I’m sure many of you have also been aghast these recent mornings upon seeing how much gas has spiked from the day previous. For me, petro is costing a small fortune. To say Purple Thunder guzzles gas is like calling Charlie Sheen a social drinker. Every six days she burns through $100 of petro, up from about $85 a few weeks ago. At roughly eleven miles to the gallon, it costs around $20 an hour to drive the bitch. And it’s only getting worse.

But every once in a while I catch a break. Yesterday, I received a letter from Orbitz.com, the flight-booking site I’ve used for the last three years. In the envelope was a check for $92 and a note.

“We promised you’d get the lowest price available on Orbitz… and we meant,” it read. “Here is your Orbitz Price Assurance Refund Check… Never overpay on Orbitz.”

Surprise money is the best money. Thank you Orbitz!

For those of you who check in regularly, my apologies for not posting much lately, but the job squeezes minutes from my life like nothing else. In a couple of weeks it’ll be over. I’ll be back on the road and posting more frequently.

Below are some pics from a recent trip to Atlantic City’s famed Boardwalk.

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Gypsies on the Move
The New York Times takes us this week to Romania, where the historically reviled and largely uneducated Gypsy population is taking advantage of Europe’s porous borders and decamping the motherland for wealthier places. But some countries are taking controversial steps to keep them out.

Boeing’s Space Tourism Plans Have Lift-Off
Entering into a partnership with Space Adventures, Boeing aims to ferry astronauts and tourists to the space station by 2015. But will Congress let NASA be privatized? Start saving now just in case, because that window seat will set you back a few bucks.

The Joy of Traveling Alone
Lauren Quinn, whose LonelyGirlTravels.com chronicles her globe-trotting adventures, during which she’s been detained in Venezuela and kicked it with soldiers in Columbia, writes on why she travels solo at The Huffington Post.

The Ashes of San Miguel
Amid a mid-life life crisis, Tawni Vee Waters explores this Mexican town’s celebrations of death while coming to terms with her own mortality in this haunting essay. The Ashes of San Miguel is the 2009 grand prize winner for best travel story in TravelersTales.com’s annual contest.

Featured Site
Written anonymously by a global backpacker in search of a home, The Longest Way Home provides a hyper-local look inside places as far flung as Slovakia and Pakistan. As its title suggests, the point of this wanderer’s journey is to find a country he can call home. More than five years later, he’s still looking. Highlights: B&W photography and an entertaining guide for each of the countries he’s passed through, including Dos and Don’ts and whether these countries are potential homes.

The Stanley Family vault in Woodland Cemetery.

Dayton, OH – Woodland Cemetery spreads out across some 240-acres of rolling hills canopied by more than 3,000 trees, several of which are more than a century old. Here you will find buried such luminaries as the Wright Brothers, author Erma Bombeck and African-American poet Paul Dunbar. You’ll also walk above numerous figures whose contributions to progress are more recognizable than their names. Among them are the inventors of the cash register, the electric starter, the folding ladder, the pop-top can, moisture-proof cellophane and the Oh Henry! candy bar. But whose grave I’m here to visit belongs to Matilda Stanley, Queen of the American gypsies.

Queen Matilda was the matriarch of the Stanley gypsy clan, one of three large clans that migrated from England to the Dayton area in the mid-1800s. Initially, the Stanley’s were agriculturists, but over time they became horse traders and acquired sizable wealth. Their prosperity lured others to the county, making the Miami Valley during that period America’s gypsy capitol. Queen Matilda’s husband, King Levi, once told a reporter that the honorary titles of King and Queen were an indication of their peoples’ love and trust for them, nothing more.

According to Sherry Pusat, a volunteer tour guide and historian at Woodland Cemetery,  not much is known about the Stanley’s or the culture they brought here. No one knows to where they traveled upon leaving Dayton during the cold months. Some press accounts described Matilda as a “plain, hardy-looking woman… with a manner indicative of a strong and pronounced character,” as well as a fortune-teller “of remarkable faculty.”

An obituary published in the Dayton Democrat, and later in the New York Times, suggests that Matilda and Levi made a striking couple.

“She and her spouse were well matched… a noble addition to American citizenship,” the paper stated. “In the prosperous future old ways and manners will fade out before the new. But revered will the simple, noble lives and kindly influences of Matilda and Levi Stanley ever be.”

“She was very loved, the most beloved of all the queens,” says Pusat. “But we don’t know why.”

When Queen Matilda, 51, died in Vicksburg, Mississippi on January 16, 1878, her body, per custom, was embalmed, shipped to Dayton and for nine months rested in a receiving vault so that word of her death had time to reach those who wished to arrive and bear tribute to her worth.

By the time her funeral was held on a rainy day in September 1878, more than 25,000 gypsies from the United States, Canada and England descended on Dayton to pay their respects. So full was the cemetery that an estimated 1,000 horse-drawn carriages were turned away at Woodland’s Romanesque gates. It was unlike anything the people of Dayton had ever seen.

“The rather bright colors of apparel and expressive features of these people standing in the rain without umbrellas and vacantly wandering around the grounds under restraint were noticed…” according to the Dayton Democrat.  “It was on Election Day last October that the last caravan of the Dayton gypsies rattled down Main Street for the South. For two years the gypsies had kept in this county, contrary to their ancient custom of migration. This was owing to the illness of Lady Stanley herself.”

The Stanley’s rest in a large subterranean vault in what was then the central part of the cemetery. An angel tops the 20-foot granite obelisk surmounting the site. When King Levi died 30 years later, only 30 family members attended his funeral, which was ignored by the press. “Our children are all learning fast and soon our people will not go roaming any more,” he said at his wife’s funeral.

It’s unclear whether any descendents of Matilda and Levi remain in the area. Woodland employees vaguely recall hearing that either Stanley descendents or other gypsies have visited the grave in recent memory. But as with so much else about this clan, no one can say for sure. About all that anyone can agree on is that Matilda Stanley was, for unknown reasons, greatly adored. Everything else is lost to history.

“The good Queen Matilda was a mother of her people, with rare nobility of nature,” according to her obituary. “This title Queen, so far as it embodies the love and trust of her countrymen and countrywomen, is beautifully appropriate.”