The middle of nowhere

I had a very lucky morning today, in the following way.

I'd made plans to take a long route through Yellowstone, but an hour into my explorations I realized I had forgotten my stuffed fox Kazuko at the hotel. I toss and turn a little in my sleep, and she must have fallen onto the floor and escaped my notice as I was packing. I panicked. It was already past check-out time, and I had no idea what the Super 8 does with stuff its guests leave behind in their rooms. I sped back to the hotel, going well over the restrictive Yellowstone speed limits (while still driving safely, I thought). And wouldn't you know it, I got pulled over for speeding for the first time in my life.

Here is where the luck comes in. As luck would have it, the officer who pulled me over had not had his radar gun turned on, and as a result couldn't issue me a ticket. He sent me off with a stern warning that if I was pulled over again in the next three days I would get an automatic ticket; the whole encounter took less than a minute. I was soon back at the hotel, where I discovered housekeeping had not gotten to my room yet and Kazuko was right where I'd left her. I restored her to my car with apologies, and I actually cried quite a bit. I'd been so scared I was going to lose her.

Which of course is rather odd. Over a stuffed fox I got myself pulled over and worked myself into a small emotional meltdown. I guess I can't attribute it to anything other than needing the familiarity that Kazuko -- the only other pair of eyes that's gone with me in every phase of this journey -- represents. I feel isolated and far from home. Maybe that's also why I found myself oddly unmoved by splendid Yellowstone, its peaks and canyons and steaming springs so different from Florida terrain. I didn't feel emotionally up to a hike, and apart from hiking all there is to do in Yellowstone is drive around staring at pretty things, all of which look pretty much the same. Thus it came to pass that I actually found myself bored in a national park famous for a breathtaking view around every corner.

Old Faithful I liked. The geyser's eruption itself was pretty aesthetically astonishing even to my jaded eyes, but I found the mathematics even more astonishing: the reason Old Faithful reaches the 150-foot height it does is that eight thousand gallons of water pass through a four-inch opening in about three minutes. What's more, the eruption was predictable down to the minute (2:07 PM), which I learned is more complicated than I thought; Old Faithful has long and short eruptions (defined as whether the eruption lasts more or less than two and a half minutes), and the interval after a long eruption, 90 minutes, is different from the interval after a short one, 65 minutes. There is nothing in between. There are no medium-length eruptions that produce intermediate intervals. The rangers didn't seem to have much of an idea why you get these two lengths and no others, though they were very helpful in explaining that the reason Old Faithful is so faithful is that it doesn't share its water source with any other geysers in the park, so there are few variables that could affect its timing.

The most moving thing in the park, though, was the color of the sky above Yellowstone Lake, a deep, pure sapphire blue that I've never seen in midafternoon east of the Mississippi (but saw once in Oregon), and which the lake reflected back a shade deeper and purer. That and the massive burnt forest, tree after tree barren like abandoned frameworks in a housing project almost as far as the eye can see, to my mind outdid the geyser for beauty.

Also beautiful: the green waters of Buffalo Bill Reservoir, somewhat east of the park, smooth and unruffled, with small grooved hills gently rolling out of them as though patting the reservoir on the head. In fact, I thought Wyoming got more beautiful once I'd left Yellowstone, the buttes more interesting, the gorges more -- well -- gorgeous. And at length the prairie set in, just grass and grass to the horizon, often flat, and that reminded me of home. There's a joke that since I've never been to Wyoming and I don't know anyone who has been, the state probably doesn't actually exist and cartographers just made it up to fill the space. Well, now I'm here, and I stand by it. This is the middle of nowhere. And I sort of like it.

I am also a fan of the little town I'm in tonight, Greybull. From these few hours' observation, Greybull is desperately trying to be the Wild West. The local steakhouse I went to tonight was all done up with adobe pots and rugs knit with the traditional Southwestern motifs, every other guy is wearing a cowboy hat, and even the blanket on my bed at the Greybull Motel is cowboy-themed. I half expected to see artificial tumbleweed made from Easter grass blowing across the road. I thought about why this was funny and realized that in a way, Greybull is the Wild West. Tiny town, built around mining (bentonite), everything falling down around the edges, most everyone just passing through... even the modern aluminum warehouses, dented and with piles of rubble everywhere alongside them, feel like they could be from Buffalo Bill's time. If you wanted to write a novel set in the modern Wild West, you could do a hell of a lot worse than Greybull.

Tomorrow I'm making for Rapid City, South Dakota. Depending on how I do on time, I may be able to tell you about Mount Rushmore and/or the Badlands tomorrow night!

Repatriating

I spent the morning and early afternoon exploring Grouse Mountain, which, like everywhere else in Vancouver, was under heavy construction that blocked off some of the paths I'd really wanted to walk, but which, also like everywhere else in Vancouver, was a pleasure to walk around. Grouse Mountain is sort of a small mountain Disneyland. You take a skyride -- a hundred-person gondola -- to get up, gazing out the windows at breathtaking vistas of the entire Vancouver metro area, which the mountain overlooks. Or at fog, if it's this morning. There were places where the fog was so thick you could only see two trees at a time in the dense alpine forest outside the carriage. The lack of a view was disappointing, but I was cheered by the prospect that I was going to explore a park located inside a cloud, which would have gone into my wedding story if it had happened earlier in the trip.

The highlight of my time at Grouse Mountain was the chair lift. I got there at a time no one else was there, and took the fifteen-minute lift to the mountain peak without seeing another soul... through the fog... in near-perfect silence. You could be moved without even trying. There was nothing to do at the top for those of us who don't want to spend $70 to ride a zip line, but you could ride the chair lift down again, which was just as fun as riding up. The lift plus the lumberjack show -- watching a couple extremely talented saw operators ham it up for the two-hundred-strong crowd, racing to chop logs and throwing axes at bullseyes thirty feet away with deadly accuracy -- was probably just about worth the price of admission. One of them used a chainsaw to carve a baby chair out of a log in under a minute, and gave it away to a mother in the crowd. Good times in spite of the mist, and when I went back down the skyride some of the fog had burned off and I got some great pictures after all.

And then I drove back to Seattle. Vancouver was a good time! I have to say, though, that it didn't feel very different from a town in America. Apart from the different currency and the unpatriotically starless and nearly stripeless flags, there was nothing quintessentially Canadian about it, nothing that screamed "YOU ARE IN A DIFFERENT COUNTRY." Indeed, I caught myself thinking about Vancouver in terms of Seattle geography twice. I didn't hear the word "aboot" once, nor see the glory of socialized medicine in action (though I did get to hear a rant about what a mess the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has made of crossing the border and the ensuing economic downturn), nor see a lot of French signs once I was out of the federally maintained border area. So Vancouver was basically another typical Pacific Northwest city, only with flashing green lights that don't change for cross traffic but do change for pedestrians. Nice enough, but I don't feel that my soul is forever captive to that skyline or that country. I'd go back, though.

I was hoping to post photos tonight, but the Internet is being slow and reluctant, and Blogger's picture uploading tool is sluggish at the best of times. I've been staring at the "uploading" screen for twenty minutes. Photobucket is likewise uncooperative. For my own reference, though, the pictures I want to post are numbered 193, 255, 267, 277, 322, 334, 340, 346, 362, 367, 380, 391, 416, and 428 -- whew, that's a mouthful! One of them will be subtitled "Wildlife Photographer 2: Electric Cockatoo." (I don't know if the bird in question is actually a cockatoo. Maybe one of you can help me!) Perhaps tomorrow I will post the pictures, if I have time? -- when, God willing, this blog will come to you from Missoula, Montana, en route to Yellowstone!

I'm coming to your country, guy

Today I left Seattle for lands to the north. I was not disappointed.

It was no more than a couple hours from Seattle to the Canadian border. The other traffic was almost exclusively Washingtonian, and I felt special for being a Floridian on the road to Vancouver. The border crossing team thought I was special too; when I told them it was my first time in Canada they had me park and go inside for a security check. I gave them my passport, car keys, and cell phone -- harsh! -- and waited in a folding chair until they cleared me to enter their country and be an expatriate for a couple days. Then I drove to East Vancouver while singing what I can remember of the Canadian national anthem, as well as, for some reason, the "Charge of the Light Brigade" song my brother made up fifteen years ago. It's his birthday today (the 7th). Happy birthday, Alex!

Though the cities are comparable in size, Vancouver driving is different from Seattle's. In Seattle, I-5 and I-90 pierce downtown and are major urban thoroughfares. By contrast, there are no highways that run through Vancouver. BC 99, which took me to the city, stops being a highway when it enters city limits. I'm not sure what drove this decision; the lack of a central artery robs one of a way to orient oneself within a city. On the other hand, interstates are ugly and no one likes them; long-distance travelers like me especially hate them when they run through cities we don't intend to visit.

The good news, when I crossed the border, was that Zhuge Liang (as I dubbed my GPS, after the Chinese strategist) knows Canadian roads! The bad news is that, as I learned online, downtown parking in Vancouver is very, very expensive and time-consuming. So after establishing myself at the Days Inn, I hopped a bus. It was my first public transit of the trip, and getting on the right bus (the 19) going the right direction (downtown) to the right place (Pender and Carrall) was an adventure. I almost couldn't get on; bus fare is $2.50 and requires exact change, and the smallest thing Bank of America had given me when I visited them in the morning was a ten. But by a stroke of good fortune, the fare machine on the 19 I hopped was out of commission, which meant I got a free ride!

Where was I going? Well, to the obvious place when one visits Vancouver, of course: the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden! Apparently twenty-three years ago a master Chinese architect came to British Columbia and, taken aback by its beauty, offered to design a scholar's garden in the style of the Ming Dynasty in downtown Vancouver. British Columbia obligingly bussed in sixty builders from China who were schooled in traditional fifteenth-century methods of architecture and had them erect a garden using only the materials and techniques that would have been available in Ming China, right down to the then-contemporary understanding of Feng Shui. The result is fucking gorgeous. Though situated on just three-tenths of an acre, the garden feels like it must be ten times as big due to the manifold and canny tricks of perspective employed by the architect. You can look at a stone, take two paces left, and look at the same stone again, and you'd swear it was a different stone in a different setting. And all the perspectives would be breathtaking if they weren't so serene. What's best, perhaps, is that the garden is no replica, not a copy of some Ming garden in China; it is an original, built to take best advantage of the space and scenery of Vancouver. There's even a red maple tree planted alongside bamboo in the eastern (yin) side of the garden to symbolize the union of China and Canada in the accomplishment of this project. This is the sort of thing you only get to see once, so if anyone visits Vancouver, look this garden all the way the fuck up. Take the guided tour.

Oh, and go on a rainy day. It turns out cool, rainy days in early July are the best time to see Vancouver; everything's open but there are no crowds, even downtown. I got lucky, because today was just such a day. Vancouver rain is the finest rain I've seen, transparent and inaudible; you go out without an umbrella because it looks like such a light rain, and a block later your clothes are soaked. Fortunately, I brought an umbrella, and it protected me as I went to a big ol' downtown tower to snap some shots of the city from up high. I walked to the tower from the garden, about eight blocks, along Hastings Street through the center of downtown. The pot-smoker concentration in that area was even bigger than Portland's. What follows is an actual conversation I had on the way to the tower:

"Hey, man, you have the time?"

"Sure! Um, 7:05."

"Cool. Man, you want a toke?"

And it was thus that I learned that if you give someone the time in Vancouver you will be offered a joint. I declined. Marijuana is de facto decriminalized in Vancouver: it's illegal, but no one's likely to cuff you for it as long as you don't call attention to yourself. I will post later a picture I took of a pot-related merchandise outlet situated next door to "The Amsterdam Cafe." As an American I find this highly amusing, along with the bilingual road signs (everything's in French, even though I heard a lot more Mandarin and Spanish today than I did French) and more liberal attitudes about sexuality. (One store near the garden played a song whose refrain was "birthday sex, birthday sex" over the speakers, and one of the buses I took had a free sex-ed ad up top.)

It's funny how long this post got, and how much longer I could make it go on, considering that all I did today in the way of touristy stuff was go to the garden and tower. The lesson is that when you're on the road in a really new place, a lot of small things become adventures. I could talk about the very yummy pho I got near the hotel (it's a Vietnamese vermicelli variant that uses rice noodles, for those who don't know; I discovered it first in SF). I could talk about how Canada has $1 coins and $2 coins, and how weird it feels to carry a $2 coin around in your pocket, and how Canadian coinage makes different clinking sounds from American. I could talk about the beautifully tranquil traditional Chinese-style framed painting I practically stole at $15 from the garden gift store, the cheap price being for no reason other than that it was done by a Caucasian -- who the lady at the counter raved to me about, saying how sincere the girl who painted it was and how much that girl would love to hear from me by email how much I liked the painting. I could talk about how the posted gas prices in Canada don't look like gas prices in America -- no decimal point, strange configuration of digits -- and I still haven't figured out what that's all about. There's so much! But this will have to serve, as I need to lie in a warm bath with a Neil Gaiman book and recover from all the fun I'm having. Today was beautiful.

Late light

The sky stays light very late at this latitude. 9:45 and there was still light in the sky here in Seattle, even now, two weeks off the solstice. (Has it been two weeks since the solstice? Is it possible there's only a week left until I'll have been away from home for an entire month?) The length of the daylight is disorienting and strange, and it will only be stranger tomorrow, when I make my drive to Vancouver. I'll arrive in time for a late lunch, I think, and spend the day downtown. Unstructured time, guided a little by my reading at the invaluable wikitravel.org. Since I'm going all the way to Canada I might as well spend some extra time, so July 8 will be entirely in the city, and I have a reservation to see Richard II at Vanier Park that evening. In the process I'll need to figure out how public transit works in Vancouver, since parking downtown is likely to be an expensive hassle and my GPS doesn't have Canadian maps anyway. And I'll be alone for the night for the first time since hitting San Francisco.

I'm nervous about tomorrow. More nervous, actually, than I was on June 12, the eve of this whole great adventure. I think the difference is that on June 12 I knew that, if things went terribly, I could be home again on June 14. But the port I'm setting out from tomorrow is already across the continent from my comfort zone. This, of course, is why I'm going to Vancouver. Seattle is the farthest I knew I would get from Fort Myers if all went well, but if I go that far and no farther, I'll feel like I'm straggling home. Vancouver is a victory lap: a way to say to myself, convincingly, "and there's more where that came from." And there is. But I'm nervous anyway.

My time in Seattle has been important. It's a city they've got here -- decisively bigger than Portland, I found to my surprise; more to see, more right and more wrong turns to make. There was a shooting in front of the community center three blocks from Alexis's flat yesterday while we were fooling around in the farmers' market. On the other hand, there's a lot to love here, too, and I'm not talking about the kitschy (but kind of cute) Space Needle; I'm talking about the blackbird art in the UW library, the used bookstores that give 20% off if you know what book a quote comes from, the fact that this is simultaneously the town of Boeing and Starbucks, Bill Gates and Dan Savage. I like that Seattle's City Center, where we are, supports not one but several Ethiopian restaurants, a kind of cooking I didn't know existed until a few days ago. I don't think I would want to live here. But if I did live here, there would be a lot to love. Seattle is a city that has got a personality, distinct and complicated; it doesn't feel schizophrenic like San Francisco, monomaniacal like Winnemucca, or empty like Hays. I don't think we're compatible, Seattle and I. It is too much like Alexis's cat, adorable and fickle. But I understand this place now in a way that goes beyond "it's a town in Washington."

I'll probably be back in Seattle on Thursday. But from now to then, it's north...

Internal Oregons

Up from Waldport to Portland today! After the promised hike to the top of a foxglove-lined Cape Perpetua trail and the gaping at its nonpareil view of a surf-beaten Oregon coast, we piled back in the car and undertook what seemed like a short jaunt compared to yesterday's marathon. Our one stop amidst the pine forests was at the cheese factory in Tillamook, and if that doesn't sound like a good time to you then you have clearly never been to the Tillamook cheese factory. Their signature product is cheddar, and based on their samples it is by my estimation very fine. But what was even better was their ice cream -- I had two scoops of blackberry -- and what was even better than that was the production floor. So many machines and people working in tandem, executing one of the innumerable minute steps between milk and packaged extra sharp cheddar cheese! It was like something out of Adam Smith -- or Rube Goldberg. Totally worth taking the detour rather than the direct route to Portland.

We arrived in Portland before six, leaving plenty of time to explore. Isaac grew up here and Alexis lived here for a few months; between their narratives and our foray downtown, I've already had more education about the culture and characteristics of Portland than about most of the other cities on this trip. Here are some tidbits before I pass out from exhaustion.

1. From the perspective of Isaac, a musician aspiring to become professional, the distinguishing feature of Portland is its very lively indie music scene. Sometime in the last decade, downtown Portland became Mecca for both "hipsters" and "aging hipsters," to Isaac's mixed delight and disgust.

2. Portland has cable cars and light rail in the same places, often with intersecting tracks. Bicycling is also big. As a result, bicyclists commonly get stuck in the grooves of the PT rails, leading to nasty falls. There are yellow signs illustrating this road hazard.

3. One can have any kind of cuisine one can imagine in Portland, served out of a van that camps out in the same place every day like a restaurant on wheels. I had Indian food tonight. It was average in quality but cost $5 for twice as much as I could eat, so you don't hear me complaining.

4. To celebrate saving money on dinner, it is possible to go to Powell's Books to spend money on books instead. Powell's is a new and used bookstore that must be three times the size of the Barnes & Noble in Fort Myers -- three enormous floors of books of all subjects and languages and editions. I bought three, including a book that's been out of print for twenty years and is difficult to find at a good price online.

5. On the first Thursday of every month -- like today -- downtown art galleries have free exhibitions, drawing out the art crowd. Perhaps as a result, today I saw a greater density of people obviously hopped up on one illicit substance or another than I have ever seen before in my life.

6. Especially during the recession, which has hit Oregon hard, Portland's downtown businesses have a very high turnover rate. The places where Isaac hung out when he was little are gone, as is the place where his dad used to buy cookies. One porn shop literally disappeared off the face of the earth overnight, leaving a vacant lot on the corner. You have to be paying close attention to the indie scene to know where the culturally important clubs of the moment are (and generally you have to sell your own tickets to play at one and receive some fraction of the proceeds).

Tomorrow, after a nice sleep on a mattress at Isaac's dad's house, I'll explore Portland some more with him and Alexis and perhaps Aviva, who lives up here and drove separately. Then in the afternoon Alexis and I will make for Seattle, arriving neatly before Independence Day so that we can relax on the Fourth instead of fighting traffic. Till then!

The dusty Winnemucca road

I bade a fond farewell to Salt Lake City this morning, but first I set out to explore its greatest remaining mystery: the Great Salt Lake. One would think that it would be impossible to drive past the Great Salt Lake without seeing at least three billboards for boat tours of the lake, but as far as my Googling and inquiries can discover, all the lake's boat tours are either luxury or bankrupt. The best way to experience the lake seemed to be driving across a bridge to Antelope Island, where there's a road that showcases the lake on one side and native flora and fauna on the other, but it would have been two extra hours of driving with nothing to do but gawk at things from the car. I generally like activities better that let me gawk at things from outside the car, so I took a pass on Antelope Island. Instead I pulled off I-80 at a beach (yes, the Great Salt Lake has beaches) and waded out to the water. The interesting thing about the Great Salt Lake is that you experience it with all five of your senses. The other interesting thing about the Great Salt Lake is that none of those senses can distinguish the lake from the Gulf of Mexico, the coast I'm most familiar with. There is simply no way to tell that this is a lake and not an ocean. Indeed, the early explorers thought they'd reached the Pacific.

Wishful thinking on their part. They still had a ways to go. The western mountains in this country simply do not end! Whenever you crest one, there's another behind it. Sometimes they're craggy peaks, sometimes mesas, sometimes big ol' hills that look like contour maps out of an MMORPG. But there are always more of them. It's a good thing I'm driving primarily to see the country, because if I were driving primarily to reach a destination I'd be frustrated to no end. In fact, I was frustrated today. I turned off the interstate to look for a canyon they advertised. It turned out to be a forty-mile round trip, and so inadequately marked that I never did find what I was looking for. I did hit a prairie dog while looking, though. I don't think it lived. I cried a little bit on my way back to the interstate. I was going a little over the speed limit, and if I'd been going slower I might have stopped in time. It was one of the small, careless tragedies that happen every day. I'm so sorry.

Later I finally reached Winnemucca. Winnemucca is a small town that appears to be built entirely on transient tourism like mine. Small-time casinos are everywhere, poised to rake in the passing traffic. Well, I reasoned, if I want to experience Nevada I have to go to either a casino or a prostitute, and prostitutes are expensive. I got $40 turned into chips. This was my first time gambling and very nearly my first time in a casino. I didn't know the rituals. You pay for your chips in cash, no credit. No blackjack till six. Chip bucket on your lap, not the table. Only one hand on the cards. Scratch the cards on the table to hit, shove 'em under the money to stand. No touching cards other than your first two. Drinks are free while you play. I didn't know any of that stuff, but I walked in knowing there was a lot I didn't know. I still don't know how many of those rules are universal to casinos and how many are specific to Winners Hotel & Casino. What's important is that I overcame my intimidation -- and Winnemucca is an intimidating, masculine town -- for no other reason than to practice courageous living. I didn't do too bad, either! Conservatively, I kept my winnings separate from my principal and left when my $40 was gone. At that point I had $29.50. So I paid $10.50 for a drink, some entertainment, and a bracing memory. Absolutely a fair transaction.

Exhausting the list of things to do in Winnemucca was Sid's Restaurant, sort of a de-chained version of Perkins, walls decorated with everything from framed artwork to My Little Pony coloring book pages. I asked the waitress what her favorite dish on the menu was and got a chicken focaccia sandwich -- which was not at all what I'd been going to order but turned out to be very good! One thing I've learned repeatedly on this trip is that people who know more than I do about an area, or a restaurant, or a culture, are to be treasured; it's through them that I can approach that knowledge. They don't always help, but they almost never hurt. Of course, sometimes I stumble across things on my own, too, and that kind of knowledge is also sweet, like a little secret. Which I promptly blab about to all of you. :)

Life at altitude

After a second day in Aurora, Colorado, I once again greet the evening exhausted but full of life. I've stayed both days with Wiley and her family -- who, along with my previous hosts Jacob, Zach, and Alex, must be some of the best and most generous hosts in America -- and will forge west tomorrow morning with fond memories of the Mile High City.

The days here seem to blur together, as my head is fuzzy from fatigue and altitude, but I remember a lot of words. I've had plentiful and often hilarious conversations with Wiley's clan about topics ranging from tomatoes to economics to charismatic megafauna. I've heard stories about tornado chasing in Denver, President Clinton's personal troll doll in Washington, and signs informing tourists what to do if you encounter a cow in Switzerland. We had conversations over dinner last night at a charming local Persian restaurant whose combination lamb and beef patties were new to me, over Wiley's mother's koi pond this morning as she recovered from being attacked by a vicious garter snake, and over lunch today at a Boulder tea house imported piece by piece from Tajikistan.

I've also learned many things about life in the mountains -- some from the family, others from direct experience. Most of the direct-experience items have to do with the atmosphere of a town a mile in the air. For one thing, I've spent much of my time here suffering from airplane ear from climbing and descending the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. For another, the lack of air means Aurora is far cooler and less humid than Kansas City; Wiley tells me that every thousand feet of altitude means the temperature drops three degrees. Yet in spite of the cool air, it's easier to get sunburned or dehydrated here; less air between us and the sun means that everything the sun does in Florida it does better in Colorado. I learned this firsthand as Wiley and I walked a 2.5-mile path in Golden Gate Canyon State Park outside Boulder after a dizzying climb to nine thousand feet that Blackbird struggled to surmount. I'll eventually post photos, but as usual they will be a pale imitation of the wonders that are the Continental Divide and mountain creeks and aspen groves. There was a fifteen-degree difference between sunlight and shade, and my water vanished quickly as we trod the steep paths alert for mountain lions or grizzly bears. (No "charismatic megafauna" was in evidence on the trail, but we saw some awkward and cute mule deer from the car.) The hike was the defining moment of my time near Denver, the part that made me understand how everyday life here is different from life in Fort Myers.

There is of course so much more to say, but I can never say it all and I have to hit the hay now so that I can hit the road later. Tomorrow I detour from the interstate along a circuitous route recommended by Wiley's mother. I'll get a king's view of the mountains and visit the highest incorporated town in the lower 48 states. I hope to blog next from Grand Junction, Colorado, near the western border of the state. Until then!

Days like this, part 2

Before you read this post, please read part 1, below, which is about the act of traveling. Done? Okay, good. Now we can move from journeys to destinations. Or rather interim destinations which are themselves waypoints in the larger journey.

I've stayed in three towns so far -- Eustis, Decatur, and Paducah. No two are anything like each other. My camera is full of Sunday's pictures from bucolic Eustis and its neighbor Mt. Dora, both rural communities in central Florida where tractor supply shops are cultural hubs. Those pictures mostly do not do the area justice. The horizon over Lake Dora, for instance, is far more beautiful than a camera can capture, at least in the hands of an amateur. But here are a couple snapshots that did turn out well.


Snap! The great heron of Eustis, commemorated in fountain statuary. Does it represent ibis-headed Thoth and my symbolic entry into the underworld of my own psyche? No, it's just a bird, but thank you for giving me so much credit. That's downtown Eustis in the background. That's all of downtown Eustis.


Snap! Olivia's Cafe, Eustis hotspot and beacon for open mic night devotees. My hostess Alex and I were entertained by live performers on the cramped stage in front of the bar more or less throughout our evening in the cafe. I sipped ginger peach tea that you taste with the roof of your mouth instead of your tongue -- you have to taste it to understand -- and taught Alex chess.


Snap! Here she is after her narrow defeat. During the early game both of my bishops got exchanged for both of her knights, leading to fun situations where she learned the potency of her long-range alternate-color bishops as well as that of my leaping, forking knights. I think bishops are probably her favorite piece now.


Snap! Alex with her favorite chicken -- one of many her family farms. She also has a dog, two cats, a beehive, and a cockatiel. All are adorable, even the bees. Alex says her dad fancies himself a "gentleman farmer" (though he's actually an accountant). Whether that's just his fancy or not, the hens' brown eggs are real, and they are delicious. Bubbles the cockatiel also lays eggs, but I guess you don't eat cockatiel eggs. Alex worries about Bubbles depleting her calcium.


Snap! The roof of the Donnelly House, a sightseeing spot (and Masonic lodge) on the National Register of Historic Places. The Masons are big in central Florida, apparently. I think of the Masons the way I think of the Mafia -- once influential, now moribund -- but in Mt. Dora, at least, being a Mason (Masonry?) is still a way of life for some. These are the things you learn when you have a host.


Snap! The Mt. Dora historical museum, once used as a combination firehouse and jail. One jail cell is visible in the back right. (I have a picture of myself in jail, too.) That hand-cranked record player still works. I got a personal tour by virtue of Alex's serendipitous employment with this very museum, which is normally closed on Sundays.

Things I didn't get pictures of: the church sign in Mt. Dora reading "Life is fragile. Handle with prayer." The alpacas farmed down the street from Alex's house. The moment when Alex presented me with an extremely comfortable belt, whose infinitely adjustable metal buckle is helping to hold my pants up even now. (I swear to God those pants fit when I packed them. They got looser as the day went on until I could hardly stand up.) The aging, slightly awkward guy who ran a roadside boiled peanut stand -- another cultural phenomenon I had no consciousness of until Eustis. And much else. It's amazing how much Alex and I crammed into my short time in Eustis!

Next post: the other waypoints!

Days like this, part 1

Happily ensconced in a cozy Days Inn in Paducah, Kentucky, I sit down to write a blog entry and realize there's so much to record about my trip so far that I'm already (after just three days) having trouble holding it all in my head! Why haven't I written a nice long entry sooner, then? Part of it is that I've been effing tired from all the driving; I'm still getting used to feeling my buns fall asleep as I spend seven consecutive hours behind the wheel punctuated only by a gas stop. But today, while I'm tired, I feel better, and moreover I have my own private room. This last matters. I've loved staying with my hosts -- people who know the area, can take me to the good restaurants (or cook up something delicious themselves!), can chat with me after a long and lonely stretch of road -- but one's own room is comforting in a different way and engenders a different kind of consciousness that's more conducive to writing.

Now, how to write? There's a certain irony about roadbound travelogue in that driving is the common and dominating feature of my days, yet there's not much to say about it. I've been on the interstate since Eustis and so I can't share quaint rural towns' oddities as observed from the car. (I think I'm going to take the back ways through Kansas in a couple days.) The most interesting thing about the driving has been the changing landscape. South Florida, for those of you who've never been there, is flat like a board. I'm not used to driving on hills. The pita-bread terrain of north Florida and Georgia was a novelty, but it wasn't until the long march through Tennessee where I-24 is flanked by sheer cliffs as it jags in all three dimensions that I realized how much hills matter in driving. Cruise control does not always work on hills, and the gas pedal doesn't work normally either. Fortunately, Blackbird is tolerant of my learning curve; she is a fantastic car. Later, after a breathtaking series of interchanges in Nashville that would have been nigh-unmanageable without GPS, the skies opened. As the rain poured down I wondered how people in the Rocky Mountains get around during a storm. Nice thing about that is, I can just ask my friend in Denver when I get there in a few days.

While my eyes scan the road, my ears are kept busy with music, NPR, or random local radio stations. I listened in fascination to a Georgian call-in show aimed at conservative housewives; the hostess spent fifteen minutes promoting a website billed as a Craigslist for conservatives, which helps make sure you don't accidentally do business with a liberal. Not that she's a liberal-hater, exactly. She was just using conservatism as an index for cleanliness and conscientiousness, and I have to admit that if I was going to hire a lifeguard from Craigslist sight-unseen, I'd be reassured to know he was a Mormon. Talk radio: a window into culture, including our own.

At this point in the entry I'm conscious that this is getting a little long. I have a lot more to say and no knowledge of when I'll have another writing opportunity like this, so I'm going to plow right along but split this post into a few parts. This way, if you don't want to read the whole update, you can stop here and come back tomorrow! But first, check out the double rainbow my friend in Eustis and I spotted outside her house...