Keith-Hynes perform earlier this winter at The Orange Peel in Asheville. A renowned fiddler/singer, Keith-Hynes is headlong into a solo career with the recent disbanding of her former band, the Grammy-winning Americana/bluegrass act Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway. 

Ordering some item from a company like Amazon — a smock, a special coffee, cotton swabs, whatever — is quick, simple and easy. You place the order, and two or three days later, the package appears on your front porch. The same ease and speed apply when ordering your groceries from Walmart or the local food mart. You make a list, tap a key, arrive at the delivery time, put the groceries in the car and brush your hands off as a job well done. 

I only met Bob Weir once. It was backstage at the long gone Gathering of the Vibes music festival located on the shoreline of the Long Island Sound in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It was the summer of 2009 and I was 24 years old, myself an aspiring journalist for a now-defunct music magazine. 

It finally happened. Exactly 10 years in the making, my daily running streak officially celebrated one decade of continuation on Dec. 31, 2025. End-to-end, that span of time is 3,654 straight days. The mile I’ve run? Countless. I can’t even fathom the total distance jogged throughout that time period, although I have kept a running log since “The Streak” started. Someday I’ll calculate it. 

Hello from Room 1001 at the Cambria hotel in downtown Asheville. It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m currently sitting at this writing desk (pictured), I’m overlooking the intersection of Haywood Street and Page Avenue, the Harrah’s Cherokee Center and former George Vanderbilt Hotel within sight.