My drive today took me back to Eustis, north of Orlando. For only the second time this trip, I revisited a town -- the first was Seattle -- and for the second time I spent the evening hanging out with Alex (my Floridian friend from the Utena forum, who again is not to be confused with my brother Alex in Charlotte, my college friend Alexis in Seattle, or my new friend Aleksa in Chicago).
The drive, as so often happens, was not very interesting. It was marked by my final admission of defeat in the struggle to keep Zhuge Liang attached to the dashboard. (For those of you who read only periodically, Zhuge Liang is my GPS; I am not keeping an actual Chinese tactician attached to my dashboard. Or anything else, for that matter, but I'm getting to that.) The sticky disc the GPS came with gave out way back at Lake Tahoe. I'd been using double-sided tape to keep it mounted, replacing the tape periodically as the sun's heat melted the adhesive, but as both the GPS and the dash became increasingly marked up, the tape became less and less useful. Finally, I believe in Indianapolis, I decided to try Velcro. This turned out not to be such a great idea; the Velcro did not stick any better than the tape had, but its residue is much harder to remove. So with only a couple days to go, I threw up my hands and have been riding with Zhuge Liang perched in the front seat with my foxes. Sometimes you have to know when to say when.
Anyway, as I was trying to say, interstate driving is boring, especially in the South, where the road is flanked by generic trees and you can tell this is not an actual forest: you're not seeing landscape, just landscaping. So I listened to some NPR, cued up my favorite traveling songs, and sang along to lunch in Jacksonville and at last to Alex's house in Eustis. Here, after other nocturnal activities -- the 1984 edition of Trivial Pursuit at Olivia's Cafe (where it turns out Edgar Cayce is the right answer to every question), dinner at the Mason Jar, and watching Perfect Blue, to name a few -- we went out on Alex's porch to look for lacewings. We didn't find any, but we did discover the praying mantis. I mean that in the same sense that Columbus discovered America -- it may not have been new to other people, but it was new to him -- and the emotional content was the same as if we had never known such a thing existed. We oohed and aahed as she showed off her spindly, frightening arms as if posing for a textbook photo (which Alex's mother indeed tried to take). Eventually she marched off into the bushes, wagging her butt at us, leaving us to look instead for the large toads and tree frogs that densely populate Alex's yard and, apparently, her grill.
Tomorrow the two of us will drive into Orlando to meet Andrea, another forum friend. We'll tour some gardens and go to some kind of tea and coffee market that Andrea says is brilliant, and then, at around 3:00 in the afternoon, I will get in the car one last time and point it towards home. Tonight's is my 100th post to Lover's Lanes. In the spirit of adventure and shooting for beyond the horizon, my post from home concluding this long journey will be #101!
Showing posts with label eustis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eustis. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Sunday, June 21, 2009
City on a hill
I left Grand Junction this morning without it leaving much of an impression on me. Not that I didn't try to have an adventure! -- but adventures are harder to come by on Sundays, and Grand Junction's museums and wineries aren't really my scene anyway. I settled for the Trail Through Time, just west along the interstate. The trail winds through the hills beside a mesa on the high scrubland, showcasing classical Wild West terrain to great effect, and runs past many dramatic rock formations, some with dinosaur and plant fossils embedded in them. Courtesy of the trail, I had an invigorating and nearly solo morning constitutional, then set out for Salt Lake City.
Utah's cliffs and plateaus would have seemed breathtaking back in Kansas, but seemed gentle and a little boring after yesterday's Rocky Mountain passage. They were a welcome reprieve from the constantly-one-second-away-from-death peaks of Colorado. (Though there was some snow on the road at one point!!!) To pass the time while driving I listened to an audiobook version of Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers," courtesy of Wiley. Audiobooks are much better than music as a way to kill time; they hold your attention and let your muscle memory deal with the road. Outliers is pretty good. It's a lot like The Tipping Point in that it's a book-length elaboration of a single self-evident sentence, in this case "even for the talented, success relies on being in the right place at the right time." But also like The Tipping Point, the case studies Gladwell uses to make his (foregone-conclusion) argument are fascinating in themselves. It might be better to think of Gladwell as a talented essayist who organizes his monographs around central themes rather than the social visionary he presents himself as.
But you're not here for my literary criticism, are you? Outliers was just a means to Salt Lake City. I exited the interstate at a randomly selected mile marker within the city and began exploring downtown. I soon found myself driving up a steep grade and staring directly at the Utah State Capitol, an architecturally gorgeous building very much modeled after the U.S. Capitol in Washington. I couldn't go inside because it was Sunday -- go figure -- but I got a couple pictures, plus a pamphlet about Temple Square from the tourist information center across the street. Temple Square is Salt Lake City's Loop -- a block of buildings with names at the heart of downtown. But where the Chicago Loop is very commercial, Temple Square beams Mormonism. Its centerpiece is Salt Lake Temple, which unfortunately I couldn't visit due to construction -- it figures that the one building you'd expect to be open on a Sunday was closed for a different reason! I did, however, sit in a pew inside the Salt Lake Tabernacle and snapped photos of its organ, one of the twenty biggest in the world. Just sitting in that building is a remarkable experience; the tabernacle seems bizarrely full of space for its size even though it isn't as lofty as one expects from a religious structure.
Once I was done wandering around Temple Square I got back in the car and headed for Red Iguana. This Mexican restaurant shows up in all the travel guides as a culinary center of the city. It's a pretty large place with lots of parking, yet still has a hole-in-the-wall atmosphere that makes you feel cared for even as you're stuffed into the dining rooms with a few dozen other parties. (At 4:50 it was already on a 45-minute wait! I read some Neverwhere until my name was called.) I ordered a pork shank that was served in a thick, savory sauce made from a couple different kinds of chili. It was pretty good -- which if you know how I generally feel about Mexican food you will understand is high praise!
Of course, food tastes better when you're in a good mood. I was, and still am! Salt Lake City is unflaggingly welcoming; I haven't met a person here yet who seemed jaded or standoffish. The camera around my neck earned me welcomes here rather than the benign contempt I get in other areas. The city is also very easy to navigate, either on foot or by car. This place and Eustis are the two cities I've seen so far this trip where I might actually like to live -- though every city without exception has been fun to pass through!
Tomorrow I'll tour the Great Salt Lake, then set off for the little-known town of Winnemucca, Nevada, my last waypoint before my San Francisco terminus. As usual, I don't know what to expect from Winnemucca. Making up your adventures as you go along is fun!
Utah's cliffs and plateaus would have seemed breathtaking back in Kansas, but seemed gentle and a little boring after yesterday's Rocky Mountain passage. They were a welcome reprieve from the constantly-one-second-away-from-death peaks of Colorado. (Though there was some snow on the road at one point!!!) To pass the time while driving I listened to an audiobook version of Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers," courtesy of Wiley. Audiobooks are much better than music as a way to kill time; they hold your attention and let your muscle memory deal with the road. Outliers is pretty good. It's a lot like The Tipping Point in that it's a book-length elaboration of a single self-evident sentence, in this case "even for the talented, success relies on being in the right place at the right time." But also like The Tipping Point, the case studies Gladwell uses to make his (foregone-conclusion) argument are fascinating in themselves. It might be better to think of Gladwell as a talented essayist who organizes his monographs around central themes rather than the social visionary he presents himself as.
But you're not here for my literary criticism, are you? Outliers was just a means to Salt Lake City. I exited the interstate at a randomly selected mile marker within the city and began exploring downtown. I soon found myself driving up a steep grade and staring directly at the Utah State Capitol, an architecturally gorgeous building very much modeled after the U.S. Capitol in Washington. I couldn't go inside because it was Sunday -- go figure -- but I got a couple pictures, plus a pamphlet about Temple Square from the tourist information center across the street. Temple Square is Salt Lake City's Loop -- a block of buildings with names at the heart of downtown. But where the Chicago Loop is very commercial, Temple Square beams Mormonism. Its centerpiece is Salt Lake Temple, which unfortunately I couldn't visit due to construction -- it figures that the one building you'd expect to be open on a Sunday was closed for a different reason! I did, however, sit in a pew inside the Salt Lake Tabernacle and snapped photos of its organ, one of the twenty biggest in the world. Just sitting in that building is a remarkable experience; the tabernacle seems bizarrely full of space for its size even though it isn't as lofty as one expects from a religious structure.
Once I was done wandering around Temple Square I got back in the car and headed for Red Iguana. This Mexican restaurant shows up in all the travel guides as a culinary center of the city. It's a pretty large place with lots of parking, yet still has a hole-in-the-wall atmosphere that makes you feel cared for even as you're stuffed into the dining rooms with a few dozen other parties. (At 4:50 it was already on a 45-minute wait! I read some Neverwhere until my name was called.) I ordered a pork shank that was served in a thick, savory sauce made from a couple different kinds of chili. It was pretty good -- which if you know how I generally feel about Mexican food you will understand is high praise!
Of course, food tastes better when you're in a good mood. I was, and still am! Salt Lake City is unflaggingly welcoming; I haven't met a person here yet who seemed jaded or standoffish. The camera around my neck earned me welcomes here rather than the benign contempt I get in other areas. The city is also very easy to navigate, either on foot or by car. This place and Eustis are the two cities I've seen so far this trip where I might actually like to live -- though every city without exception has been fun to pass through!
Tomorrow I'll tour the Great Salt Lake, then set off for the little-known town of Winnemucca, Nevada, my last waypoint before my San Francisco terminus. As usual, I don't know what to expect from Winnemucca. Making up your adventures as you go along is fun!
Monday, June 15, 2009
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!
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...
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...
Saturday, June 13, 2009
A double rainbow
The first half was the drive. Four hours from Fort Myers to Eustis, where I'm typing this entry. It was exhilarating and triumphant, the culmination of the preparatory journey I talked about in my last post. I listened to "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!" on NPR, then turned on the iPod, which randomly blared songs including I Woke Up In A Car, I'm On A Boat, and I'm On A Blimp, giving me a travel theme to go with my first day of journeying.
The second half was Eustis. My tour guide was a friend from the Revolutionary Girl Utena forum, and she showed me the prettiest parts of this rural community a hundred years old. (Tomorrow I get to see the most historic.) I taught her how to play chess, and she taught me how to play with chickens, of which her family keeps something like fifteen. The highlight of the evening was our visit to Olivia's Cafe, an adorable hole-in-the-wall run by Santa and Mrs. Claus, right down to the board games stacked on a bookcase on one wall. I couldn't have asked for a better first day.
Tomorrow it gets harder. More driving and a late arrival in Atlanta to an address I don't have yet. It'll be an adventure! I'm already foreseeing a problem with the writing end of things, though; I'm tuckered out after writing this post, and I didn't even have to design an itinerary today. Hopefully as I get into the swing of the journey the writing will become part of the routine. Until next time!
The second half was Eustis. My tour guide was a friend from the Revolutionary Girl Utena forum, and she showed me the prettiest parts of this rural community a hundred years old. (Tomorrow I get to see the most historic.) I taught her how to play chess, and she taught me how to play with chickens, of which her family keeps something like fifteen. The highlight of the evening was our visit to Olivia's Cafe, an adorable hole-in-the-wall run by Santa and Mrs. Claus, right down to the board games stacked on a bookcase on one wall. I couldn't have asked for a better first day.
Tomorrow it gets harder. More driving and a late arrival in Atlanta to an address I don't have yet. It'll be an adventure! I'm already foreseeing a problem with the writing end of things, though; I'm tuckered out after writing this post, and I didn't even have to design an itinerary today. Hopefully as I get into the swing of the journey the writing will become part of the routine. Until next time!
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