I've spent the last few days hanging out with old friends and meeting some new ones. Most especially, though, I've spent them delighting in Jono and Sushu's newfound matrimony. The weekend has been a whirlwind. Hell, in a one-hour span today alone I established in-jokes with my buddies about buffalo, pagodas, and pylons in separate episodes. (Golden Gate Park has all three.) For the record, Stephen's buffalo call is "buffalo!" said in a slightly different voice, and the famously bizarre (but perfectly grammatical) sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" relies on the word "buffalo" being a collective plural noun, a transitive verb, and an adjective, properties we couldn't think of any other word that fit. (The sentence means "Buffalo from a city in New York who are bullied by other buffalo from a city in New York bully still other buffalo from a city in New York.") The stories for the pagoda and pylon are similarly elaborate. We all learned the word "equitational" in connection with the latter.
But I digress. I should really start with Friday, a day spent mostly at the home of the grandparents of Aza Raskin (a webfamous software developer) exploring their wonderfully eccentric farm and treehouse. They have chickens, goats, alpacas, a dog, a cat, a python named Monty, an African gray parrot (not a Norwegian blue), a swing hung from tree branches perhaps thirty feet high, and two tree forts connected by industrial-strength rope netting. I traveled this strange realm with friends old and new; it's been a pleasure getting to know Aza's sister Aviva over the weekend, and I hope we stay in touch! (They have a third sibling, Aenea, and if you are observant about language you will notice that their parents have a particular playful naming convention for their children.) At the Raskin clan's house Alexis and Aviva baked a red velvet cake to complement the wedding while I wrote a story to perform at the picnic, a work of fiction based on the tales I've recounted in previous entries here; it includes elements from Ruby Falls, from Tunnel Hill, and from Winnemucca, and tells how my nonexistent friend Richard had a surreal experience while on a road trip to San Francisco to pick up a statue of St. McGuffin.
The following day I actually told this story in front of the picnic crowd of about sixty people, to general applause! Other acts included a trumpet/cello duet (?!) written especially for the wedding, some really fantastic juggling with that spinning thing on a wire, two ukulele songs, and embarrassing stories about the many ways Jono has almost killed himself over the years. During the eating portion of the picnic I wandered off with Alexis and Aviva. We found a creek, took our shoes off, and had a foot dip. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but it was for me, maybe more than the storytelling. Spontaneity is difficult! I love spontaneous people, but I have trouble cultivating that quality in myself. I can't go out and mindfully practice it, either, because by definition you can't plan spontaneity. So instead I just have to be alert to the times when I can break out of my own expectations to create something unexpected and wonderful. In this case I came out refreshed and with dirty feet. The willingness to accept dirty feet as the price of being able to tell this story is relevant to what I'm trying to say here.
After the picnic there was the wedding dinner, where I sat at a table of twelve and was very nearly socially functional! The toasts and well-wishes would have been nauseatingly sweet for anyone but Jono and Sushu, who are superhumanly sweet themselves and deserve all the sweetness the world can bestow on them. Afterward there was karaoke. That started out okay, but it turns out that when you pack forty people into a room with flashing lights and loud music and bad technology and people trying to make conversation with you in this environment you have a recipe for social disaster. I fled the scene after about an hour and spent the rest of the evening in my car until the friends I was driving home were ready to leave, turning the car on only to play "Blackbird" softly. I felt really awful. This is the same as the creek story except for the outcome. But I don't want to beat myself up for that; karaoke could have been fantastic and I gave it the opportunity to be. Adventures don't always have happy endings, but most happy endings come about because of adventures.
And then today I got to meet Jono's very little sister Aleksa, who is without doubt the nerdiest eight-year-old girl I know. (I'm guessing at her age.) Jono, Sushu, Aleksa, and I played some Rock Band together, and it turns out I'm best at the drums while Aleksa is best at singing. Then there was tourism: the Exploratorium, a San Francisco interactive science museum full of the coolest exhibits I have ever seen, from magnetic sand to imaging technology that draws evolving, moving stylized sketches of you in real time as you stand in front of the screen gaping at it; and Golden Gate Park, which I've already talked about. That plus the amazing Asian food that my visit to Cali has been full of made this a day well worth getting out of bed for.
It looks like I have two more full days in the Bay Area. I'm driving Alexis and possibly our fellow anime club alum Isaac up to Portland and then Seattle later this week, probably Wednesday, in convoy with Aviva. Until then I will happily stay in these bay cities that have afforded me so many adventures!
Showing posts with label route. Show all posts
Showing posts with label route. Show all posts
Monday, June 29, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Purple Hays
The skies are indeed purple over Hays, Kansas, a city of 20,000 in western Kansas. The landscape is sort of purple, too, and my mood is purple to top it off.
Today's my birthday, and it got off to a great start with a gourmet breakfast prepared by Jacob, then a lunch of a ground beef popover and a chocolate "Matterhorn" (a mountain-shaped chocolate baked atop a cookie and served with sweet cream) at Andre's Patisserie. I reluctantly bid him goodbye in the afternoon, then drove four and a half hours to Hays without stopping except to refill Blackbird's tank and empty my own. (Rule of traveling I've discovered: never pass up the opportunity to take a leak.)
I took the interstate after all, having been assured by Jacob that there is equally little worthwhile to see on any route through Kansas. I don't agree with his assessment that it's boring, but it's certainly rural, and tourist attractions are few and far between. The land's green and brown spaces are amazing. The high point of the drive, however, was certainly the expedition past a massive wind farm. There must have been hundreds of individual mills gyrating in the breeze. The three polished, rotating blades of each turbine looked so sleek and modern, like something out of a TV commercial for either renewable energy or Mercedes-Benz. If they had no purpose at all, their beauty would make them a landmark and a tourist attraction. It's odd that they're not viewed as one, and there are no roads leading from I-70 to within the churn of the wind farm.
The four and a half hour drive felt longer than it was, and I arrived in Hays feeling drained. Here I made an unpleasant discovery: my cell phone does not have any reception here. Investigating online, I made an even more unpleasant discovery: AT&T does not cover western Kansas at all, and most of the western United States in general is covered only through AT&T's presumably less reliable "partners" or is completely uncovered. Virtually all of Nevada, for example, is an AT&T dead zone. This knowledge scares me. If I break down on the highway in a dead zone I won't be able to call AAA, and God knows I have no idea how to fix anything on my own. Fortunately, I've been able to make contact with Wiley, my host for tomorrow, through Gmail, and she's expecting me in the early evening. But I need to think about backup plans for communication, or else make sure I stick to paths that get reception.
Hays itself feels oddly tense. The people have a look on their faces like they're besieged. Maybe it's the weather, which NPR says may reach 100 degrees tomorrow, or maybe it's my imagination, me projecting my anxiety onto the strangers around me. I ate dinner at Montana Mike's Steakhouse, which served a passable ribeye. I've been trying to avoid soda this trip, but I couldn't pass up the most unique thing on the menu, Sierra Mist with pear flavoring. Sweet! The pear taste was overpowering and delicate at the same time. As usual, I almost didn't order it but then thought "what the hell." I'm learning to recognize the moments when I should say "what the hell" and live a little.
Happy birthday to me! With luck, the next post will come from Aurora, Colorado, outside Denver. In the meantime I'll try to figure out why Hays exists, out here in the boonies, as opposed to being a tiny interstate stopover like the other towns I passed.
Today's my birthday, and it got off to a great start with a gourmet breakfast prepared by Jacob, then a lunch of a ground beef popover and a chocolate "Matterhorn" (a mountain-shaped chocolate baked atop a cookie and served with sweet cream) at Andre's Patisserie. I reluctantly bid him goodbye in the afternoon, then drove four and a half hours to Hays without stopping except to refill Blackbird's tank and empty my own. (Rule of traveling I've discovered: never pass up the opportunity to take a leak.)
I took the interstate after all, having been assured by Jacob that there is equally little worthwhile to see on any route through Kansas. I don't agree with his assessment that it's boring, but it's certainly rural, and tourist attractions are few and far between. The land's green and brown spaces are amazing. The high point of the drive, however, was certainly the expedition past a massive wind farm. There must have been hundreds of individual mills gyrating in the breeze. The three polished, rotating blades of each turbine looked so sleek and modern, like something out of a TV commercial for either renewable energy or Mercedes-Benz. If they had no purpose at all, their beauty would make them a landmark and a tourist attraction. It's odd that they're not viewed as one, and there are no roads leading from I-70 to within the churn of the wind farm.
The four and a half hour drive felt longer than it was, and I arrived in Hays feeling drained. Here I made an unpleasant discovery: my cell phone does not have any reception here. Investigating online, I made an even more unpleasant discovery: AT&T does not cover western Kansas at all, and most of the western United States in general is covered only through AT&T's presumably less reliable "partners" or is completely uncovered. Virtually all of Nevada, for example, is an AT&T dead zone. This knowledge scares me. If I break down on the highway in a dead zone I won't be able to call AAA, and God knows I have no idea how to fix anything on my own. Fortunately, I've been able to make contact with Wiley, my host for tomorrow, through Gmail, and she's expecting me in the early evening. But I need to think about backup plans for communication, or else make sure I stick to paths that get reception.
Hays itself feels oddly tense. The people have a look on their faces like they're besieged. Maybe it's the weather, which NPR says may reach 100 degrees tomorrow, or maybe it's my imagination, me projecting my anxiety onto the strangers around me. I ate dinner at Montana Mike's Steakhouse, which served a passable ribeye. I've been trying to avoid soda this trip, but I couldn't pass up the most unique thing on the menu, Sierra Mist with pear flavoring. Sweet! The pear taste was overpowering and delicate at the same time. As usual, I almost didn't order it but then thought "what the hell." I'm learning to recognize the moments when I should say "what the hell" and live a little.
Happy birthday to me! With luck, the next post will come from Aurora, Colorado, outside Denver. In the meantime I'll try to figure out why Hays exists, out here in the boonies, as opposed to being a tiny interstate stopover like the other towns I passed.
Monday, June 15, 2009
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...
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Cutting a swath
My itinerary is coming along nicely. Leg One of the trip is Fort Myers to San Francisco. I need to make this trip in at most twelve days in order to attend wedding festivities on the 27th, and in case of unexpected developments along the way I've planned it so that I'm crossing most of the continent in half that time.
June 13: Set out from Fort Myers, FL. Stay the night in Eustis, FL, just north of Orlando, with Alexandra/moroschino from IRG. Totally gives me a reason to leave the house in the first place! Meals: with Alex; attractions: at Alex's discretion.
June 14: Stay the night near Atlanta, GA, exact location TBA but hopefully with a friend of Alexis, a friend from anime club. Meals and attractions TBA.
June 15: Stay the night near Paducah, KY, at a hotel. Meals and attractions TBA.
June 16: Stay the night in Merriam, KS, just outside Kansas City, with Jacob/Stormcrow from IRG. Another day to look forward to! Meals: Korma Sutra (Indian) or Free State Brewing Co. Attractions: Independence Church, the site of the Second Coming of Christ according to the Latter-Day Saints.
June 17: My birthday! Have lunch with Jacob at Andre's Confiserie. Stay the night near either Hays, KS or Stockton, KS, depending on whether I take the interstate or local roads; it'll be a hotel either way. Dinner and attractions TBA.
June 18: Stay the night in Denver, CO, hopefully with Wiley, a friend from the U of C. Need to get in touch with her. Meals and attractions TBA but plentiful.
From there the itinerary is still very much under construction. The two major choices are whether to get on I-80, taking me through Cheyenne and Salt Lake City en route to the West Coast, or whether to stay on I-70 into southern Utah and take local roads across Nevada. If I really do arrive in Denver on schedule on the 18th, though, I'll have oodles of time to get to San Francisco, so I may do something more radical like cut south through Albuquerque and take the by-all-accounts-gorgeous drive up the California coast. Will make contingency plans.
June 13: Set out from Fort Myers, FL. Stay the night in Eustis, FL, just north of Orlando, with Alexandra/moroschino from IRG. Totally gives me a reason to leave the house in the first place! Meals: with Alex; attractions: at Alex's discretion.
June 14: Stay the night near Atlanta, GA, exact location TBA but hopefully with a friend of Alexis, a friend from anime club. Meals and attractions TBA.
June 15: Stay the night near Paducah, KY, at a hotel. Meals and attractions TBA.
June 16: Stay the night in Merriam, KS, just outside Kansas City, with Jacob/Stormcrow from IRG. Another day to look forward to! Meals: Korma Sutra (Indian) or Free State Brewing Co. Attractions: Independence Church, the site of the Second Coming of Christ according to the Latter-Day Saints.
June 17: My birthday! Have lunch with Jacob at Andre's Confiserie. Stay the night near either Hays, KS or Stockton, KS, depending on whether I take the interstate or local roads; it'll be a hotel either way. Dinner and attractions TBA.
June 18: Stay the night in Denver, CO, hopefully with Wiley, a friend from the U of C. Need to get in touch with her. Meals and attractions TBA but plentiful.
From there the itinerary is still very much under construction. The two major choices are whether to get on I-80, taking me through Cheyenne and Salt Lake City en route to the West Coast, or whether to stay on I-70 into southern Utah and take local roads across Nevada. If I really do arrive in Denver on schedule on the 18th, though, I'll have oodles of time to get to San Francisco, so I may do something more radical like cut south through Albuquerque and take the by-all-accounts-gorgeous drive up the California coast. Will make contingency plans.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Further training
I called Amtrak about half an hour before their daily northbound train from Orlando was due to leave this afternoon, and there were still seats available. So much for the idea that I'd have to book well in advance! Interestingly, though, it turns out that daily train leaves for different destinations on different days. Today it was going to Washington, but tomorrow it goes all the way to New York. You can put it down to the recession and reduced freight on the tracks -- or at least, that's what one article my awesome friend sent me would attribute it to -- but it makes travel both more complicated and in some ways more interesting. There's something glamorous about hopping on the next train out of town no matter where it happens to be going. Waking up, checking the schedule -- oh, today there's a train to Phoenix, awesome! -- and off we go. Of course, I have no idea what it's like in cities other than Orlando, where they keep a station manned thirteen hours a day for the sake of the one or two trains that come through. Amtrak is a totally different animal in the northeast, and I imagine its transcontinental trains are more frequent than once a day too. Chicago in particular is a hub for them. That station is open eighteen hours a day, with a train coming in just about every hour. Good thing, too. You can't go coast to coast on Amtrak without passing through Chicago or New Orleans. If I go by train I'm not going to get away without visiting Chicago, probably more than once.
My goal for tomorrow is to visit a local AT&T store and ask them about the network card I mentioned yesterday. One way or another, I also hope to conduct an interview this weekend!
My goal for tomorrow is to visit a local AT&T store and ask them about the network card I mentioned yesterday. One way or another, I also hope to conduct an interview this weekend!
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Day's anatomy, part 2
To see how the three-day rule works, let's try a test case: Mobile, Alabama. I chose Mobile because I know absolutely nothing about it and because it's an early stop on the first-draft route of our journey.
The previous stop will probably have been Pensacola; I'll just have driven an awesome bridge stretch of I-10 that spans Mobile Bay by way of various islands and peninsulas that stud the delta. Though it's a long bridge, it's a short drive. Google Maps estimates 55 minutes from Pensacola to Mobile, and that may actually not be too unrealistic; with the magic of Street View I can see that the bridge is actually four lanes, which I wouldn't have guessed, so I'm unlikely to get stuck behind a semi. If I leave Pensacola at eleven I can be at a Days Inn near I-65 by one at the latest.
Why Days Inn? Because a friend of mine who went on a road trip of her own last year reports that Days Inn is the best for having safe, comfortable, affordable rooms, and also because it's everywhere. I could look into local bed and breakfasts or something, and maybe sometimes I will, and I'm now a certified member of CouchSurfing.com so I have that option, but Days Inn will always be a good fallback.
The particular inn I'm looking at in Mobile is near the mall, which is a minus in terms of noise but means I'm likely to be in a district where I can buy groceries and get laundry done. What's more, it's spitting distance from Spring Hill College, which according to Wikipedia is a historically significant Jesuit college full of young people whose love stories just might have something to do with their faith. Score!!! I can probably visit on the day I arrive while I wait for check-in time at the inn. The University of South Alabama is only a little farther afield and might make a good Day Two destination.
A quick search for laundromats turns several up nearby, along with two Circle K locations, so necessities are covered after check-in on Day One. Nearby Dauphin Street is crowded with restaurants if I feel like splurging. With the interstate nearby it's mostly fast food, but there's also a Chinese place, and there are several cafes near the college and elsewhere, which just might mean more love stories. Bizarrely, there are four nursing homes within a mile of the inn, also good story repositories. And who knows what I'll pass on the way to and from all these places that might draw my attention. Plenty to fill Day Two even if I don't make it to the university.
If indeed the second day is as fruitful as I hope it'll be, I'll spend another night in Mobile and continue along I-10 the next morning. Biloxi would be the obvious next destination, or I could plow through Mississippi the better to reach New Orleans, surely one of the ten most important cities to visit on a trip like this. Either way, I'll have had a great visit to Mobile, busy without being exhausting, and full of stories!
The previous stop will probably have been Pensacola; I'll just have driven an awesome bridge stretch of I-10 that spans Mobile Bay by way of various islands and peninsulas that stud the delta. Though it's a long bridge, it's a short drive. Google Maps estimates 55 minutes from Pensacola to Mobile, and that may actually not be too unrealistic; with the magic of Street View I can see that the bridge is actually four lanes, which I wouldn't have guessed, so I'm unlikely to get stuck behind a semi. If I leave Pensacola at eleven I can be at a Days Inn near I-65 by one at the latest.
Why Days Inn? Because a friend of mine who went on a road trip of her own last year reports that Days Inn is the best for having safe, comfortable, affordable rooms, and also because it's everywhere. I could look into local bed and breakfasts or something, and maybe sometimes I will, and I'm now a certified member of CouchSurfing.com so I have that option, but Days Inn will always be a good fallback.
The particular inn I'm looking at in Mobile is near the mall, which is a minus in terms of noise but means I'm likely to be in a district where I can buy groceries and get laundry done. What's more, it's spitting distance from Spring Hill College, which according to Wikipedia is a historically significant Jesuit college full of young people whose love stories just might have something to do with their faith. Score!!! I can probably visit on the day I arrive while I wait for check-in time at the inn. The University of South Alabama is only a little farther afield and might make a good Day Two destination.
A quick search for laundromats turns several up nearby, along with two Circle K locations, so necessities are covered after check-in on Day One. Nearby Dauphin Street is crowded with restaurants if I feel like splurging. With the interstate nearby it's mostly fast food, but there's also a Chinese place, and there are several cafes near the college and elsewhere, which just might mean more love stories. Bizarrely, there are four nursing homes within a mile of the inn, also good story repositories. And who knows what I'll pass on the way to and from all these places that might draw my attention. Plenty to fill Day Two even if I don't make it to the university.
If indeed the second day is as fruitful as I hope it'll be, I'll spend another night in Mobile and continue along I-10 the next morning. Biloxi would be the obvious next destination, or I could plow through Mississippi the better to reach New Orleans, surely one of the ten most important cities to visit on a trip like this. Either way, I'll have had a great visit to Mobile, busy without being exhausting, and full of stories!
Friday, February 13, 2009
Go, Venusaur!
I'm not the first to collect love stories. Chicken Soup for the Soul does it -- sometimes nauseatingly and omitting unhappy endings, but Chicken Soup for the Soul does it. In a way Dan Savage does it every week. And of course compendiums abound of fictional love stories -- by Shakespeare, Chaucer, Masters. Their stories come from letters, emails, conversations with friends, or their own panting imaginations.
None of them ever had to chart a course.
Lover's Lanes uses the Pokemon model of love story collecting: you can't catch 'em all by staying in one place. You have to get out in the tall grass. You have to hit Viridian City and Pallet Town. That game would not be much fun if you could catch all the Pokemon without going on a journey. As for love stories -- even if you could somehow capture the entire range of them without leaving town, all your tales set against the same backdrop -- would you really want to?
So I'm charting a course. It's still inchoate, only gradually taking shape as I get feedback from friends who might be willing to put me up and as I decide where I need to go to make my own story worth telling. Las Vegas, of course. Can you imagine the stories a showgirl would tell? -- or even a man on the street, in a place like that. New York is also can't-miss, though my friend there tells me she may not be around in the summer, a great pity. I have a concentration of helpful collaborators in San Francisco (itself a must-visit city), Portland, and Seattle, so it's safe to say I'll spend a lot of time in the Pacific Northwest. And I definitely want to hit a recession-stricken hub, say Detroit or Cleveland, to find out how people live love when living life is hard enough.
Here's the thing. Even if the cities I've mentioned all lay on the same straight empty road, by the time I got back to Fort Myers I'd have gathered a bounteous cornucopia of experiences, eclectic and fascinating, to spill onto the rose-scented page. But they don't. To pass through those cities and return home I'm sure to encounter Orlando, Houston, Phoenix, LA, Denver, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, Atlanta -- and innumerable points besides. That's if I don't detour up to Minneapolis or Boston or over to Memphis or to other cities that are natural stops on a lover's lanes. If just five or six cities' worth of experiences would leave me with a cornucopia, what will I have after my tires see the asphalt of dozens of freeways and cities? Will it even be comprehensible? Will I persevere?
None of them ever had to chart a course.
Lover's Lanes uses the Pokemon model of love story collecting: you can't catch 'em all by staying in one place. You have to get out in the tall grass. You have to hit Viridian City and Pallet Town. That game would not be much fun if you could catch all the Pokemon without going on a journey. As for love stories -- even if you could somehow capture the entire range of them without leaving town, all your tales set against the same backdrop -- would you really want to?
So I'm charting a course. It's still inchoate, only gradually taking shape as I get feedback from friends who might be willing to put me up and as I decide where I need to go to make my own story worth telling. Las Vegas, of course. Can you imagine the stories a showgirl would tell? -- or even a man on the street, in a place like that. New York is also can't-miss, though my friend there tells me she may not be around in the summer, a great pity. I have a concentration of helpful collaborators in San Francisco (itself a must-visit city), Portland, and Seattle, so it's safe to say I'll spend a lot of time in the Pacific Northwest. And I definitely want to hit a recession-stricken hub, say Detroit or Cleveland, to find out how people live love when living life is hard enough.
Here's the thing. Even if the cities I've mentioned all lay on the same straight empty road, by the time I got back to Fort Myers I'd have gathered a bounteous cornucopia of experiences, eclectic and fascinating, to spill onto the rose-scented page. But they don't. To pass through those cities and return home I'm sure to encounter Orlando, Houston, Phoenix, LA, Denver, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, Atlanta -- and innumerable points besides. That's if I don't detour up to Minneapolis or Boston or over to Memphis or to other cities that are natural stops on a lover's lanes. If just five or six cities' worth of experiences would leave me with a cornucopia, what will I have after my tires see the asphalt of dozens of freeways and cities? Will it even be comprehensible? Will I persevere?
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