Jay Mathews on the lam
By the time this post pops up on the blog, I will be somewhere in West Virginia … maybe even Ohio, if my wife, a more conservative driver, let's me take the wheel. We are driving our 25-year-old daughter's Honda to Berkeley, Calif., where she will start law school next month.
We love road trips, particularly if they take us across the entire country. Our first as a couple was in 1972. Linda was pregnant with our first child, who now lives in Los Angeles with our daughter-in-law and grandson. Linda spent a lot of time in bathrooms on that first trip, emerging to make fun of my mistaking grain silos in Oklahoma -- where her family is from -- for apartment buildings.
The blog will carry on in my absence, with timed releases of new posts and some guest columns. Look for them to appear about 5:30 a.m. Tuesdays and 6 p.m. Thursdays. I will have my laptop with me, so I might check on comments, and maybe post more items if something important happens. I should be back on a regular schedule, in my newly created home office (move over, cats) by Aug. 16.
One thing puzzles me about travel these days. Why is it that big, expensive hotels charge for WiFi, but cheap motels do not? You can guess what kind of places we will be staying in. We will try to make it to California, our ancestral homeland, in six days this time, and move back there permanently in summer 2011.
Read Jay's blog every day, and follow all of The Post's Education coverage on Twitter, Facebook and our Education web page.
By
Jay Mathews
| July 22, 2010; 2:30 PM ET
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Jay on the Web
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Jay on vacation, he and his wife like road trips, he wonders why expensive hotels charge for Wifi and cheap motels do not
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Posted by: celestun100 | July 22, 2010 5:40 PM | Report abuse
Does this mean that you'll be retiring in summer 2011? Say it ain't so, Jay!
Posted by: tfp_wnc | July 23, 2010 3:22 AM | Report abuse
Maybe you can compare working from a home office with the virtual school experience.
Posted by: gideon4ed | July 23, 2010 11:12 AM | Report abuse
Jay, I tried to comment on your psychology post but comments are closed. Why are you hating on college psychology courses? Stating that you only took the course for the "easy A" is very condescending!
Posted by: prnt23 | July 23, 2010 11:49 AM | Report abuse
Hey, Jay, I hope you stop by for dinner this time! I owe you two or three.
Posted by: Cal_Lanier | July 23, 2010 12:17 PM | Report abuse
An idea for a newspaper reporter's
experiment: While traveling across country, do not access your home paper online. Try to get your news from whatever is the morning paper sold where you eat breakfast or from the local television newscast in the motel room at night.
See how much you can figure out is going on with national stories just from what the local news media bothers to report in between the soft feature articles and the discussions between the sexy anchors.
Posted by: sideswiththekids | July 23, 2010 3:55 PM | Report abuse
Thanks for the very helpful comments and suggestions. I just saw also that comments are closed on yesterday's column. I don't understand it either. I will inquire.
And I am NOT retiring, at least in the real sense, next year. I have to keep doing this or I die. So I will be doing just about everything in Calif that I am doing now. I think the Post will let me blog from wherever I am. And I hope to still get a few columns in the paper paper too. Plus books and stuff. Stay tuned. I am not going to get this all set up until shortly before I move.
I am in Des Moines. HUGE electrical storm last night. very exciting. ON to Nebraska, which my wife thinks is just too big. It will take a long time to get across. The storm shorted out the TV in the middle of Friday NIght LIghts last night, but fortunately it came right back. I am bothered that Coach Taylor didnt want to leave the bar. Linda seems a lot more interested in Riggins.
Posted by: Jay Mathews | July 24, 2010 8:26 AM | Report abuse
webmaster Emily Tsao has restored reader ability to make comments on psych column at top of the blog.
Posted by: Jay Mathews | July 25, 2010 9:15 AM | Report abuse
The comments to this entry are closed.
Have a nice trip. Sounds like fun.