:: Free Traveler ::

For Los Angeles artist Gayle Garner Roski, painting is a way of enhancing her travel experiences–a process that allows her to better see and appreciate the exciting locales she visits while traveling three months out of the year with her husband. “I paint anywhere,” Roski proclaims. “In the beginning, I would look for the perfect subject. Now I realize that wherever I am–whether it’s on top of a mountain or sitting in an airport waiting for a flight–there is always something interesting to paint.”

During her travels, Roski creates mainly sketches that she describes as noncommercial, something just for herself. “They’re not polished, not thought out,” she admits, “but they’re authentic. They express what I did, where I was. Travel has a lot of downtime, and I can fit in artwork while waiting. If I have one hour before the plane arrives I figure out what I can accomplish. Sometimes it’s just 10 minutes for a gesture drawing in ink, but one that may be the beginning of a future finished work.”

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In an interview, Alex Kummant says now is the time for a national dialogue on passenger rail

Don’t look for Amtrak’s eighth president and chief executive officer to apologize for the carrier’s federal capital and operating grants of the past. No, he wants more!

“We should ask for big things — we shouldn’t haltingly ask for small things,” Alex Kummant told Sen. Dick Durbin and more than 25 Illinois mayors that the Illinois Democrat and Rep. Tim Johnson (R., Ill) convened at the multi-modal transportation center in Champaign, Ill., on Oct. 17.

“One of the reasons I took this job is that if you look at gas prices, highway congestion, and the challenges in air travel, the time really is now to have a national dialogue on passenger rail. What’s going on here today is the face of [Amtrak’s] future: sitting down with groups of state departments of transportation and freight railroads to look for public monies perhaps totaling in the billions in certain demonstration lanes of 300 to 600 miles in length.”

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