Dave Leach

I was born in Florida, but I grew up in Kingsport. It’s home.

My friends and I do cornfield mazes every year, so this is right up our alley!

I learned about The Alhambra in my high school Spanish class and have always wanted to see it firsthand.

My wife and I spent our honeymoon in Banff in mid-April. Eat at the Grizzly House and chat with the other patrons via the phones at each table. Have lunch at the Maple Leaf Inn and play pool at King Eddy Billiards just upstairs. Take pictures of the elk strolling down Main Street. Walk across the frozen Bow River. Go horseback riding in the snow. There are so many great things to do even if you never hit a ski slope.

I’m sure the museum is a very moving and impacting place if you have a frame of reference when viewing it. If, for example, my grandparents had been at one of the camps, the experience probably would have struck a chord with me. I don’t, so I’m thankful that I didn’t find the museum relevant to my life.

As it was, I felt like an outsider viewing a record of this completely alien situation in which I had no toehold. It was if the museum were saying “don’t do this to anybody” and my response was “no problem, I wasn’t intending to anyway.”

The saying, of course, is that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. I know about the holocaust. I think I get more of a sense of how horrific it was through the things I can imagine more than the things someone else shows me.

I visited Niagara Falls when I was in high school on my first real trip away from home without my parents. Aside from being a landmark of popular culture, it’s fascinating to experience that much raw, concentrated natural power in a single place. The roar of the falls is deafening. You can see the mist rising up miles away. Finding out there’s a certain point upstream beyond which you probably can’t escape the pull of the waterfall is humbling.