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 stops. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stops. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
Through the monsoon
Woke up, finished Haruhi, said goodbye to Alex -- who I hope very much to see again soon -- and left Charlotte for Savannah at about noon today. The drive was uneventful. I could not have guessed what was going to happen that evening.
I checked in at Savannah just after four and went exploring. I wanted to know how this town became famous for its beauty. I quickly found my own answer: it's the proliferation of Spanish moss hanging from every tree like Christmas streamers. Driving down a main boulevard is like taking a walk in the woods. After a stop at a used bookstore, I continued my sojourns with a trip east on US-80. You see, all this time I've been telling a fib. I've been calling this a coast-to-coast journey, and since I started on the Gulf Coast that is technically true, but that's not what people usually mean when they say "coast-to-coast." To really earn that title I had to see the Atlantic Ocean. I resolved that Savannah would be the place, and I chose right. To find the ocean I took the highway all the way out to Tybee Island, across bridges spanning the less solid parts of the swamp. Looking out over the railings of those bridges, I saw dark clouds gathering, and in the stormwrought half-twilight the bright grass and dark water clashed joyously. My heart beat faster.
My visit to the Tybee Island beach was quick and professional. I took pictures of the seagulls swarming a woman who was feeding them bread, then strode to the water to sample it. I can report that the Atlantic at Savannah is less salty than the Pacific at San Francisco and much less salty than the Great Salt Lake, and has a thinner consistency than either. These tasks done, my journey had spanned all the coasts. I turned around to go back to town...
...and ran smack into some Weather. In the hour I'd been gone, Savannah had begun taking what might loosely be called an urban bath, if you drop hairdryers into the bathtub a lot. I've driven through slightly worse rain on the interstates, but never through flash floods, and never through a storm so vicious and full of crackling electricity. The lightning was nonstop and deafening even from inside the car. One bolt struck a transformer on the opposite side of the road, which exploded like a shotgun and spat sparks into the air. My emergency flashers flaring a few feet into the evening, plumes of water overwhelming my tires and windshield, lightning crashing for moments on end into some unlucky tree not very far away, I thought: This is going to make a fantastic blog post.
If I asked you to guess what sort of restaurant I went to, you would be unable to match the truth for aptness. My eatery was the Pirates' House, a tavern which grew up around a shack built by James Oglethorpe's men in 1734 when Georgia was first colonized; by 1753 it was a functioning seafarers' inn. What I'm trying to say here is that this restaurant comes by its piracy motif legitimately, and that I am not the first to seek shelter from a storm within its walls. I chatted with the waitress (no, this is not usual weather for Savannah; yes, the cornbread is fantastic) and asked for the house specialty, fried chicken. The fried chicken was not only tender and delicious, but also -- bear with me, guys -- covered with a thick sauce of honey and pecans. I ate half a chicken as the thunder rattled the walls and nearby couples complained about the roof leaking.
By the time I had finished the storm had abated some, and the night had gone from invisible to pearly and luminous. Marveling at the astonishing light, I fought the storm one more time on my way back to the hotel. I believe I came all this way to be blinded by the sun's reflection in the Savannah pavement as it conquered the clouds, its inverse twin casting my shadow on the dashboard. And fuck me if, pulling into the Microtel at the end of this brief but eventful evening, I didn't see a double rainbow -- for the second time in my life, and the second time in the last two months -- arcing across the opalescent clouds, from one pot of gold to another.
I checked in at Savannah just after four and went exploring. I wanted to know how this town became famous for its beauty. I quickly found my own answer: it's the proliferation of Spanish moss hanging from every tree like Christmas streamers. Driving down a main boulevard is like taking a walk in the woods. After a stop at a used bookstore, I continued my sojourns with a trip east on US-80. You see, all this time I've been telling a fib. I've been calling this a coast-to-coast journey, and since I started on the Gulf Coast that is technically true, but that's not what people usually mean when they say "coast-to-coast." To really earn that title I had to see the Atlantic Ocean. I resolved that Savannah would be the place, and I chose right. To find the ocean I took the highway all the way out to Tybee Island, across bridges spanning the less solid parts of the swamp. Looking out over the railings of those bridges, I saw dark clouds gathering, and in the stormwrought half-twilight the bright grass and dark water clashed joyously. My heart beat faster.
My visit to the Tybee Island beach was quick and professional. I took pictures of the seagulls swarming a woman who was feeding them bread, then strode to the water to sample it. I can report that the Atlantic at Savannah is less salty than the Pacific at San Francisco and much less salty than the Great Salt Lake, and has a thinner consistency than either. These tasks done, my journey had spanned all the coasts. I turned around to go back to town...
...and ran smack into some Weather. In the hour I'd been gone, Savannah had begun taking what might loosely be called an urban bath, if you drop hairdryers into the bathtub a lot. I've driven through slightly worse rain on the interstates, but never through flash floods, and never through a storm so vicious and full of crackling electricity. The lightning was nonstop and deafening even from inside the car. One bolt struck a transformer on the opposite side of the road, which exploded like a shotgun and spat sparks into the air. My emergency flashers flaring a few feet into the evening, plumes of water overwhelming my tires and windshield, lightning crashing for moments on end into some unlucky tree not very far away, I thought: This is going to make a fantastic blog post.
If I asked you to guess what sort of restaurant I went to, you would be unable to match the truth for aptness. My eatery was the Pirates' House, a tavern which grew up around a shack built by James Oglethorpe's men in 1734 when Georgia was first colonized; by 1753 it was a functioning seafarers' inn. What I'm trying to say here is that this restaurant comes by its piracy motif legitimately, and that I am not the first to seek shelter from a storm within its walls. I chatted with the waitress (no, this is not usual weather for Savannah; yes, the cornbread is fantastic) and asked for the house specialty, fried chicken. The fried chicken was not only tender and delicious, but also -- bear with me, guys -- covered with a thick sauce of honey and pecans. I ate half a chicken as the thunder rattled the walls and nearby couples complained about the roof leaking.
By the time I had finished the storm had abated some, and the night had gone from invisible to pearly and luminous. Marveling at the astonishing light, I fought the storm one more time on my way back to the hotel. I believe I came all this way to be blinded by the sun's reflection in the Savannah pavement as it conquered the clouds, its inverse twin casting my shadow on the dashboard. And fuck me if, pulling into the Microtel at the end of this brief but eventful evening, I didn't see a double rainbow -- for the second time in my life, and the second time in the last two months -- arcing across the opalescent clouds, from one pot of gold to another.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Winning the Charlottery
I've spent the last two nights with my brother Alex here in Charlotte -- not to be confused with my hostess Alex in Eustis, nor my hostess Alexis in Seattle -- and we have had multifarious Fun Thymes! Fortunately for the length of this entry, most of these Fun Thymes have been of a catching-up and sharing-cool-things nature that don't really need recapitulation here, except to say that I have infected Alex with the Haruhi Suzumiya meme I got from Ruth and Robert. I am an anime proliferation vector! But we've done other things, too. Most novel: rock climbing! I've never been rock climbing before, but on Wednesday I scaled a 25-foot wall and on Thursday a 30-foot wall at the National Whitewater Center. Guys, rock climbing is hard! My fingertips have muscles I didn't know about, and they hurt!
What struck me about rock climbing, which I think of as a dangerous sport, is how safe it is as practiced at the places I went. You can scale walls at four years old. It's all because of the belaying: a person or mechanism is gripping a rope run through a pulley at the top of the rock down to a secure (and package-flattering) harness strapped to your waist. If you fall off, which you will, the belayer controls the rate of your descent, and you land like a feather. For the same reason, you don't have to climb down, which would be perilous because you can't see what you're doing; once you've reached the top you just let go. As a result, what could be a terrifying activity is actually exhilarating, fun -- and very difficult for those of us who aren't especially flexible. Getting from one finger- or toehold to the next requires a certain amount of yoga and stern control of one's center of gravity. Otherwise, well, you get a free ride down the rope.
I also got to catch up with a college friend, Laura, who I haven't seen for five years over lunch this afternoon. She's living here in Charlotte working as a substitute teacher, having spent two years with Teach for America and another two in area high schools. But she's like me: education isn't a calling for her, not a career, just a job. Which is not to say she's not good at it!!! -- and anyone who works with inner-city middle schoolers has my respect -- but she and I are both holding out hope that we'll find something else out there. We also talked about creative writing; I shared a writing exercise I invented and Laura told me about a short-story she's writing and her problems coming to grips with how to write a monster convincingly. It was fun chatting like old times, though I was sorry I couldn't ask if she wanted to go to Edwardo's for dinner. I may get to see her again this evening, unless Alex and I end up playing D&D. And then there's a forum friend I'm hoping to link up with while I'm here! So much fun to have, so little time!
What struck me about rock climbing, which I think of as a dangerous sport, is how safe it is as practiced at the places I went. You can scale walls at four years old. It's all because of the belaying: a person or mechanism is gripping a rope run through a pulley at the top of the rock down to a secure (and package-flattering) harness strapped to your waist. If you fall off, which you will, the belayer controls the rate of your descent, and you land like a feather. For the same reason, you don't have to climb down, which would be perilous because you can't see what you're doing; once you've reached the top you just let go. As a result, what could be a terrifying activity is actually exhilarating, fun -- and very difficult for those of us who aren't especially flexible. Getting from one finger- or toehold to the next requires a certain amount of yoga and stern control of one's center of gravity. Otherwise, well, you get a free ride down the rope.
I also got to catch up with a college friend, Laura, who I haven't seen for five years over lunch this afternoon. She's living here in Charlotte working as a substitute teacher, having spent two years with Teach for America and another two in area high schools. But she's like me: education isn't a calling for her, not a career, just a job. Which is not to say she's not good at it!!! -- and anyone who works with inner-city middle schoolers has my respect -- but she and I are both holding out hope that we'll find something else out there. We also talked about creative writing; I shared a writing exercise I invented and Laura told me about a short-story she's writing and her problems coming to grips with how to write a monster convincingly. It was fun chatting like old times, though I was sorry I couldn't ask if she wanted to go to Edwardo's for dinner. I may get to see her again this evening, unless Alex and I end up playing D&D. And then there's a forum friend I'm hoping to link up with while I'm here! So much fun to have, so little time!
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Bullet train
Another missed post means more bullet points!
- Indianapolis activity 1: puzzles at the Lilly Library! This library, which houses UI's rare manuscripts and such, had an exhibition on mechanical puzzles ranging from tangrams to Rubik's Cubes to twisted pieces of metal you had to figure out how to separate. I accidentally spent two hours there playing with the puzzles! Also there: a gigantic edition of Audubon's guide to birds. They turn the page every week. This week was grackles, which seemed appropriate for the blackbird theme of the trip.
- Indy activity 2: hiking in Brown County! The sign said "Ogle Lake," so I did.
- Indy activity 3: watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya with Robert and Ruth! I'd never seen the show before, and now I've seen the first five or six episodes (in broadcast order, not chronological; this is important). Now I too can participate in the fan-wankery over this show! It is a lot of fun, at least as far as this particular normal human being is concerned.
- Missing: cottonwood seeds. They'd been drifting across all the non-coastal interstates since Denver and I'd gotten to like them. Now I'm either too far east or outside of cottonwood seed season, and either way there's no more cotton drifting around. Also missing: Rene, Al, Aleksa, Ruth, and Robert. There's nothing like making new friends! -- and then having to drive away a couple days later. >.<
- Passed: a guy driving a beige car with a U.S. Marines bumper sticker. Thought: Hey, mister tan Marine man, play a song for me.
- Currently residing in: the Red Roof Inn in southern Knoxville, Tennessee. Entertainment: nature! Their Nature Center here has a parking lot eerily reminiscent of the Calusa Nature Center back home. Their trails, though, are more convoluted and easier to get lost in, which I did, to my delight! There was forest and rock and the Tennessee River and lots and LOTS of bright blue damselflies. Also attempted: McKay Used Books, a warehouse of a used bookstore that turned out to have the same isolating feel as Wal-Mart. I did not know a used bookstore could feel like that.
- Next stop: Charlotte!
- Indianapolis activity 1: puzzles at the Lilly Library! This library, which houses UI's rare manuscripts and such, had an exhibition on mechanical puzzles ranging from tangrams to Rubik's Cubes to twisted pieces of metal you had to figure out how to separate. I accidentally spent two hours there playing with the puzzles! Also there: a gigantic edition of Audubon's guide to birds. They turn the page every week. This week was grackles, which seemed appropriate for the blackbird theme of the trip.
- Indy activity 2: hiking in Brown County! The sign said "Ogle Lake," so I did.
- Indy activity 3: watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya with Robert and Ruth! I'd never seen the show before, and now I've seen the first five or six episodes (in broadcast order, not chronological; this is important). Now I too can participate in the fan-wankery over this show! It is a lot of fun, at least as far as this particular normal human being is concerned.
- Missing: cottonwood seeds. They'd been drifting across all the non-coastal interstates since Denver and I'd gotten to like them. Now I'm either too far east or outside of cottonwood seed season, and either way there's no more cotton drifting around. Also missing: Rene, Al, Aleksa, Ruth, and Robert. There's nothing like making new friends! -- and then having to drive away a couple days later. >.<
- Passed: a guy driving a beige car with a U.S. Marines bumper sticker. Thought: Hey, mister tan Marine man, play a song for me.
- Currently residing in: the Red Roof Inn in southern Knoxville, Tennessee. Entertainment: nature! Their Nature Center here has a parking lot eerily reminiscent of the Calusa Nature Center back home. Their trails, though, are more convoluted and easier to get lost in, which I did, to my delight! There was forest and rock and the Tennessee River and lots and LOTS of bright blue damselflies. Also attempted: McKay Used Books, a warehouse of a used bookstore that turned out to have the same isolating feel as Wal-Mart. I did not know a used bookstore could feel like that.
- Next stop: Charlotte!
Sunday, July 19, 2009
I woke up in a car
A "usual" day on this trip, if there is such a thing, is that I have a hotel on one end, a hotel or friend on the other, and some driving in between. Today was unusual in that I had friends on both ends! I spent this morning in Chicago helping Aleksa claim the last two Power Stars in Super Mario Galaxy; she has now unlocked Luigi and thinks I'm a video game deity (which, one gets the impression, is pretty high up there as deities go). But in order to have happy welcomings one first must have sad partings, and I said goodbye to Al, Rene, and Aleksa at around 10:30. As planned, I stopped at the Parthenon for lunch -- their slogan should be "nothing is ever as good as you remember it, except the Parthenon's saganaki" -- and then made for Indianapolis to stay with Ruth and Robert, aka Mylene and Paradox from the Utena forum.
I'd woken up early, at eight, to have time to play with Aleksa before leaving. (She slept in till 8:30 by accident, and yelled at her mom for not waking her up sooner.) As a result, on the way to Indy I encountered a problem: I kept nearly nodding off. That's no way to make a road trip, so I pulled over at a Mobil station and took a half-hour nap in the driver's seat. The reason this event was significant enough to mention in this space is that I'm pretty sure if I'd been making this drive a month ago, I'd have tried to soldier through the fatigue, thinking "well, I can't exactly pull over at a gas station and take a nap, can I?" It turns out that yes -- yes, I can -- and it feels good. I drove the rest of the way to Indianapolis full of energy and ready to meet two new friends!
And it turns out that Ruth and Robert are both swell people! Ruth's a public librarian, Robert a code monkey for the VA. They met on the Internet because of Sailor Moon, explored their shared geekeries on online forums, role-plays, and chat, and ended up going to school together at Purdue. They got married in 2003. This trip isn't about collecting love stories anymore, but if it were, this one would be a heartwarming tale about love persevering across distances (Robert is Texan, Ruth Indiananinian) and through economic hardship.
Yes, they're a sweet couple. They're also both wonderfully nerdy, so we spent much of the evening, including my first-ever dinner at a Japanese hibachi place rather similar to having a Mongolian barbecue right at your table, chatting easily about anime and video games and the Internet. You'd be surprised watching us to learn we were meeting for the first time! Shared subculture is a great social loosener, and of course it helps that we've been reading each other's forum posts for a couple years. In fact, things have gone well enough that I'm staying another night! I'll spend tomorrow exploring upstate Indiana -- there's a puzzle exhibition at a library in Bloomington, conveniently near some hiking trails that Robert and Ruth assure me are beautiful -- and then, time permitting, make the obligatory visit to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. There's a race this weekend, so it might be an interesting time to visit! Unfortunately, I'll be making these trips alone, since my hosts have this "work" shit they have to do, but we'll be able to spend the evening together!
To avoid road naps tomorrow I'll go abed now. Until the morrow!
I'd woken up early, at eight, to have time to play with Aleksa before leaving. (She slept in till 8:30 by accident, and yelled at her mom for not waking her up sooner.) As a result, on the way to Indy I encountered a problem: I kept nearly nodding off. That's no way to make a road trip, so I pulled over at a Mobil station and took a half-hour nap in the driver's seat. The reason this event was significant enough to mention in this space is that I'm pretty sure if I'd been making this drive a month ago, I'd have tried to soldier through the fatigue, thinking "well, I can't exactly pull over at a gas station and take a nap, can I?" It turns out that yes -- yes, I can -- and it feels good. I drove the rest of the way to Indianapolis full of energy and ready to meet two new friends!
And it turns out that Ruth and Robert are both swell people! Ruth's a public librarian, Robert a code monkey for the VA. They met on the Internet because of Sailor Moon, explored their shared geekeries on online forums, role-plays, and chat, and ended up going to school together at Purdue. They got married in 2003. This trip isn't about collecting love stories anymore, but if it were, this one would be a heartwarming tale about love persevering across distances (Robert is Texan, Ruth Indiananinian) and through economic hardship.
Yes, they're a sweet couple. They're also both wonderfully nerdy, so we spent much of the evening, including my first-ever dinner at a Japanese hibachi place rather similar to having a Mongolian barbecue right at your table, chatting easily about anime and video games and the Internet. You'd be surprised watching us to learn we were meeting for the first time! Shared subculture is a great social loosener, and of course it helps that we've been reading each other's forum posts for a couple years. In fact, things have gone well enough that I'm staying another night! I'll spend tomorrow exploring upstate Indiana -- there's a puzzle exhibition at a library in Bloomington, conveniently near some hiking trails that Robert and Ruth assure me are beautiful -- and then, time permitting, make the obligatory visit to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. There's a race this weekend, so it might be an interesting time to visit! Unfortunately, I'll be making these trips alone, since my hosts have this "work" shit they have to do, but we'll be able to spend the evening together!
To avoid road naps tomorrow I'll go abed now. Until the morrow!
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Most true of all the true, say we
I missed an update yesterday for the first time in -- well, a while! That's because I'm having a blast in Chicago. This is the city where I went to college with many of the friends I've been staying with, including Wiley in Aurora, Sushu and Jono (the bride and groom) in San Francisco, and Alexis in Seattle. Here in Chicago, I'm staying with Jono's family: his mother and father Rene [sic] and Al, and his nine-year-old sister Aleksa. They are fantastic hosts! Aleksa and I have been playing a lot of Super Mario Galaxy. She got 100 stars by herself and we're trying to crack the last 20 before I leave tomorrow. These are some of the hardest stars in the game, which means they're stars I've attempted dozens of times at home, which in turn means that I've gotten disproportionately good at them; Aleksa is very deeply impressed and says she wishes I could stay here forever. :D Rene and Al have also been extremely welcoming, and took me to two fine eateries for dinner yesterday and today.
All this couldn't be better suited for the breather I needed Chicago to be. Video games and nice meals are a little taste of home here in the Windy City. I've managed to get out of the house as well, though: today I drove down to the university, where I took a deeply nostalgic walking tour of campus. I have memories attached to almost all of those buildings, and I remembered a few stories I'd forgotten just by walking by the places where they happened. There's also some new alongside the old: the street-crossing lights are the countdown kind now, and oh, right, there's a frigging enormous new dorm being built right behind my old digs in Burton-Judson. Everything was closed, of course, this being a Saturday in summer, but the feeling you get walking around your old college, a mix of nostalgia and mastery and regret, is powerful, an aesthetic experience in itself.
And then I went to Edwardo's, my once and future favorite pizzeria of all time anywhere ever. They tried to serve me a "mini-pizza," since I was alone, but I know their wiles: the mini-pizza is prefabricated and not half as good as a freshly baked pie. I got the delectable, made-from-scratch deep dish and downed it while thinking of all the times I'd been to that restaurant before, who I was with and what I was literally and figuratively carrying.
When I got back to the house, Rene took Aleksa and me to the Brookfield Zoo! It was full of the exotic fauna that most Americans only get to see in zoos. The giraffes were especially funny: the way one of them spread his front legs and stooped to get water, the way another spent ten minutes licking a tree trunk with her blue tongue. I also loved the monkey house, which is a spacious series of chambers that create a huge three-dimensional habitat for its simian inhabitants. Rene and Aleksa wouldn't go in with me because it smelled bad. In fact, it smelled like monkeys, that's all. My favorite exhibit in the monkey house was a gap in the wall inscribed with the text "Look through here to see primates behaving socially;" the gap looked back on the tourist path, and through it you could see all the zoo visitors chatting and gawking.
Social behavior, after a week of near-solitude, has been a fun challenge for me as well! It's complicated by the fact that both Al and Aleksa are hard of hearing; Aleksa in fact was born with a vestigial right ear with no canal and needs an unusual hearing aid for her left. Seating at restaurants and walking on paths always has to take into account who can hear out of which ear(s). Combine that with my own challenges understanding conversation, particularly in noisy and crowded places like zoos and restaurants, and you have all you need for some memorable interactions!
But these two halcyon nights in recollective and unseasonably cool Chicago are at an end with tonight's stay. Tomorrow I'll rustle up a lunch of flaming saganaki at the restaurant that invented it, another of my favorites from college, then make the drive to Indianapolis to stay with Ruth and Robert: two of my peeps from the Utena forum who I know only through their posts. Where I'll stay after that is still an open question; will I dart to Lexington to make Charlotte in two days, or take my time through Louisville and Knoxville? Either way, I'm slowly but surely heading southeast, back to where I began...
All this couldn't be better suited for the breather I needed Chicago to be. Video games and nice meals are a little taste of home here in the Windy City. I've managed to get out of the house as well, though: today I drove down to the university, where I took a deeply nostalgic walking tour of campus. I have memories attached to almost all of those buildings, and I remembered a few stories I'd forgotten just by walking by the places where they happened. There's also some new alongside the old: the street-crossing lights are the countdown kind now, and oh, right, there's a frigging enormous new dorm being built right behind my old digs in Burton-Judson. Everything was closed, of course, this being a Saturday in summer, but the feeling you get walking around your old college, a mix of nostalgia and mastery and regret, is powerful, an aesthetic experience in itself.
And then I went to Edwardo's, my once and future favorite pizzeria of all time anywhere ever. They tried to serve me a "mini-pizza," since I was alone, but I know their wiles: the mini-pizza is prefabricated and not half as good as a freshly baked pie. I got the delectable, made-from-scratch deep dish and downed it while thinking of all the times I'd been to that restaurant before, who I was with and what I was literally and figuratively carrying.
When I got back to the house, Rene took Aleksa and me to the Brookfield Zoo! It was full of the exotic fauna that most Americans only get to see in zoos. The giraffes were especially funny: the way one of them spread his front legs and stooped to get water, the way another spent ten minutes licking a tree trunk with her blue tongue. I also loved the monkey house, which is a spacious series of chambers that create a huge three-dimensional habitat for its simian inhabitants. Rene and Aleksa wouldn't go in with me because it smelled bad. In fact, it smelled like monkeys, that's all. My favorite exhibit in the monkey house was a gap in the wall inscribed with the text "Look through here to see primates behaving socially;" the gap looked back on the tourist path, and through it you could see all the zoo visitors chatting and gawking.
Social behavior, after a week of near-solitude, has been a fun challenge for me as well! It's complicated by the fact that both Al and Aleksa are hard of hearing; Aleksa in fact was born with a vestigial right ear with no canal and needs an unusual hearing aid for her left. Seating at restaurants and walking on paths always has to take into account who can hear out of which ear(s). Combine that with my own challenges understanding conversation, particularly in noisy and crowded places like zoos and restaurants, and you have all you need for some memorable interactions!
But these two halcyon nights in recollective and unseasonably cool Chicago are at an end with tonight's stay. Tomorrow I'll rustle up a lunch of flaming saganaki at the restaurant that invented it, another of my favorites from college, then make the drive to Indianapolis to stay with Ruth and Robert: two of my peeps from the Utena forum who I know only through their posts. Where I'll stay after that is still an open question; will I dart to Lexington to make Charlotte in two days, or take my time through Louisville and Knoxville? Either way, I'm slowly but surely heading southeast, back to where I began...
Friday, July 17, 2009
Various forms of steam
As of this day, I have achieved the Grand Isthmic Bifecta: I have visited every major United States city that is built on an isthmus! That is, both Seattle and Madison! Congratulations to me!
Today I rode on a train as a result of asking a question I already knew the answer to. Here is how that happened. Last night I was looking for something to do between St. Paul and Madison, and in my Googling I came across something called Dr. Evermore's Forevertron. In an alternate universe, the Forevertron is a device designed to propel Dr. Evermor [sic] into space on magnetic lightning bolts or something; I didn't quite follow that part. In this universe, the Forevertron is the world's largest sculpture made entirely out of scrap metal. It looks awesome. It is every steampunk novel or RPG you have ever seen, done, or eaten, like Jules Verne and Ludwig von Beethoven collaborated on a lunar rover. It is also surrounded by other scrap metal sculptures, from gigantic to tiny, of insects and birds and little tiny protestors and such. These sculptures are clearly the life's work of the couple responsible for them, and there will be ample pics eventually.
But that's not what I was trying to tell you about. I was trying to tell you about this train ride. The thing about the Forevertron is that it's located in a junkyard with no physical address in the deep rural wilds of North Freedom, Wisconsin. Nonetheless, I had managed to pull directions off Google Maps and had written them down. You'd think I'd have been happy with that, but when I stopped for lunch on my way to North Freedom I happened to pass a tourist bureau, and on a whim I decided to stop in and ask if they knew how to get to Dr. Evermore's Forevertron. This question had gotten me weird looks at the restaurant, and it got me a weird look at the tourist bureau, too. The lady working there had never heard of it but was otherwise very helpful, and I mean that sincerely; once she realized I hadn't just made up a tourist spot she was all over Google and Wikipedia trying to get me an address. I stopped her, since I'd done the same already to no effect, but not before she told me that North Freedom is really known for its railroad museum with hour-long train rides on refurbished cars from the 1910s. A train ride, you say?!? I rushed to North Freedom and arrived just in time for the last railroad expedition of the day. It was fun letting the engineer drive for a change! I also learned that -- at least in those days, no idea if it's still true -- locomotives have both forward and reverse gears. So in theory the locomotive could have pulled us forwards to the quartzite gravel quarry that was our endpoint, then pushed us backwards to bring us back to our starting place. But that's not how you actually do it, because then the engineer couldn't see where he was going on the return trip. Instead, the engineer de-couples the locomotive from the rest of the train, runs the locomotive alone backwards along a set of parallel tracks, passing the cars, then runs it forward on the original track and couples it to the caboose. Then he pulls the cars back to the starting point in reverse gear. At no point does the locomotive make a U-turn -- you can't do that on a train track; the locomotive faces forward the entire trip, even though it's pulling backward for half of it. It's designed so that the engineer has line of sight in the direction of motion either way. This is probably something some of you knew when you were six, but for this suburban boy it was a revelation. So that's how they do it!
Not much to speak of this evening. Had a quiet dinner and ice cream at the University of Madison campus; still need to plot my evil deeds tomorrow morning and hopefully see something else that makes Madison cool before I go join Jono's parents for Thai food and subsequent hospitality in La Grange, a surburb of Chicago. (Spelling matters. If you type in Lagrange, Google Maps will send you upstate.) Sadly, the Forevertron trip left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, because I talked to a woman there, a local tourist if there is such a thing, who perceived that I was in a hurry, and I am indeed worried about being in too much of a hurry. I mean, just one day in the Twin Cities? You could spend a week there and just scratch the surface. I tell myself you pass through a lot of towns on a cross-country road trip and (without a ton of time and money) you can't delve into all of them. The trip's already taken longer than I expected it to. But in some sense I am hurrying, and I don't like that, because who knows how long it will be until I'm in North Freedom, Wisconsin again, you know? It's like speed dating. You're just getting to know the town, and then whoosh, it's gone, time for the next one. Fortunately, Chicago is a city that I already know at least a little bit from my four years in college there. I know some of the good restaurants and intend to reacquaint myself with them, while also enjoying the companionship of semi-familiar faces for the first time since Seattle. Two nights in a city I already sort of know means less hurrying. Onward, upward, and southeastward -- but not too quickly!
Today I rode on a train as a result of asking a question I already knew the answer to. Here is how that happened. Last night I was looking for something to do between St. Paul and Madison, and in my Googling I came across something called Dr. Evermore's Forevertron. In an alternate universe, the Forevertron is a device designed to propel Dr. Evermor [sic] into space on magnetic lightning bolts or something; I didn't quite follow that part. In this universe, the Forevertron is the world's largest sculpture made entirely out of scrap metal. It looks awesome. It is every steampunk novel or RPG you have ever seen, done, or eaten, like Jules Verne and Ludwig von Beethoven collaborated on a lunar rover. It is also surrounded by other scrap metal sculptures, from gigantic to tiny, of insects and birds and little tiny protestors and such. These sculptures are clearly the life's work of the couple responsible for them, and there will be ample pics eventually.
But that's not what I was trying to tell you about. I was trying to tell you about this train ride. The thing about the Forevertron is that it's located in a junkyard with no physical address in the deep rural wilds of North Freedom, Wisconsin. Nonetheless, I had managed to pull directions off Google Maps and had written them down. You'd think I'd have been happy with that, but when I stopped for lunch on my way to North Freedom I happened to pass a tourist bureau, and on a whim I decided to stop in and ask if they knew how to get to Dr. Evermore's Forevertron. This question had gotten me weird looks at the restaurant, and it got me a weird look at the tourist bureau, too. The lady working there had never heard of it but was otherwise very helpful, and I mean that sincerely; once she realized I hadn't just made up a tourist spot she was all over Google and Wikipedia trying to get me an address. I stopped her, since I'd done the same already to no effect, but not before she told me that North Freedom is really known for its railroad museum with hour-long train rides on refurbished cars from the 1910s. A train ride, you say?!? I rushed to North Freedom and arrived just in time for the last railroad expedition of the day. It was fun letting the engineer drive for a change! I also learned that -- at least in those days, no idea if it's still true -- locomotives have both forward and reverse gears. So in theory the locomotive could have pulled us forwards to the quartzite gravel quarry that was our endpoint, then pushed us backwards to bring us back to our starting place. But that's not how you actually do it, because then the engineer couldn't see where he was going on the return trip. Instead, the engineer de-couples the locomotive from the rest of the train, runs the locomotive alone backwards along a set of parallel tracks, passing the cars, then runs it forward on the original track and couples it to the caboose. Then he pulls the cars back to the starting point in reverse gear. At no point does the locomotive make a U-turn -- you can't do that on a train track; the locomotive faces forward the entire trip, even though it's pulling backward for half of it. It's designed so that the engineer has line of sight in the direction of motion either way. This is probably something some of you knew when you were six, but for this suburban boy it was a revelation. So that's how they do it!
Not much to speak of this evening. Had a quiet dinner and ice cream at the University of Madison campus; still need to plot my evil deeds tomorrow morning and hopefully see something else that makes Madison cool before I go join Jono's parents for Thai food and subsequent hospitality in La Grange, a surburb of Chicago. (Spelling matters. If you type in Lagrange, Google Maps will send you upstate.) Sadly, the Forevertron trip left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, because I talked to a woman there, a local tourist if there is such a thing, who perceived that I was in a hurry, and I am indeed worried about being in too much of a hurry. I mean, just one day in the Twin Cities? You could spend a week there and just scratch the surface. I tell myself you pass through a lot of towns on a cross-country road trip and (without a ton of time and money) you can't delve into all of them. The trip's already taken longer than I expected it to. But in some sense I am hurrying, and I don't like that, because who knows how long it will be until I'm in North Freedom, Wisconsin again, you know? It's like speed dating. You're just getting to know the town, and then whoosh, it's gone, time for the next one. Fortunately, Chicago is a city that I already know at least a little bit from my four years in college there. I know some of the good restaurants and intend to reacquaint myself with them, while also enjoying the companionship of semi-familiar faces for the first time since Seattle. Two nights in a city I already sort of know means less hurrying. Onward, upward, and southeastward -- but not too quickly!
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Emo but in a good way
Bullet points today because of time management issues in connection with the slowth of Holiday Inn's Internet combined with my own slate of activities!
- I'm in St. Paul, Minnesota tonight. The drive from Sioux Falls was not arduous and doesn't want to stick in my memory. Driving is like dreaming. Sometimes you think of neat creative ideas, or you notice something and say "I want to remember that," but when you wake up it's gone. I should make more careful use of Kino for moments like that.
- Before leaving Sioux Falls I visited their butterfly garden! Hundreds of tropical butterflies flapping everywhere, absolutely beautiful, like flying flowers. They only live a couple of weeks, so the greenhouse is constantly importing more of them. My camera's batteries gave out, so I didn't get as many pictures as I might have liked, but fortunately I brought a cigarette lighter/AC adapter and charged the camera in the car.
- Before checking in at St. Paul I drove through Minneapolis. Gorgeous skyline! I stopped in at the Smitten Kitten, a somewhat netfamous adult toy store notable for their friendliness, professionalism, and sponsorship of the Sex Is Fun podcast. It's nice to be planning a visit to a city and have an "aha!" moment when you remember a place there that you never expected to be able to actually visit. The store's much smaller than I imagined, but the staff lived up to their reputation! And it turned out I even got 10% off the book I bought by mentioning the podcast.
- Later I returned to Minneapolis to the Acme Comedy Club for an hour and a half of fun times. This was at my brother's suggestion; he said he vaguely remembered going to a comedy club in Minneapolis, and that sounded like a fantastic idea to me. Some gems of jokes in there. Their headliner was very much an SMBC-style comedian, for those who know what SMBC is; basically, very good at saying something mundane to rather funny, and then saying something else that casts what he previously said in a completely new and utterly hilarious light. Simple example: "I hit a blue jay with my car yesterday. [Cue "awww" from audience.] Yeah, it's very sad. He may never play baseball again." His name was Emo Philips, and apparently I should have heard of him; he could have been George Carlin. Just now in the process of writing I Wikied him and was shocked to discover that he is a well-known comedian who actually is 53, as he claimed; he looked to me like a very talented thirty-year-old in a gray wig who was using a "slightly senile old man" persona as part of his schtick. Actually, he said he'd let his hair go gray for a movie. He wanted to get in cheaper.
Well, past my bedtime! Tomorrow I expect to be in Madison, Wisconsin; I was hoping to stay with my cousin Susan, but sadly on this day of all days she's going to be in Chicago, where I'm going to be the following night. D'oh! So Days Inn it is...
- I'm in St. Paul, Minnesota tonight. The drive from Sioux Falls was not arduous and doesn't want to stick in my memory. Driving is like dreaming. Sometimes you think of neat creative ideas, or you notice something and say "I want to remember that," but when you wake up it's gone. I should make more careful use of Kino for moments like that.
- Before leaving Sioux Falls I visited their butterfly garden! Hundreds of tropical butterflies flapping everywhere, absolutely beautiful, like flying flowers. They only live a couple of weeks, so the greenhouse is constantly importing more of them. My camera's batteries gave out, so I didn't get as many pictures as I might have liked, but fortunately I brought a cigarette lighter/AC adapter and charged the camera in the car.
- Before checking in at St. Paul I drove through Minneapolis. Gorgeous skyline! I stopped in at the Smitten Kitten, a somewhat netfamous adult toy store notable for their friendliness, professionalism, and sponsorship of the Sex Is Fun podcast. It's nice to be planning a visit to a city and have an "aha!" moment when you remember a place there that you never expected to be able to actually visit. The store's much smaller than I imagined, but the staff lived up to their reputation! And it turned out I even got 10% off the book I bought by mentioning the podcast.
- Later I returned to Minneapolis to the Acme Comedy Club for an hour and a half of fun times. This was at my brother's suggestion; he said he vaguely remembered going to a comedy club in Minneapolis, and that sounded like a fantastic idea to me. Some gems of jokes in there. Their headliner was very much an SMBC-style comedian, for those who know what SMBC is; basically, very good at saying something mundane to rather funny, and then saying something else that casts what he previously said in a completely new and utterly hilarious light. Simple example: "I hit a blue jay with my car yesterday. [Cue "awww" from audience.] Yeah, it's very sad. He may never play baseball again." His name was Emo Philips, and apparently I should have heard of him; he could have been George Carlin. Just now in the process of writing I Wikied him and was shocked to discover that he is a well-known comedian who actually is 53, as he claimed; he looked to me like a very talented thirty-year-old in a gray wig who was using a "slightly senile old man" persona as part of his schtick. Actually, he said he'd let his hair go gray for a movie. He wanted to get in cheaper.
Well, past my bedtime! Tomorrow I expect to be in Madison, Wisconsin; I was hoping to stay with my cousin Susan, but sadly on this day of all days she's going to be in Chicago, where I'm going to be the following night. D'oh! So Days Inn it is...
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
South Dakota, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain
I survived last night's thunderstorms! No one seems to have been hurt by tornadoes, so it was a false alarm. Probably happens pretty often up here. Still, the memory of the hail and the shaking street lights is sort of unsettling.
To catch up with yesterday, I neglected to mention dinner, which I ate at a firehouse that had been converted into a microbrewery. (This provides some nice symbolic unity with my first stop of the trip, where I visited a firehouse that had been converted into a museum.) I had a microbrewed root beer! It was nice -- about halfway between grocery-store root beer and the dark, rather bitter stuff at the Fort Myers microbrewery restaurant, and better to drink than either one. I've mostly been avoiding soda this trip, but I make exceptions for unusual stuff. No other culinary adventures yesterday or today, though; getting enough calories at the right intervals in interesting restaurants has been a little problematic in Wyoming and South Dakota, so when I find a place to eat I tend to order something I know I'll like.
Also left over from yesterday are two odd phenomena about South Dakota. One is that some restaurants have smoking sections. I was taken aback to be asked "smoking or non?" when I asked for a table! The other is that in South Dakota, not only is gas very cheap compared to other states I've been to, but mid-grade "plus" gas is cheaper than low-grade gas. This bizarre inversion is present at every gas station I've seen in the state. I'm told it's because they put 10% ethanol in the mid-grade gas and get big tax breaks for it that allow them to lower the price, but then why don't they put ethanol in the low- and high-grade gas as well? An enigma the gas station attendant was not equipped to answer.
Today was mostly driving end-to-end through South Dakota. The big adventure of the day was the Badlands. For context, let me explain that South Dakota is basically four hundred miles of open prairie with one town (Rapid City) in the west and another (Sioux Falls) in the east, and today I drove from the former to the latter across all that prairie. I'm emphasizing the prairie here because the Badlands is utterly shocking, terrible and eye-boggling primarily because of the contrast it makes with the grass and scrub. The Badlands look like this:
Two hundred years from now, some mad scientist invents a tractor beam and a time machine. He travels back in time to millions of years ago, where he uses the tractor beam to capture several large asteroids full of ravines and ridges and odd jutting contours like nothing on Earth. In an attempt to destroy the world, he crashes the asteroids into what will become South Dakota; this causes the extinction of the dinosaurs. The asteroids, however, do not destroy the world as planned. Instead, the above-ground parts of the asteroids loom ominously over the Dakota prairie, emitting their odd chemicals into the soil and fouling the land and water. The grass tries to reclaim the land from the asteroids, hardy weeds cropping from the rock where they can find a foothold, but in the end this feeble growth only makes the asteroids look more unearthly.
The Badlands, of course, are not actually asteroids, but they should be. You look at them flabbergasted and say "how on Earth could that have happened?" (The answer is almost invariably "erosion," so it's better not to ask.) I liked them better than Yellowstone. Less wildlife, to be sure -- only a few brave species are well-adapted for life in the South Dakota Badlands, such as the critically endangered black-footed ferret -- but the terrain was truly different, while Yellowstone was just "things you've already seen this trip packed into a smaller space." Of course, I'm prejudiced by the sheer fun I had climbing over the ridges of the Badlands. You can pull over at any number of turnouts and trek as far as you care to into that country, every step treacherous, the dirt and clay loose under your feet. I climbed the north side of one ridge and got it into my head that I had to go down the south side, which was steeper. I went step by step as far as I could, but in the end I had no alternative but to crouch and slide down the side on my sneakers, ripping at the earth with my palms to keep from somersaulting down the rocky slope -- sneakerboarding, if you will. This could have torn my hands open but didn't, so it was a good day. Afterwards I chatted with a woman from Atlanta returning from her own West Coast road trip. She had wisely stayed on the boardwalk and suggested gloves if I should try that sort of thing again in the future. One thing I didn't think to pack...
Speaking of which, I haven't been doing badly on talking to strangers recently. I've swapped stories with this woman from Atlanta, a guy from Quebec, a Texan, a New Yorker, and some others. From our chats, I'm astonished how un-unique my journey is -- how many people share an experience like this one. My Atlantan traveled the Trans-Canada Highway, which is by some metrics the longest single road in the world, end-to-end and had a fantastic time. It seems almost everyone has driven coast-to-coast, though not too many have done it solo. Of course, my sample is biased -- I'm surveying only people I'm coming across in my own coast-to-coast trip full of places tourists go -- but it's interesting to reconcile my experience of Lover's Lanes as a personal and irreproducible journey with the ubiquity of the transcontinental road trip in the American collective consciousness.
To catch up with yesterday, I neglected to mention dinner, which I ate at a firehouse that had been converted into a microbrewery. (This provides some nice symbolic unity with my first stop of the trip, where I visited a firehouse that had been converted into a museum.) I had a microbrewed root beer! It was nice -- about halfway between grocery-store root beer and the dark, rather bitter stuff at the Fort Myers microbrewery restaurant, and better to drink than either one. I've mostly been avoiding soda this trip, but I make exceptions for unusual stuff. No other culinary adventures yesterday or today, though; getting enough calories at the right intervals in interesting restaurants has been a little problematic in Wyoming and South Dakota, so when I find a place to eat I tend to order something I know I'll like.
Also left over from yesterday are two odd phenomena about South Dakota. One is that some restaurants have smoking sections. I was taken aback to be asked "smoking or non?" when I asked for a table! The other is that in South Dakota, not only is gas very cheap compared to other states I've been to, but mid-grade "plus" gas is cheaper than low-grade gas. This bizarre inversion is present at every gas station I've seen in the state. I'm told it's because they put 10% ethanol in the mid-grade gas and get big tax breaks for it that allow them to lower the price, but then why don't they put ethanol in the low- and high-grade gas as well? An enigma the gas station attendant was not equipped to answer.
Today was mostly driving end-to-end through South Dakota. The big adventure of the day was the Badlands. For context, let me explain that South Dakota is basically four hundred miles of open prairie with one town (Rapid City) in the west and another (Sioux Falls) in the east, and today I drove from the former to the latter across all that prairie. I'm emphasizing the prairie here because the Badlands is utterly shocking, terrible and eye-boggling primarily because of the contrast it makes with the grass and scrub. The Badlands look like this:
Two hundred years from now, some mad scientist invents a tractor beam and a time machine. He travels back in time to millions of years ago, where he uses the tractor beam to capture several large asteroids full of ravines and ridges and odd jutting contours like nothing on Earth. In an attempt to destroy the world, he crashes the asteroids into what will become South Dakota; this causes the extinction of the dinosaurs. The asteroids, however, do not destroy the world as planned. Instead, the above-ground parts of the asteroids loom ominously over the Dakota prairie, emitting their odd chemicals into the soil and fouling the land and water. The grass tries to reclaim the land from the asteroids, hardy weeds cropping from the rock where they can find a foothold, but in the end this feeble growth only makes the asteroids look more unearthly.
The Badlands, of course, are not actually asteroids, but they should be. You look at them flabbergasted and say "how on Earth could that have happened?" (The answer is almost invariably "erosion," so it's better not to ask.) I liked them better than Yellowstone. Less wildlife, to be sure -- only a few brave species are well-adapted for life in the South Dakota Badlands, such as the critically endangered black-footed ferret -- but the terrain was truly different, while Yellowstone was just "things you've already seen this trip packed into a smaller space." Of course, I'm prejudiced by the sheer fun I had climbing over the ridges of the Badlands. You can pull over at any number of turnouts and trek as far as you care to into that country, every step treacherous, the dirt and clay loose under your feet. I climbed the north side of one ridge and got it into my head that I had to go down the south side, which was steeper. I went step by step as far as I could, but in the end I had no alternative but to crouch and slide down the side on my sneakers, ripping at the earth with my palms to keep from somersaulting down the rocky slope -- sneakerboarding, if you will. This could have torn my hands open but didn't, so it was a good day. Afterwards I chatted with a woman from Atlanta returning from her own West Coast road trip. She had wisely stayed on the boardwalk and suggested gloves if I should try that sort of thing again in the future. One thing I didn't think to pack...
Speaking of which, I haven't been doing badly on talking to strangers recently. I've swapped stories with this woman from Atlanta, a guy from Quebec, a Texan, a New Yorker, and some others. From our chats, I'm astonished how un-unique my journey is -- how many people share an experience like this one. My Atlantan traveled the Trans-Canada Highway, which is by some metrics the longest single road in the world, end-to-end and had a fantastic time. It seems almost everyone has driven coast-to-coast, though not too many have done it solo. Of course, my sample is biased -- I'm surveying only people I'm coming across in my own coast-to-coast trip full of places tourists go -- but it's interesting to reconcile my experience of Lover's Lanes as a personal and irreproducible journey with the ubiquity of the transcontinental road trip in the American collective consciousness.
Monday, July 13, 2009
A holy place
In American Gods, the novel generally considered Neil Gaiman's best work in conventional prose, it turns out that America's holy places are the kitschy roadside stops that travelers flock to without ever being quite sure why. Pulling over to stare at the world's biggest ball of twine or whatever is a form of worship, according to Gaiman's mythos, and so when gods in America want to have a meeting, they hold it at a tourist trap that has been sanctified by the gawking of people like me.
By this metric, Mount Rushmore is possibly the holiest place in America.
It's just a bunch of presidents carved into a mountain. It's not even an especially impressive mountain by local standards, and the statuary is inconsistent; Washington's face is well articulated, while Lincoln looks like the artist forgot that people's heads have backs. But it's a symbol of America we rank just behind the Statue of Liberty and the bald eagle. And you know what, it is pretty awesome to round the corner and discover, wtf, there are presidents on that rock! And we've lavished so much attention on it that by reason of its popularity alone it has actually become a symbol of America up there with Lady Liberty.
I snapped a few shots, the same shots every tourist snaps, put in my worship, and went into the gift store to see if they sold the Constitution, as I thought they should, since the gentlemen on the mountain were among the luminaries who wrote it, fought for it, died for it. To my delight, a nicely bound Constitution was just $10! I picked it up -- a Mount Rushmore Constitution -- along with a similarly small volume containing the three poems Abraham Lincoln is known to have written and which I have never read. I'll let you know if he's any good.
I also need to write about the Reptile Gardens -- but first, oh my gosh, guys, the sky out there is getting dark! They're saying a terrible thunderstorm is heading towards where I'm staying in Rapid City, and there's a tornado warning out. It would be the day I'm doing my laundry. (The Days Inn has facilities.) So if you're not reading this, it may mean I'm being absorbed by a tornado and need your help right away!
Where was I? Right, the Reptile Gardens. The path to Mount Rushmore is like Carnival -- the parts that aren't federally protected, anyway -- lined with lesser holy places trying to pick up some of the mountain's powerful tourist radiation. I picked the Reptile Gardens to investigate, and it turns out the park's collection of reptiles is among the most comprehensive in America! They had at least half a dozen snakes of varieties that you literally can't see anywhere else in the country. I think it was the enormous animals that made the biggest impressions on me, though: the crocodile and the Komodo dragon...
Holy shit, the street lamps are shaking back and forth outside. I'm going to abbreviate this post.
P.S. Editing this entry to say I'm still not dead twenty minutes later, but I wanted to mark that today is the one-month anniversary of my departure. It staggers me to think I've actually taken care of myself okay for thirty days and nights, usually not sleeping in the same place two nights in a row, and have crossed America one and a half times in that span. (I'm definitely clear of the Rockies now, though the foothills persist; those mountains never end, they just roll away.) I'm both bolstered and sobered by what I've achieved. Now I just need some luck with the funnel clouds and I may even make it home in one piece!
P.P.S. It's hailing out. In mid-July. 70-mph wind gusts. The guy on TV says it's going to get worse.
By this metric, Mount Rushmore is possibly the holiest place in America.
It's just a bunch of presidents carved into a mountain. It's not even an especially impressive mountain by local standards, and the statuary is inconsistent; Washington's face is well articulated, while Lincoln looks like the artist forgot that people's heads have backs. But it's a symbol of America we rank just behind the Statue of Liberty and the bald eagle. And you know what, it is pretty awesome to round the corner and discover, wtf, there are presidents on that rock! And we've lavished so much attention on it that by reason of its popularity alone it has actually become a symbol of America up there with Lady Liberty.
I snapped a few shots, the same shots every tourist snaps, put in my worship, and went into the gift store to see if they sold the Constitution, as I thought they should, since the gentlemen on the mountain were among the luminaries who wrote it, fought for it, died for it. To my delight, a nicely bound Constitution was just $10! I picked it up -- a Mount Rushmore Constitution -- along with a similarly small volume containing the three poems Abraham Lincoln is known to have written and which I have never read. I'll let you know if he's any good.
I also need to write about the Reptile Gardens -- but first, oh my gosh, guys, the sky out there is getting dark! They're saying a terrible thunderstorm is heading towards where I'm staying in Rapid City, and there's a tornado warning out. It would be the day I'm doing my laundry. (The Days Inn has facilities.) So if you're not reading this, it may mean I'm being absorbed by a tornado and need your help right away!
Where was I? Right, the Reptile Gardens. The path to Mount Rushmore is like Carnival -- the parts that aren't federally protected, anyway -- lined with lesser holy places trying to pick up some of the mountain's powerful tourist radiation. I picked the Reptile Gardens to investigate, and it turns out the park's collection of reptiles is among the most comprehensive in America! They had at least half a dozen snakes of varieties that you literally can't see anywhere else in the country. I think it was the enormous animals that made the biggest impressions on me, though: the crocodile and the Komodo dragon...
Holy shit, the street lamps are shaking back and forth outside. I'm going to abbreviate this post.
P.S. Editing this entry to say I'm still not dead twenty minutes later, but I wanted to mark that today is the one-month anniversary of my departure. It staggers me to think I've actually taken care of myself okay for thirty days and nights, usually not sleeping in the same place two nights in a row, and have crossed America one and a half times in that span. (I'm definitely clear of the Rockies now, though the foothills persist; those mountains never end, they just roll away.) I'm both bolstered and sobered by what I've achieved. Now I just need some luck with the funnel clouds and I may even make it home in one piece!
P.P.S. It's hailing out. In mid-July. 70-mph wind gusts. The guy on TV says it's going to get worse.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
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!
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!
More of a Boo-Boo than a Yogi
Brief one today because it's late and I'm tired. I'm posting this from Gardiner, Montana, a tiny town in the south of the state that exists solely to serve as the northwest gateway to Yellowstone National Park. Originally I planned to spend two nights here, the better to see more of Yellowstone, but a combination of several things -- the price of the hotel, my eagerness to return east, and my early arrival at the park today, to name a few -- made me decide otherwise. Today I explored the northern reaches of Yellowstone end to end. This was not entirely planned. I had meant to go to Tower Falls, in the central north part of the park, and then go back. But coming out I managed to make a wrong turn that resulted in me driving all the way to the northeast corner of the park, actually reaching the exit before realizing I'd made a wrong turn. This was even more remarkable because the scenery was rather different than it had been on the way in, and everything had different names, yet apparently I noticed nothing wrong. I think the angel of adventure was steering at that moment.
But all went well. If I hadn't made that wrong turn, I wouldn't have seen the herd of easily over a hundred wild bison grazing on the mountainous plains. I wouldn't have seen a few curious bison up close, standing right next to (and in one case, on) the road, inspecting the traffic as if posing for photographs. Wild bison are ugly sons of bitches, with mats of fur and big dead black eyes. I would have preferred to see more of the small black bear, who flashed once between trees, visible only for a moment but in the center of my vision. He caused a traffic jam. I'd read about "bear jams" at Yellowstone, but I'd somehow thought they were caused by bears standing on the road; I now think they're mostly caused by tourists trying to photograph bears standing beside the road. In addition to these megafauna and some tame mule deer who live near the Mammoth Hot Springs, I made the acquaintance of some odd rodents who look like squirrels but have almost no tails, or like large chipmunks but with no markings, and also two species of insect I haven't come across before. One in particular, which emits a loud flapping buzz as it flies, is paranoid and extremely well camouflaged, lost against the scenery the moment it alights and impossible to photograph.
Of course the scenery is beautiful, but other than that it is unremarkable.
At several points during the day, such as when I glimpsed a hawk perching atop a nearby rock in a picturesque fashion as I drove past, I wished I'd had the presence of mind or reflexes to take a snapshot (as I did of many other scenes today). I caught myself slipping into the "pics or it didn't happen" mentality that is why I distrust cameras in the first place. So I want to state right now that there was a hawk, he was perching on a rock, and he was very handsome, and although I would like to share the moment with you, it happened whether you can see him or not. I remember.
Tomorrow? Cody, Wyoming, if the park ensnares me as I take the long loop through it past Old Faithful and Yellowstone Lake; or Greybull, Wyoming, if I am less captivated. The angel of adventure is pulling for Cody.
But all went well. If I hadn't made that wrong turn, I wouldn't have seen the herd of easily over a hundred wild bison grazing on the mountainous plains. I wouldn't have seen a few curious bison up close, standing right next to (and in one case, on) the road, inspecting the traffic as if posing for photographs. Wild bison are ugly sons of bitches, with mats of fur and big dead black eyes. I would have preferred to see more of the small black bear, who flashed once between trees, visible only for a moment but in the center of my vision. He caused a traffic jam. I'd read about "bear jams" at Yellowstone, but I'd somehow thought they were caused by bears standing on the road; I now think they're mostly caused by tourists trying to photograph bears standing beside the road. In addition to these megafauna and some tame mule deer who live near the Mammoth Hot Springs, I made the acquaintance of some odd rodents who look like squirrels but have almost no tails, or like large chipmunks but with no markings, and also two species of insect I haven't come across before. One in particular, which emits a loud flapping buzz as it flies, is paranoid and extremely well camouflaged, lost against the scenery the moment it alights and impossible to photograph.
Of course the scenery is beautiful, but other than that it is unremarkable.
At several points during the day, such as when I glimpsed a hawk perching atop a nearby rock in a picturesque fashion as I drove past, I wished I'd had the presence of mind or reflexes to take a snapshot (as I did of many other scenes today). I caught myself slipping into the "pics or it didn't happen" mentality that is why I distrust cameras in the first place. So I want to state right now that there was a hawk, he was perching on a rock, and he was very handsome, and although I would like to share the moment with you, it happened whether you can see him or not. I remember.
Tomorrow? Cody, Wyoming, if the park ensnares me as I take the long loop through it past Old Faithful and Yellowstone Lake; or Greybull, Wyoming, if I am less captivated. The angel of adventure is pulling for Cody.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Fuck yeah America
Yesterday, July 3, I arrived in Seattle just as planned and commenced celebration! I've now driven corner to corner through this country of ours, and have completed this phase of the journey in time to celebrate our national birthday. Seattle was built amidst a Byzantine maze of rivers and lakes, and it was Lake Union, in the heart of the city, that Seattle chose as the site of its Fourth of July celebration. The lakeside Gas Works Park, itself built upon the ruins of a defunct power plant, was the center of the celebration, so of course Alexis, Aviva, and I avoided it like the proverbial restaurant no one goes to anymore because it's too crowded. Instead we found a nice public pier on one side of the lake to watch the show from.
The story of how we found the pier is itself worth telling and involves a firecracker, a frying pan, and the Seattle police department. The firecracker was employed by the neighbors in holiday festivities at about 2 PM, when we three were at Safeway, and caused a fire to start on Alexis's lawn. The frying pan was also employed by the neighbors, this time to put out the fire. The Seattle police department was employed by Alexis to file a nuisance complaint to cover her butt in case the landlady wondered why there was a five-by-twelve scorch mark on her lawn, and while they were here ("Ma'am, are you aware you're not supposed to set your lawn on fire?") Alexis asked where we should watch the fireworks from. They suggested the east shore of the lake, so that's where we went. Through the help of a privately employed security officer, we then discovered a pier that most people didn't know about or notice, yet which was perfectly public and centrally located -- best seats in the house if you don't own a boat. Anecdotally, I heard over eight hundred thousand people were there, eyes focused like mine on the water.
While we waited for the big show to begin, we picnicked on salad and sandwiches, chatted, did Tarot readings, had poking contests, and watched the various illegal private fireworks shows light up the sky as the sun dipped below the horizon. But when the real show started and the first glittering flares went up from the barge, the breath was taken away, and it didn't come back until the final explosions twenty minutes later. There were spheres, cubes, smile faces, planets, and stars; the booms had shapes too, but English doesn't have easily accessed words for them. The magnitude of this fireworks show could be measured on the Richter scale. It was a fantastic fucking show. I'll tell you, whatever faults it might have, let no one say America can't paint the sky gold.
The show ended at quarter till eleven, and there was a little traffic, and long story short I'm exhausted from all the cheering and swearing. I'm going to bed. Tomorrow Aviva will say her tearful goodbyes and board a Greyhound bus back to Portland, and sometime soon -- the next day? -- I will say a goodbye of my own, kick patriotism across the curb, and set sail for Vancouver.
The story of how we found the pier is itself worth telling and involves a firecracker, a frying pan, and the Seattle police department. The firecracker was employed by the neighbors in holiday festivities at about 2 PM, when we three were at Safeway, and caused a fire to start on Alexis's lawn. The frying pan was also employed by the neighbors, this time to put out the fire. The Seattle police department was employed by Alexis to file a nuisance complaint to cover her butt in case the landlady wondered why there was a five-by-twelve scorch mark on her lawn, and while they were here ("Ma'am, are you aware you're not supposed to set your lawn on fire?") Alexis asked where we should watch the fireworks from. They suggested the east shore of the lake, so that's where we went. Through the help of a privately employed security officer, we then discovered a pier that most people didn't know about or notice, yet which was perfectly public and centrally located -- best seats in the house if you don't own a boat. Anecdotally, I heard over eight hundred thousand people were there, eyes focused like mine on the water.
While we waited for the big show to begin, we picnicked on salad and sandwiches, chatted, did Tarot readings, had poking contests, and watched the various illegal private fireworks shows light up the sky as the sun dipped below the horizon. But when the real show started and the first glittering flares went up from the barge, the breath was taken away, and it didn't come back until the final explosions twenty minutes later. There were spheres, cubes, smile faces, planets, and stars; the booms had shapes too, but English doesn't have easily accessed words for them. The magnitude of this fireworks show could be measured on the Richter scale. It was a fantastic fucking show. I'll tell you, whatever faults it might have, let no one say America can't paint the sky gold.
The show ended at quarter till eleven, and there was a little traffic, and long story short I'm exhausted from all the cheering and swearing. I'm going to bed. Tomorrow Aviva will say her tearful goodbyes and board a Greyhound bus back to Portland, and sometime soon -- the next day? -- I will say a goodbye of my own, kick patriotism across the curb, and set sail for Vancouver.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
What not to do while on a road trip
When I drove from Eustis to Atlanta in a day, then drove from Paducah to Kansas City in a day, those were some pretty long hauls. They were about as far as I'd want to drive in a day. They were also substantially shorter than today's drive, which took me virtually nonstop from Pacifica, in the south Bay Area, to Waldport, Oregon, about halfway up the Pacific coast of that state, on Route 101, which is two lanes and 55 mph for much of the way. I spent twelve hours in the car, getting on the road at 7:30 and not stopping till Waldport at the other 7:30. I will not be doing that again this trip if I can reasonably help it.
Fortunately, having friends in the car makes time go faster! Alexis and Isaac both joined me for this leg of the trip and kept me awake. I arrived rather happy and wired at the home of an online acquaintance of Isaac's, whom he was meeting for the first time -- a beautiful house overlooking Alsea Bay and the Pacific Ocean -- which is where I'll be sleeping tonight. On the way we somehow managed to squeeze in a few en-route adventures. We stopped for lunch in Arcata, where I had an enormous burrito (the first burrito I've ever liked, though I was intimidated by its size), followed by a regional treat called an It's-It: vanilla ice cream sandwiched between two soft oatmeal cookies and with a chocolate shell. Absolutely delicious, of course, and how could it not be. Apparently northern Cali is the only place you can get them!
In Oregon I made a surprising discovery: it is illegal to pump one's own gas in Oregon. All gas must be pumped by a gas station attendant. Isaac, who lives in Portland, says this idiosyncracy is just make-work, and I expect he's right. Nevertheless, gas in Oregon is a quarter cheaper than gas in northern California.
Driving up the coast, we saw some of the most amazing scenery of the trip in the form of enormous redwoods, white water and beaches on the Pacific, and cliff faces that looked like something out of an adventure or romance film. Tomorrow we'll likely head back south a few miles to properly check out the trails around Cape Perpetua, then make what I'm assured is an easy three-hour drive to Portland. And then, the world!
Fortunately, having friends in the car makes time go faster! Alexis and Isaac both joined me for this leg of the trip and kept me awake. I arrived rather happy and wired at the home of an online acquaintance of Isaac's, whom he was meeting for the first time -- a beautiful house overlooking Alsea Bay and the Pacific Ocean -- which is where I'll be sleeping tonight. On the way we somehow managed to squeeze in a few en-route adventures. We stopped for lunch in Arcata, where I had an enormous burrito (the first burrito I've ever liked, though I was intimidated by its size), followed by a regional treat called an It's-It: vanilla ice cream sandwiched between two soft oatmeal cookies and with a chocolate shell. Absolutely delicious, of course, and how could it not be. Apparently northern Cali is the only place you can get them!
In Oregon I made a surprising discovery: it is illegal to pump one's own gas in Oregon. All gas must be pumped by a gas station attendant. Isaac, who lives in Portland, says this idiosyncracy is just make-work, and I expect he's right. Nevertheless, gas in Oregon is a quarter cheaper than gas in northern California.
Driving up the coast, we saw some of the most amazing scenery of the trip in the form of enormous redwoods, white water and beaches on the Pacific, and cliff faces that looked like something out of an adventure or romance film. Tomorrow we'll likely head back south a few miles to properly check out the trails around Cape Perpetua, then make what I'm assured is an easy three-hour drive to Portland. And then, the world!
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Tough row Tahoe
Today I'll be relatively brief, because it's late and I'm tired. I got the hell out of Dodge (okay, Winnemucca) early this morning to give myself time for a long detour on the way to San Francisco. My target: Lake Tahoe, the well-known resort lake on the California/Nevada border south of Reno. The lake is almost lost behind an enormous hillock that you have to crest before you can reach it, an artifact of the glaciers and volcanoes that worked in concert to create Lake Tahoe as we know it. The lake is... absolutely gorgeous. It's not at all like the Great Salt Lake, where the appeal comes in part from the intellectual act of trying to come to terms with the scope of what you're seeing. Lake Tahoe is just vibrant with uncomplicated beauty, clear and blue and with mountains on all sides. I rented a kayak from a guy in a big straw hat and paddled around for half an hour, happy as a clam. Would've paddled longer but didn't have the abs for it. Took some nice pictures, which will be up when they're up. Afterwards I grabbed a quick lunch of chicken skewers and peanut sauce and packed up for Frisco.
And that -- or more specifically, Berkeley -- is where I am now. The first leg of my transcontinental trip is complete. I've driven from Florida to California. It's a momentous night, and to celebrate I kicked ass at chess and Pente against my aunt Ellen, who's hosting me for a couple nights. I also ate her girlfriend Wendy's halibut, which was mild and yummy with some lemon and ginger on it. Once again I'm the beneficiary of touching generosity. My hosts, my hotel rooms, and the road between them -- the scale of this trip has been larger than anything I've done before. And because I'm in San Francisco and the only way back home is to drive, I know the journey will grow larger still. The next leg will take me up to Seattle, but only after a layover of several days here in the Bay Area, where I will frolic with my aunt and then with my anime club friends and their relatives, all in from out of town for Sushu and Jono's wedding. Lots of (challenging, character-building) fun ahead!
And that -- or more specifically, Berkeley -- is where I am now. The first leg of my transcontinental trip is complete. I've driven from Florida to California. It's a momentous night, and to celebrate I kicked ass at chess and Pente against my aunt Ellen, who's hosting me for a couple nights. I also ate her girlfriend Wendy's halibut, which was mild and yummy with some lemon and ginger on it. Once again I'm the beneficiary of touching generosity. My hosts, my hotel rooms, and the road between them -- the scale of this trip has been larger than anything I've done before. And because I'm in San Francisco and the only way back home is to drive, I know the journey will grow larger still. The next leg will take me up to Seattle, but only after a layover of several days here in the Bay Area, where I will frolic with my aunt and then with my anime club friends and their relatives, all in from out of town for Sushu and Jono's wedding. Lots of (challenging, character-building) fun ahead!
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!
Saturday, June 20, 2009
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!
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!
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.
Everything's up to date
Today I'm posting from Merriam, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City! I'm staying with my friend Jacob from the Utena forum, who's already shown me a good time in the form of a rose garden and lively conversation and will show me a good breakfast strata in the morning. I'll post all about KC when I've seen more of it. Today I post about the in-between space and time.
I closed my stay in Paducah by visiting the riverfront. I owed this city, which grew up around the Tennessee River, at least that much, and this is the part of the Mississippi my trip takes me across. It was... cool, if not exactly visually stunning. Actually, I found the insect life more interesting. The pier was overrun with bugs I've never seen before; they looked like large earwigs flying around on damselfly wings. I asked a passerby about them (he was on a road trip himself, from Texas to Pennsylvania) and he says the locals call them sand flies. Wikipedia's idea of a sandfly looks nothing like these bugs, unfortunately, so I can't tell you what they were.
As I drove across southern Illinois en route to Missouri, I pulled off the interstate to check out a winery advertised on the roadside. I couldn't find the winery, or indeed any other human beings at all. Instead I found a trail called Tunnel Hill -- a cliff-bordered nature walk, miniature creeks flowing on each side from recent rains, unkept and gorgeous in the heavy morning fog. After a quarter of a mile, the trail entered a tunnel which was itself probably about a quarter of a mile long. Its interior was completely dark except for the points of light at each end. Walking through it bordered on a religious experience, each step an act of faith: will this step be the one that lands on a rattlesnake or in a bottomless pit? I was afraid, but I pushed forward and exited the tunnel at the other end, very proud of myself. Sadly, I soon had to turn around again because it had started to rain.
And what a rain. It was the longest, hardest sustained deluge I have ever driven through. Lightning flared down in all directions and the winds buffeted brave Blackbird as she strove across southern Illinois. With patience we continued our mission in spite of the blinding rain. In the end we were rewarded as we pulled into sunny lands whose gas stations have quarter-operated cologne dispensers in the restrooms. (I got a teaklike fragrance that's supposed to be a knockoff of something called Aramis.)
In St. Louis I had to use a parking garage by myself for the first time. My city friends and most of my suburban friends are cracking up right now, but it's true! I had to find a parking garage and keep track of where it was all by myself, even as I ate at Einstein Bros. Bagels and toured Forest Park afterward. I didn't get to see much of Forest Park, a very large place where the World's Fair was once hosted; what I saw was verdant and pretty but not memorable. The seemingly endless straight drive across Missouri along I-70 afterwards was more memorable, if only because I had finally joined the artery that will carry me most of the way to the West Coast.
When I finally arrived in Kansas City, I checked out the Mormons' Independence Temple (the future site of the Second Coming of Christ according to their church), which has an architecturally gorgeous spire that I took a good picture of. This aesthetic experience, however, was far overshadowed by the artistry that was Korma Sutra, an Indian restaurant in Highland Park that Jacob recommended to me. The A/C was busted and they hardly spoke English, but the food was by far the best Indian food I've ever eaten, and probably the best food of any kind I've had since Balthazar in New York City last year. I ordered lamb marsala and chai; instead I got lamb marsala made from Aries' own daughter, chai spiced with clove and cinnamon and ginger, and many foods I didn't ask for, such as garlic naan, a toothpick of creme bruleeish ice cream, some kind of pita that I very much liked with the spicy dipping sauce, something Jacob tells me was called "gulab jamun" that consisted of caramelized who-knows-what whose sweetness concentration was so high that my mouth nearly melted, and some kind of milk/melon concoction that Jacob can't identify from my inadequate description of it. The whole culinary masterpiece was topped off with an actual hand-bath administered with warm water poured from a pitcher by my waitress while I squeezed a piece of lime between my fingers. Six stars out of five, if you want my Zagat rating.
And that was today, pretty much! Now to find out what tomorrow is like!
I closed my stay in Paducah by visiting the riverfront. I owed this city, which grew up around the Tennessee River, at least that much, and this is the part of the Mississippi my trip takes me across. It was... cool, if not exactly visually stunning. Actually, I found the insect life more interesting. The pier was overrun with bugs I've never seen before; they looked like large earwigs flying around on damselfly wings. I asked a passerby about them (he was on a road trip himself, from Texas to Pennsylvania) and he says the locals call them sand flies. Wikipedia's idea of a sandfly looks nothing like these bugs, unfortunately, so I can't tell you what they were.
As I drove across southern Illinois en route to Missouri, I pulled off the interstate to check out a winery advertised on the roadside. I couldn't find the winery, or indeed any other human beings at all. Instead I found a trail called Tunnel Hill -- a cliff-bordered nature walk, miniature creeks flowing on each side from recent rains, unkept and gorgeous in the heavy morning fog. After a quarter of a mile, the trail entered a tunnel which was itself probably about a quarter of a mile long. Its interior was completely dark except for the points of light at each end. Walking through it bordered on a religious experience, each step an act of faith: will this step be the one that lands on a rattlesnake or in a bottomless pit? I was afraid, but I pushed forward and exited the tunnel at the other end, very proud of myself. Sadly, I soon had to turn around again because it had started to rain.
And what a rain. It was the longest, hardest sustained deluge I have ever driven through. Lightning flared down in all directions and the winds buffeted brave Blackbird as she strove across southern Illinois. With patience we continued our mission in spite of the blinding rain. In the end we were rewarded as we pulled into sunny lands whose gas stations have quarter-operated cologne dispensers in the restrooms. (I got a teaklike fragrance that's supposed to be a knockoff of something called Aramis.)
In St. Louis I had to use a parking garage by myself for the first time. My city friends and most of my suburban friends are cracking up right now, but it's true! I had to find a parking garage and keep track of where it was all by myself, even as I ate at Einstein Bros. Bagels and toured Forest Park afterward. I didn't get to see much of Forest Park, a very large place where the World's Fair was once hosted; what I saw was verdant and pretty but not memorable. The seemingly endless straight drive across Missouri along I-70 afterwards was more memorable, if only because I had finally joined the artery that will carry me most of the way to the West Coast.
When I finally arrived in Kansas City, I checked out the Mormons' Independence Temple (the future site of the Second Coming of Christ according to their church), which has an architecturally gorgeous spire that I took a good picture of. This aesthetic experience, however, was far overshadowed by the artistry that was Korma Sutra, an Indian restaurant in Highland Park that Jacob recommended to me. The A/C was busted and they hardly spoke English, but the food was by far the best Indian food I've ever eaten, and probably the best food of any kind I've had since Balthazar in New York City last year. I ordered lamb marsala and chai; instead I got lamb marsala made from Aries' own daughter, chai spiced with clove and cinnamon and ginger, and many foods I didn't ask for, such as garlic naan, a toothpick of creme bruleeish ice cream, some kind of pita that I very much liked with the spicy dipping sauce, something Jacob tells me was called "gulab jamun" that consisted of caramelized who-knows-what whose sweetness concentration was so high that my mouth nearly melted, and some kind of milk/melon concoction that Jacob can't identify from my inadequate description of it. The whole culinary masterpiece was topped off with an actual hand-bath administered with warm water poured from a pitcher by my waitress while I squeezed a piece of lime between my fingers. Six stars out of five, if you want my Zagat rating.
And that was today, pretty much! Now to find out what tomorrow is like!
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