Over one week of junctions

I began my day in Aurora 5,471 feet above sea level and I'm now ending it in Grand Junction 4,597 feet above sea level. On net I lost about 900 feet. This does not quite tell the whole story. The whole story requires you to know that in between these two cities I passed through Alma, a town of less than two hundred people which is 10,578 feet above sea level. Yes, kids, I crossed the Continental Divide today. Don't think I didn't notice!

Unfortunately, prose is unable to convey the impossibility of the peaks and canyons of the Colorado Rockies to anyone who hasn't been there. Pictures are only slightly better. Lost in clouds though they were on this overcast day, the Rockies captured my eyes whenever I could spare them a glance as I navigated the winding roads. Poor Blackbird couldn't figure out where all the air went and had trouble maintaining her speed on the hills. She'll be happier in California. I don't have many stories from today, as rain limited my outdoor activities and the Rockies don't have a lot of indoor ones, but I do have pictures dating back to Paducah...

My room in Paducah, the first hotel room of the journey. Kazuko reclines on the bed at right. This seems like a really long time ago. I don't have any good pictures of the city.

Tunnel Hill in south Illinois. Longer and mistier than it looks. I also have a picture taken from inside the tunnel; all you can see is mist and some light at the other end.

Independence Temple's spire. The temple is the site of Jesus's Second Coming according to the Mormons. They may not believe in evolution, but I guess they believe in architecture. Magnificent.

A rose from the garden across from Jacob's flat in Kansas City. Jacob taught me how to use my camera's close-focus feature. It's the button that looks like a flower, appropriately enough.

A very relaxed raccoon at the zoo in Oakley, Kansas. He probably wanted to be asleep, but tourists like me kept interrupting him.

This prairie dog, on the other hand, was bright and alert, as were his hundreds of cousins swarming the zoo!

Wiley's mother tends her lake garden in Aurora, minutes after being terrified by a snake. The native snakes are apparently eating her fish. It's a dilemma.

We close with three views of the Rocky Mountains.

From Panorama Point on the Denver side.

From Colorado Route 9 in the midst of the Continental Divide.

From Grand Junction on the west side, where the mountains have given way to mesas and the West proper has begun.

I have plenty more photos, but these tell the story as well as any ten photos can. Time will tell what I photograph tomorrow on my Sunday pilgrimage to Salt Lake City!

Days like this, part 3

This is the third and last part of a three-part post. Please read part 1 first; it's two posts below this one. Blogs aren't like novels; you have to read them in reverse order. It's like the movie Memento, except not actually intended to be viewed that way. Bizarre.

Decatur, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, was my next stop after Eustis. I rushed to Decatur to meet my host Zach, who was generous enough to wait for me before heading to a biweekly get-together at his friend's house to play tabletop games. I was looking forward to getting to know Zach (a friend's friend who I'd never met before) and his cohort over a board game -- but things didn't quite work out that way! Zach's friend was MIA, and through a series of increasingly frantic phone calls Zach eventually discovered that game night was canceled. He didn't even hesitate before dialing yet another number, then several more, organizing an impromptu meet-up at a local Thai place. The ginger chicken was nice and savory, and the conversation was a real challenge; I navigated a sea of unfamiliar names and relationships that emerged among the four of us there. Unfortunately, amidst the general rush of the evening I didn't have my camera with me, and the Slug Incident back in Zach's apartment was a sucker punch that knocked any will I might have had to photograph anything out of me. I feel very much like Bilbo Baggins -- someone not naturally proactive or good with exigencies who nonetheless finds himself on an adventure and doesn't always know how to cope with it.

I mentioned in the last post that the three towns I've stayed in have been completely different, and Decatur is the polar opposite of spacious Eustis -- ultra-urban, with everything crammed into as little space as possible, bending streets and buildings in the process. It's not a pretty place -- is what I thought driving in on Sunday evening. But this morning (was it only this morning?!?), driving out, I saw the way the skyscrapers vanished into the dawn fog as though their tops were rubbed out with an eraser the color of the sky... and I decided maybe Decatur wasn't so bad.

I did get a picture from Decatur, but it's not the skyscraper one. It's the side of Zach's apartment building, a poor picture that could have been taken anywhere. I wish I had pulled over and snapped the shot of the skyscrapers.

As I passed through southern Tennessee on the way to Paducah, I saw several signs for some tourist spot named Ruby Falls. I was on track to get into Paducah very early and had some time to kill, so I figured, what the hell, waterfalls are pretty. Right decision. Turns out Ruby Falls is an underground waterfall at the end of a half-mile cave a thousand feet beneath Lookout Mountain, just outside Chattanooga. Twenty bucks bought me a gorgeous tour -- and one that I do have pictures of.

A tourist-oriented cave tour is not photography-friendly. Though everything is lit just right, you're never at rest for long, and when you are there are heads or hands between you and the thing you want to photograph. Nevertheless, I got some fantastic shots, which I present here without further comment, except to say that they are all much more beautiful in person. If you're ever near Chattanooga, go.





And now is the part where I want to regale you with tales of the wonders of Paducah... only writing these posts has ended up taking most of my spare time this evening, so I haven't seen much of the town. Actually, I'm glad. The last few days have been full of sensory overload, and so for once it's probably better for me to sit inside staring at an electronic screen than to be outside getting fresh air and discovering things. I'm sorry, Paducah. You seem like a nice town. You are two hundred years old and full of river lore. If I ever come back I promise I'll give you the exploration you deserve.

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...