I can’t recall wanting a year to end as much as I did 2008! I mean, did that year just suck ass or what?!

I should have known what the year would hold for me… I spent New Year’s Day evening emptying the contents of my stomach outside of an Applebee’s in Niagara Falls, Canada. (Can’t blame the food here… I had a bug on the drive up there and I could barely eat soup. It was some kind of stomach flu, and it wouldn’t be my first bout of it in 2008). I take things like that as a bad omen.
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OK, not really… especially since I was visiting Ukraine and not Russia. But I did suffer a pretty nasty bout of food poisoning last week while visiting the wife’s family in Kakhovka, Ukraine. We took a side trip for a few days to Yalta, a resort town on the Black Sea in the Crimea territory and I spent the first night emptying the contents of my stomach from both ends for literally a 12-hour stretch of the first night. (The photo above was taken well after I recovered, and no, I didn’t eat that whole plate of food.)
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Long story short… when I was a kid I found this little town called Bookwalter, Ohio in an old road atlas. Situated in the “devil’s triangle” of Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati, I often wondered just how small it was. My grandfather, a truck driver, once told me that he went through the tiny town and stopped to talk to some of the residents.
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