Tulsa? Can it Really Be?

All the pictures from this trip can be seen online by clicking on this link.

The Trip Up 

Wednesday, October 25

 This is the fourth time I've planned to go to Tulsa. The first time, last year, I ended up skipping it because of the timing of things. I was coming up from San Antonio on the way to Michigan, & the mechanics of the drive meant that I would have gotten to Tulsa less than an hour before everything I was interested in closed, and nothing opened early the next day. So I figured it'd be best to leave it for another time.

 That 'nother time was supposed to be last June, when I was wandering around with my friend Roland. We went through Little Rock and the Ozarks and up to St. Louis, then back down through the Ozarks with a plan to drive the Talihena Scenic Route before heading up to Tulsa for a couple of days. Well, let's just say that, after a good long trip, neither of us was interested in extending it when it was a hundred degrees every day. So we went home instead, by the most direct route. Strike two.

 Then I made plans to do Tulsa and Fort Worth during my August-September travel window, when I had a five-week gap available to go somewhere. The weather was extremely uncooperative with that plan, so I shelved it with little reluctance. I mean, it was f'ing hot back then, and not just in Texas and Oklahoma. (That plan to visit Tulsa and Fort Worth was a fallback; initially I was going to spend a couple of weeks in Quebec during that window, but there were all these wildfires going in Canada, and after checking air-quality reports every day, I finally decided that plan was out. I would have been more reluctant to abandon it had it not been a five-day drive up, and a five-day drive back, and wicked hot.)

 So now, here I am, just back from the Huntsman Trip, and finally on my way to Tulsa. I would have started out Monday, but I had an issue with the car that I decided (late last Friday) I could not deal with myself, so the car was in for a repair to the rear window regulator, a steel cable with a cheap piece of plastic on it that apparently is going to break every 3 or 4 years. Anyway, got it back first thing this morning -- my mechanic had quoted me a cost of $4,000 a few months back, but that was because Jaguar charges $3,000 for the replacement parts. Turns out they only sell the entire assembly, including window glass (didn't need it), regulator mounting panel (didn't need it), regulator motor (didn't need it) and regulator. I bought an OEM regulator on line for $21, and took it in for my mechanic to install when I realized I couldn't do all that stuff myself. (There were 20 steps to get to the regulator, and 22 to put it all back together, and I don't even know what some of the words mean in the instructions. So I let them do it.)

 Because I have an appointment back home next week, I dropped the Fort Worth part of the trip; I'll do that some other time. I'm sure it'll be a maudlin trip down memory lane anyway. But because there are so many things on my List of Things to Do in Tulsa, I added an extra day to my stay there. 

 The trip started today. Because of the car-repair timing I got on the road about an hour and a half later than I'd planned. There was a huge line of storms moving into my route from west Texas, but I decided to go anyway. The rain caught me around Hamilton, Texas, west of Waco, and slowed me down pretty badly. I haven't seen rain like that outside of Louisiana in ... well, my entire life, as far as I can remember. It was biblical. But I made it to Hico for lunch at the Koffee Kup, which has been The Best Place for decades, though I hadn't been there in the last 20 years. I had the best cheeseburger ($3.29) and excellent steak fries ($3) and a slice of Doctor's Office Pie ($5.29, and don't ask what's in it; go have some yourself). I strongly recommend the place. When I was done the rain had stopped and I headed off.

 The only problem I encountered otherwise on Wednesday was that, south of Dallas, my phone lost the GPS signal, dumping me in downtown Dallas with no idea how to get out. Dallas is a maze to me, even though I used to live there. I finally thought to re-boot my phone, and it found the GPS signal for a while, then lost it again. I re-booted it again & the problem has not recurred. (Well, it did, but the phone quickly re-acquired the signal that time.)

 I had hoped to get to Broken Bow on Wednesday, but only got to Idalou ... which is only 12 miles from Broken Bow, so I guess that's not something worth complaining about. And the hotel I found turned out to be a great deal: extremely clean, very cheap, with very good linens and very quiet.

 I've been listening to an audiobook called 150 Glimpses of the Beatles. It's reflections from various people of the group's early years, and it's very interesting to me, who vaguely remembers Beatlemania mostly from old clips on TV. Unfortunately it's read by three people, and whenever they read quotes from anybody, they do voices. They do passable imitations of the Fab Four, whose voices are familiar to everyone of my generation, I'm sure, and they do passable voices for British celebrities and politicians (as far as I can tell). But their American accents are just horrible. In their estimation, everyone from fangirls in Denver to Baptist preachers in Florida has a Noo Yawk accent; they all sound like Brando in On the Waterfront. Very irksome. But still an enjoyable book, a mix of history and trivia. Brings back memories.

Thursday, October 26

I slept through the night last night for the first time in years. Don't know why, but I did. And felt more refreshed today than I have in an age. Wunnerful.

It was pouring rain again when I left, about 6:30, while it was still dark. I stopped at a gas station/restaurant/car museum called Gasquatch, which I'd been to a few months ago. All muscle cars, so nothing to get excited about. Had coffee and a breakfast sandwich mainly just to kill time, hoping that dawn would come and I could see. It didn't, at least not soon enough. When I got back on the road it was so hard to see that I actually pulled over and got out to make sure I had two working headlights. (I did.) I puttered along into Broken Bow (12 miles away, if you'll recall) where I stopped for another cup of coffee just to kill some more time. I was a little more successful that second time. 

While I was waiting for the sun to come up I opened Google Maps and set it to take me to the eastern end of the Talimena National Scenic Route. Then I set out. The road going up was very pretty: winding, recently resurfaced, lightly travelled, with alternating light rain and fog. After about an hour and a half I arrived ... at the western end of the drive. So I turned off Google Maps, got out the road atlas I was given for Christmas, and headed east across the ridges. Despite the occasional fog, it was a pretty drive, with some nice views of the valleys on either side. Then I headed north to check out Mike Fuller's Car & Gas Museum in Inola.

Mike Fuller's Museum

 It proved to be, in essence, an old garage building filled with about half the man's collection of old cars (mostly from the '20s and '30s, but a few from the '50s), along with hundreds of glass finials from old-style gas pumps, gas station signs, and toy cars. The cars are in various states of repair; he has restored a couple, but most of them are in the condition they were in when he acquired them. I spent probably two hours looking over the collection, and then nearly another hour sitting outside chewing the fat and getting scratched by his very friendly, very chubby dog Nellie.

the Correll Museum's car collection

 From there, I headed just down the road a piece to the Correll Museum in Catoosa,  a suburb of Tulsa and pretty much the next town along from Inola. I of course went only for the cars, of which there are only about a dozen, but also found myself fascinated by the displays in the first building, chiefly local geological samples and toys. Then, as long as I was in Catoosa, I figured I might as well go by and see what the town is most famous for: the Blue Whale of Catoosa. Fabulous.

 Then I drove into Tulsa proper and found my hotel. 

 When I was looking for a place to stay in Tulsa -- a town I knew nothing whatsoever about -- I thought that I would stay in a nice hotel downtown. I can afford it, I thought. And I found a nice hotel downtown, which was more or less reasonably priced and part of the Wyndham group, so I'd get Rewards points, which actually does make booking that group of hotels more attractive. But I have to say it's getting less and less attractive with the passing years. Now, it happens that the downtown hotel I found didn't have a room available for the three nights I planned to be here, so I started looking further out. And when I had to choose between a room 6 miles from downtown for $117 a night, or a room 5 miles from downtown for $76 a night, I decided that, if I couldn't be downtown, I might as well save $120. I thought, Super 8? It's a good enough chain. It'll be fine.

 It's not fine. It is barely adequate. The motel itself is passable: a little on the tatty side. The bathroom counter, mirror and shower are made for short people. The room's lighting is inadequate. The towels are left over from a Civil War army hospital. The switch that controls the only light in the room also controls the switch where I had my computer plugged in. I did not know that. So when I woke up the next morning I found my computer had drained its battery substantially. 

 Worse is the neighbourhood this hotel is in. There was a homeless guy in the parking lot when I arrived, trying to affix the front of his shopping basket to a skateboard. There are people who appear to be homeless wandering the streets throughout the area. And of course there's a lot of noise from the freeway at the front of the hotel. (It gets better at night, thankfully.) (Also from the 20-something idiot girl pounding on the room next door and threatening to break the window if they didn't open up.) This is not exactly a common experience with Super 8, but it is becoming increasingly common. Which means I'm less & less interested in Super 8 motels, and in Wyndham. (I also had problems with their mobile website for most of this year, but that seems now to be fixed. Still, it has a place in the calculus of preferences. Likewise my experiences with both La Quinta and Super 8 in Amarillo, going to Colorado and returning every year.) I think when I use up my Rewards points I'll switch loyalty to another chain; maybe Marriott? (I've already found that the Best Western in Deming, New Mexico, is a better deal than the La Quinta there, so now I have a Best Western loyalty account.)

 Enough of that. Nobody but me is interested (though Wyndham should be) so I'll move on to the Main Course of this trip.

Tulsa Itself

Day one: Friday, October 27

 I lucked out this morning, and found a good breakfast place half a block from my hotel. I knew rain and colder temperatures were expected, and I walked as far as the corner before I noticed just how close and just how threatening the clouds were, so I walked back to the hotel and loaded up the car for the day's explorations (i.e., I got my city map) and drove over to the restaurant. Good coffee, one slice of wheat toast and one egg over easy. Not many people there, but everybody seemed to know everybody else, which made me feel very much the outsider. No matter; I drank my coffee, ate my breakfast and left, first for a branch of Chase Bank, then to the Philbrook Museum, Tulsa's local museum of fine art. 

hand-carved

 The museum is located in a former private mansion with extensive gardens in the nicest part of town. Reminds me a lot of the McNay, surrounded by Terrell Hills and Alamo Heights: big, expensive houses built by the Pillars of Society. Only the Philbrook house was much nicer than Lady McNay's place. The museum has added on extensively, with kind of half-assed attempts to match the style, but the additions still end up looking like Postmodern Corporate Committee Choice. Too bad

 Anyway. Naturally, being in Oklahoma, you'd expect that this museum's collection is fairly heavy on the Native American artists; and it is. I saw works from Lakota, Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo, Blackfeet, even Chemahuevi artists in abundance. But there's only one small room with perhaps a dozen pieces by artists from Oklahoma tribes. That surprised me.

 There were a number of pieces that caught me up in them in the three hours I was there. One thing I noticed in particular is how ugly the baby Jesus is portrayed in early-Renaissance paintings. In some He looks like a nude Fred Mertz, in others He just looks morbidly obese, and with a tiny head. I thought about taking pictures to illustrate it, but apparently I forgot.

 I did, though, take pictures of many works, which (again) can be seen in my online photo album for this trip. But three in particular interest me enough to present here.

1. Fanon Mask by Joanne Petit-Frère. This is a head made out of (synthetic) hair formed into a face and mounted on the lower part of a stone bust remnant. According to the accompanying placard, it has something to do with Covid 19, so I'll let you draw your own conclusions as to what the artist is saying. I mention it here just because I found it fascinating: initially startling and repulsive, then merely disturbing, then (I flatter myself) meaningful and even ... well, not entirely ugly.

2. Two Generations, by Rose Kuper. According to the painting's placard, "two women appear to be dreaming." That's not what I see when I look at it. I see a young woman staring wistfully out the window at a life she cannot access, while next to her, her grandmother prays. To me the painting shows the frustrations of youth and the frustrating complacency of age. 

3. A Day at the Beach, by Martha Walter. This painting is remarkable to me only because it was painted in 1930 or so, and yet clearly shows the image of the Starship Enterprise in the sky above the beach. I can't explain it. 

 There were a number of other beautiful things at the museum, but those three, I thought, were a little out of the ordinary. 

Tulsa skyline, 1906 & 1928

 One of the things Tulsa is known for is Art Deco architecture. The city experienced its greatest boom time during the height of the Deco era, and as a consequence many of the major buildings are exemplars of that style. I found a listing on line for the Tulsa Art Deco Museum, so naturally I wanted to go, as I'm a fan of that style of architecture. The museum, formerly located downtown in one of those Deco buildings, has relocated to a shopfront on 11th Street (Historic Route 66), where it consists of one room, and a tiny room at that, in one of America's more interesting and eclectic gift shop. The Deco stuff on display is mostly mundane, and no effort is made to protect it from curious hands, yet it seems to be in good condition. The museum artifacts, however, have to share space with inflatable dinosaurs, fridge magnets, Lego Star Wars kits, Disney princess dolls and oddities like an inflatable tiara ("for formal emergencies"; I very nearly bought one as a gag gift). The shop sells everything from complex 3-D puzzles and elegantly bound classic novels to t-shirts, taffy-by-the-pound and Christmas decorations. While I was disappointed in the Deco Museum, I take advantage of the opportunity to start my Christmas shopping. (Spoiler alert: you're all getting stuffed animals or resin boxes in the shape of Anubis.) (Just kidding.)

 By the time I finished lunch today (at Tzatziki's Mediterranean Cafe on 15th Street: good but not great) I felt like I was coming down with something. It was in the 70s when I got up this morning, but dropped soon into the 50s and is going down to the 40s tonight. I prepared for the weather as best I could, with a long-sleeved T-shirt, jeans and a windbreaker, and since I was indoors substantially all day, I thought I was ready. But now, at 10pm as I write this, I'm pretty sure I'm going to feel like crap tomorrow. Fortunately I've done almost all the main things on my list of things to do; what remains is a small car museum west of Tulsa, and the aforementioned Deco buildings downtown, which are basically point-and-shoot occasions. Consequently I have decided (just at this moment, in fact) that I'm going to check out of this crappy hotel tomorrow morning instead of the next day, stop and look at the downtown buildings, go see the cars, and then start for home. I will skip the Bob Dylan Center, I think, as I'm not all that interested in it (mainly I'm curious as to what the Hell it's doing in Tulsa, Oklahoma); and I'll probably skip the Woody Guthrie place in his home town (the name of which escapes me at the moment) for the same reason.

 That was an aside: stream-of-consciousness typing. I don't want to forget to mention that I also went to the Jewish art museum and the Blue Dome District. These were both on my list.

wooden vessels by Donna Matles

 The Jewish art museum was interesting in a provincial way. There was the expected Holocaust display, which I found (having seen others in several cities) oddly sanitized. This one was arranged to show the life of European Jews in chronological context as their place in society descended from vital elements of their various communities to hated outsider to victims of unfathomable cruelty. There was an attempt to relate the shoah to modern hate movements (the KKK, white nationalism) but I found all those presentations failed to arouse much in the way of anger or revulsion in me. Maybe I'm just too enured to it; maybe I've seen it all too often already. 

 Otherwise, the museum was dedicated to the local scene, or modern pop culture. There was a section on Synagogues in Oklahoma; there were explanations geared either towards children or utterly parochial non-Jews about Jewish holidays and a little about Jewish (biblical) history: how to play with a dreidel. What order the Channukah candles are lit. What Rosh Hashannah is. Interesting, maybe even enlightening, but essentially mundane.

 On the other hand, there were two things of particular interest to me in the Jewish art museum. One was a small display of stunningly beautiful woodcraft by a now-deceased local artist named Donna Matles; the other was a huge stained-glass synagogue window built about a hundred years ago by the Tiffany Workshop. It was of major interest to me because, unlike every other such window I've ever seen on display anywhere, this one was mounted in such a way that I could see the back of it, and so now I understand how it was done. Not that I will now go home and build stained-glass windows in the style of Tiffany, but at least now I feel like I could do it if I wanted to. I like that feeling.

Tulsa skyline at night, including the Blue Dome

 Finally, tonight, I went down to see what the Blue Dome District is. It's like St Mary's Strip back home: a bunch of clubs and bars and restaurants catering to young people. I had dinner at the Dilly Diner (I don't know why, but I recognized the name from somewhere) -- excellent pulled pork nachos -- and saw the Blue Dome, which is unimpressive, and went back to the hotel. It was still early and I'm damned if I wanted to be out there late on Hallowe'en weekend. Especially the way I'm feeling.

 Day Two: Saturday, October 28

 Definitely a sinus cold. Oh, well. I checked out of my sleazy hotel and had breakfast down the street (they got my order wrong -- ham instead of bacon in my omelet -- but I ate it anyway), then went to see some of the Art Deco buildings downtown The South Boston Avenue United Methodist Church was easily the most beautiful; the others were kind of meh. (And of course there was the Tulsa Marathon to contend with; those damn marathons seem to just follow me around the country.) Following that, I went to the supposed location for the Greenwood Memorial, a little storefront by the baseball stadium, but it was vacant. Then to the Center of the Universe, a spot near the train station. I got out of the car and wandered around but couldn't figure out what was supposed to be special about it. It was just a few rows of bricks in a circle around a bit of broken concrete, on a bridge over the train tracks. I tried yelling, to see if maybe it had special acoustics, but if it did only a dog can hear it. It was cold and drizzly and so I didn't investigate further. Nor did I bother to take a picture: it was that not special.

 From there I headed out of town to Sapulpa, to see the Heart of Route 66 Auto Museum. Not huge, but some nice cars, and I took lots of pictures. Of course I like the museum: they had both a 1955 Jaguar XK-140 and a 1971 Jaguar E-Type. What more could a body want? There were a couple of dozen other nice cars, but too many of the displayed vehicles were fancy modifications or other one-off models, like a "Maserati" built by a local guy in the 1950s from parts of a bunch of other marques, and a mid-1950s Ford Custom with a fancy paint job. And a lot of muscle cars, which, I'm sorry, seen 'em enough.

 There would appear to be some problem on Interstate 35, because when I asked Google Maps for directions home, first it told me there might be flooding in Dallas, then it gave me a route that takes me down into Fort Worth, around the northwest side, and out I-30 west to pick up 281. Later on, it changed the route to avoid I-35 altogether, sending me west at Ardmore, Oklahoma, and then south. I actually preferred that route anyway, and spent the day on just the kind of roads I like to travel. But I didn't sleep well last night, and by 4pm I was barely able to stay awake. I stopped at a convenience store for a break, thinking I'd close my eyes for a few minutes -- that usually solves the problem -- but instead I decided to just get a room for the night in the next town, Bowie, and that's where I am now, finishing up this blog post. I'm about five hours from home, and it looks now that I-35 is the fastest route to get there. But 281 is the most eco-friendly route, and only takes a few minutes longer, and it will take me by the Koffee Kup in Hico once again. Mmm, pie! That is worth the extra time!

Postscript:

I finished the Beatles audiobook on the drive from Bowie to Hico on Sunday. The very last "chapter" consisted of a single quote from some 1967 article by someone who was not a fan, to the effect that no one in their right mind could think that, in 50 years, the Beatles' music would be a regular part of life. I think an extra layer of irony is added by the fact that, in the next week, the Beatles will have yet another new Number 1 hit.

Fact Check

 One of the more trivial news stories of recent months has to do with the push by interested parties to increase the number of direct flights from around the country to Reagan Airport. Other interested parties oppose the proposed changes.

 Reagan Airport, if you're not familiar with it, lies on an island in the Potomac River at the edge of Washington DC. It's very convenient to the National Mall and all the offices near there. Some years ago the government built Dulles International Airport, half an hour west, in Virginia. In order to push the use of the inconveniently located Dulles, they adopted some complex regulations that limit the number of flights that can use Reagan.

 Consequently, a number of major cities around the country can't get direct air service to Reagan Airport. There are none, for example, to Reagan from San Diego, Tucson, Albuquerque, El Paso or San Antonio. People in those cities, all of which have populations in excess of half a million people, have to fly to Dulles, or have a stopover in some intermediate city. 

 This makes no difference to me. I don't fly to any place I can reach by car. But other people seem to like flying places. And as a Republican (a real Republican, not one of those Libertarian lunatics at the fringe of the party) I think that the question of which flights can go to which airport ought to be determined by market forces, unsullied by official favouritism, which is a form of corruption. 

 So. Changes to gate allocations at Reagan involve Congress, so there's really no chance the resolution to this manufactured controversy will be fair or logical or even sensible. Both sides are investing some money in advertising, presuming that someone will be persuaded to pressure their congressman to support one side or another. Which brings me to the point of this blog post.

 One side -- I presume it's the side trying to avoid change, but I could be wrong; I don't actually read the ads -- is claiming in its advertisement headlines (the only part that I do read) that Reagan National Airport is already at capacity and can't handle additional flights. I see that ad usually once or twice a week on a news update I get each weekday morning. And I thought, I wonder if that's really true; so I thought I'd check.

 Now, I don't know how many flights in and out Reagan Airport can handle, so I started with the assumption that it's no more than they actually handle now. So I looked at the airport's website yesterday, and found that there were 50 flights arriving, and 58 flights departing, in the two-hour span between 5pm and 7pm. So the airport's capacity is at least 52 flights per hour. 

 Then I looked at the flights between 10pm and Midnight. In that two-hour window, there were only 25 arrivals and 23 departures. (I also happened to notice that there were only two flights arriving between 9pm and 10pm, though there were still 27 flights departing in that hour.)

 So clearly, Reagan Airport is not at capacity.

I Was More Right Than I'd've Thought

Memphis, home of the worst drivers

 A couple of months ago, I wrote in a post about our trip to Williamsburg, Virginia that "there are only three people in Tennessee who know how to drive on the freeway." 

 I thought I was just exaggerating for humourous effect.

 But today I read a read a report on TheHill.com entitled "Here's Where America's Worst Drivers Are Found: Study," and it said that:

Tennessee had the most cities appear among the top 20 at four, including the worst-ranked city. In fact, Tennessee had 34 deadly crashes per 100,000 people in 2021, which is a significant increase compared to the national average of 12 deadly crashes per 100,000 people.

Topping out the list was Memphis. According to ConsumerAffairs, the majority of deadly crashes in Memphis are caused by bad driving, causing 203 deadly crashes in 2021 — more than any other city.

Tennessee’s three other cities on the list were Knoxville (12), Clarksville (17), and Chattanooga (19).

 

Don't I feel vindicated. And prescient!
 

A New Wander: Last Installment

 

  This is the final post in a series. You really should read them in order. You'll find Part One here, and here's a link to the photo album for this trip. 

 Last night, at the restaurant where we had dinner, the TV was silently playing the weather channel. It was all about some storms affecting New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina at that moment. But in between what appeared to be tediously repetitive reports that rain was falling and wind was blowing, they briefly showed a map of Oklahoma and Arkansas, all swathed in bright, scary colours, with the legend "Travel weather dangers." No idea what they were saying, but it looked ominous. 

 We had no TV in our room, because a storm the previous night had taken out the satellite dish for the hotel. So we never saw another local weather report. (Yes, I could have gotten one on my phone if I wasn't a Baby Boomer and was accustomed to such things. As it is, the idea never occurred to me.)

 This morning dawned bright and clear. Our first planned stop, about 30 minutes away, didn't open until 10AM, so we were in no rush. I walked over to a truck stop a quarter-mile up the street for some coffee, then later we decided to have breakfast at a place downtown called Big Cuppa. An excellent choice; a nice small-town coffee shop owned by a young couple who roast their own beans and bake their own pastries and basically do everything themselves. Then we went to a bank to get some cash (even paying the $4 ATM fee, because there's not a Chase within 40 miles of where I was, and nowhere along the route, and I was down to like $5); and then we headed out.

Petit Jean's grave

 Along the way, as we drove to the top of Petit Jean Mountain, we saw a sign for "Petit Jean Grave and Overlook." So what the hey, let's go see what that is. Turns out it's the grave of the woman for whom Petit Jean Mountain (and the Petit Jean River and Petit Jean Valley and a number of other places) is named. Her real name was Adrienne Something, but when her lover came to explore the area she disguised herself and came over as a cabin boy on his ship. According to the legend, the idiot didn't recognise her until she fell deathly ill and they discovered, then, that she wasn't a boy at all. Stop me if you've heard this one. Yada yada yada she died and they buried her up on top of this mountain for some reason.

 Anyway, a pretty place, with views across the Arkansas River. A little less smoke in the air today, but still the visibility is reduced. 

 A short distance down the road is the Museum of Automobiles. You can tell from the building and its expansive grounds that there's some money behind this collection. Some guy named Rockefeller, apparently, lives in the area, and he helped set the thing up and contributed several of the cars. The facility only has room to display about 50 vehicles at a time, but they do a pretty good job. I'm at the point in my car-museum-going that I pretty much skip over the Model Ts and Model As and '64 Mustangs and '57 Chevies; I've seen so many of them already, and I have places to go and things -- new things -- to see. 

 Well, okay, not new; we are talking antique cars here. But novel things.

 So I went through the museum looking mainly at cars I don't see often or ever. They display a number of makes that I've almost never heard of, like a Star station wagon and a Metz runabout, and models that I don't often encounter in museums, like the 1952 VW, the 1954 Chevy Bel Air or the De Soto Airflow. The cars are well-lit and, for the most part, positioned so that I can get some good pictures of the fronts and sides, but as is common with car museums, the back ends, facing away, are out of sight and can't be photographed in some cases. The only way to solve that problem is to place the cars where visitors can walk all the way around them, but that would mean fewer cars can be displayed. It's a trade-off.

 After the museum, the plan was to drive up the scenic route past Hardy Falls and the Petit Jean Valley overlook, then down to the Talihena Scenic Route in Oklahoma. At that point, we were going to head home. But there were no falls that we could see at Hardy Falls (and no place to pull over on a winding mountain road), and at the Petit Jean Valley overlook the weather was so threatening, with rain starting and lightning all around, that I decided not to get out of the car on the highest point in central Arkansas. I put the top up and we headed on down the road. (Plus, the view was mostly obscured by rain in the valley.) We stopped in Paris, Arkansas for lunch at a bar and grill -- the rain had eased enough that we could get from the car to the door without getting soaked -- and then I decided it was just time to head home. I plugged in a route, calculated that we could make Dallas today, and we went off to do that. We started another audio book, the second in the Junior Bender series. I think we should finish it around Austin or San Marcos tomorrow (unless Dallas has resolved the issues concerning rush hour on Central Expressway) (which I doubt).

A New Wander, Day 7: St Robert, Missouri, to Morillton, Arkansas

  This post is the sixth for this Wander. You really should read them in order. You'll find Part One here, and here's a link to the photo album for this trip. 

 This morning's drive from St Robert, Missouri was exactly the kind of driving I love, the main reason I come on wandering trips like this. Good, well-maintained winding roads, not much traffic, a little up-and-down elevation, clear skies and cool-enough temperatures. The first few miles were a little tense for me, as the dashboard indicator said my engine coolant level was low. I just had the sensor for that replaced (because it would show me that message all the time without actually being the least bit low), so I kept an eye on the temperature guage, which didn't budge, and before I came to a place where I could pull over, the idiot light went out. If it happens again I'm going to have to have the sensor replaced again.

 We didn't have breakfast this morning; neither of us was hungry. I stopped for some coffee at a convenience store, then we headed on down through rural Missouri to the town of Hartsville, where we located the marker showing that a local spot (actually out in somebody's field a little northeast of the marker) was the center of the United States' population at the time of the 2020 census. (I assume that if they'd accurately counted all the minorities in Texas back then, the spot would be maybe 30 or 40 miles to the southwest, but hey, this spot's official and it's all really not worth discussing.)

 We continued listening to our audiobook, Crashed, and finished it just before we got to our hotel this evening. Not great literature by any means, but an entertaining whodunit. There are a total of eight books featuring the same "detective," a professional burglar with, of course, a heart of gold, so we've checked out the next in the series to listen to starting tomorrow.

Buffalo River Canyon in the Ozarks

 We cruised back into the Ozark Mountains, stopping first at Arkansas' "Grand Canyon." It's actually the Buffalo River canyon, about two thousand feet from the tops of the surrounding mountains to the mean water level. There seems to be a lot of smoke in the air; maybe from those Canadian wild fires? I haven't heard any more about it since it stopped affecting our national media centers in New York City and Washington DC. Makes me feel a part of the Great Ignored Center of the nation, places to be dismissed as insignificant flyover country. This is why the Radical Right fringe of morons is so ready to dismiss the national media. One of the reasons, anyway: their own gullibility combined with stupidity and ignorance helps, too, as they sit on their home computers "doing their own research."

 But I digress. 

 We continued south through the mountains to a dirt-road turnoff for Falling Waters Waterfall. (Yes, these hillbillies spend a lot of time thinking up names for things.) It's where a small creek drops about eight feet over a dramatic precipice into a pool that's deep enough to permit diving and swimming. Despite its remoteness, there were about a dozen people there. It looked like a very nice place to spend an afternoon, but of course we weren't interested in spending much time there. Just went to see it, & take a couple of pictures.

 Coming away from there, we had no internet signal. I'd picked out a route on my paper map, but unfortunately the area was right on the fold and the fold had torn, so I couldn't read the road numbers. We got back to a pavement and headed south, but that road eventually turned east and then north. At one point we passed a county line, and I could locate our position on the map from that. I continued going what was actually the wrong way (because, by then, it was the shortest way back to where we wanted to go) and we arrived in Morillton, Arkansas, where we're spending the night. There's a car museum here that I want to see. It doesn't open until 10AM, but we figured we could do our laundry in the morning while we waited for it to open. (Tuesday is the day I'd planned on doing laundry from the start of the trip, as I always pack enough for one week. Today is one week on the road.)

 We checked into the Morillton Motel and cranked up the AC. There's no TV in the room because, apparently, there was a hell of a storm here last night. We noticed big puddles of water and some trees down in the area. The restaurant we'd picked first for dinner, not far from the hotel, was closed, apparently because they've lost power. (The power poles along the road leading to the restaurant are being held up by the lines; they're leaning away from the road with big cracks a few feet above ground level.) 

 The hotel, for other reasons, is something of a dump. We had no towels; when they provided some, they proved to be of the lowest possible quality. There was no handle on the inside of the bathroom door; the toilet ran and ran unless you reset the handle; the keys didn't work and had to be re-done. But the beds were clean and comfortable, so that was the main thing. But you kind of expect more for the not inexpensive price they charge.

 While I was waiting for Roland to come out and go to dinner, I checked the weather for Tulsa. My plan was that we would get to Muskogee (or so) tomorrow night, then spend Wednesday and Thursday nights in Tulsa. But Wednesday's high is predicted to be 109, and Thursday's will be 104. We discussed this over dinner and have decided to cut our trip short. I believe we will get into Oklahoma tomorrow evening, probably to around Talequah, maybe even farther; then we're a day's drive from home. I may even be home in time to see the US play St Kitts & Nevis in the Gold Cup at 8:30 that evening. 

 Fingers crossed.

Click on "Newer Post" below for the next installment of this gripping story.

A New Wander, Day 6: St Louis to St Robert

  This is part five of many. You really should read them in order. You'll find Part One here, and here's a link to the photo album for this trip. 

 This turned out to be a very easy-going day. Unfortunately, it was hot enough when we started that I didn't bother putting the top down at all, but other than that and a problem with access to downtown St Louis, it's been a relaxing day.

 I started off by trying to go see some of the sights of downtown St Louis, which I've never been to. I figured that, it being Sunday, there'd be very few people down there and it'd be easy to park near things like the sculpture garden and the city garden and the other park-related places they have there.

 Google Maps routed us along Collinsville Road. Turns out that when I thought I was telling it not to avoid highways, I was actually turning on the "avoid highways" instruction. My bad. Apparently there are no frontage roads for it to direct us down. Anyway, I finally started ignoring its proposed route until I got to the exit for downtown off Interstate 70; from which it directed us down a road that was closed for construction. Then it took us two blocks over and south, and all the cross-streets going to the area I wanted to go to were closed off with barricades. After circling around the area for fifteen or twenty minutes, I finally saw a sign saying that today was Pride Fest. So the area was off-limits to mere tourists who didn't want to pay to get in; and of course parking required a hefty fee.

 Okay; so the attractions of downtown St Louis will have to wait for a future visit. I drove off to get a carton of cigarettes, which are cheaper in Missouri than Texas by about $10. Sadly, the place I stopped only had one carton of my brand, so that's all I could get. Then we headed off to the west, and for the first time on this trip, we started an audiobook, a slightly glib murder mystery called Crashed, which involves a professional burglar who gets blackmailed into providing security for a porno film being made by the heir to an organized crime syndicate. We're 20 chapters in after today's drive, and it's amusing but cliché-ridden.

 One of the first stops I'd planned after St Louis was a big model-train exhibit in some town west of the city. It doesn't open until noon on Sundays, so we skipped that. I drove instead across the river into Warren County, the last county to visit in the state of Missouri. So that makes 39 states now where I've been to all the counties. I stopped at the first gas station I came to and checked the map for a route to the next planned stop, and as a result we crossed all of Warren County, then headed south, back across the Missouri River, on local highways. 

 For lunch, we found a Greek restaurant in the town of Belle. Before we left, I posted this review on Google Maps:

Wow. Can't believe the best gyro I've ever had was to be found in this quaint little family restaurant in the middle of Missouri, just over the hill from the edge of nowhere. The pita had a slight sweetness to it; the meat was I Mean perfectly done; the veggies were as fresh as can be, and the feta tastes like Granny makes it out back.

 It really was that good. Apparently I'm not the first to discover this; there are several reviews by people from St Louis that indicate they think it's worth the 90-minute drive from the city. Well, I wouldn't go quite that far, but it is excellent.

 

 After lunch, we moseyed south and west to Ha-Ha-Tonka State Park, where there are the ruins of a castle on a bluff overlooking the lake. It's not actually a castle, of course, just a big-ass house some rich guy from Kansas City built around the turn of the last century, because he liked the lay of the land. He bought 5,000 acres and put up his country palace, finishing it just before he died in a traffic accident in 1906. Then, during World War II, the house and stables burned and the house was abandoned. The water tower he had built burned in the 1970s, and at some point soon after that the family gave the wreck (and the 5,000 acres) to the state of Missouri, which cleaned it up and made it a state park and tourist attraction. 

 

Castle Ruins

 It sits, as I said, on a bluff overlooking a lake. The bluff is perhaps 700 feet high, so it's quite a sight, and they've put in a number of overlooks. I could hear loud music playing on the beach by the lakeshore, and see dots that I think must've been kayakers far below. It was about a five-hundred-foot walk up a slight rise from the parking lot, but Roland felt unable to make the trek, so I went alone.

 

 After that, we headed down to Lebanon, Missouri. There's nothing in the way of attractions there, but I had calculated that it was about as far as we'd be able to get after leaving St Louis (when that was going to be on Monday) and still get a hotel. Beyond Lebanon are a lot of miles of very rural highway with no major towns, and any motels we might come across would be hit-or-miss. So we stopped in Lebanon at a Denny's and looked up local hotels, and found that almost all of them are 30 miles east, near Fort Leonard Wood, a huge army training base; I guess all the trainees have family always coming to visit, so all the motels are there.

 

 And now so are we. 

 

 We decided on dinner at Ruby Tuesday, which is either very good or very bad, depending on the flip of a coin. Close by that restaurant, though, we spotted a "pizzeria & pub" called Poppa's or Pappa's or Pappo's or something. We neither of us wanted pizza but we figured that the "& pub" part ensured other things on the menu. It turned out to be a good choice. I had a meatball calzone while Roland had a meatball marinara bowl. Both were very good, and the service was outstanding. We were content and able to return to our room to watch Jason Bourne movies. 

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A New Wander, Days 4 and 5, but not 6: St Louis

  This is part four of many. You really should read them in order. You'll find Part One here, and here's a link to the photo album for this trip. 

Friday, June 23:

The Best Breakfast in Farmington, Missouri, according to whatever web sites I checked, is at the Factory Cafe, which has two locations: one out on the highway and one downtown. I picked the one downtown. It's located in an old factory building, along with a number of other shops. It did have excellent food and good prices, though the service could have easily been better. 

 It was then only about an hour and a half to St Louis. Since I'd decided the night before not to set my usual 6AM alarm for that reason (why bother?) and had slept until 7:30, then had a leisurely breakfast, we didn't get into the city until after noon. We made the Third Degree Glass Studio our first stop; when I visited here a few years ago with my friend Marty, I found it had some novel and inspired works of unusual quality. This time, not so much. There was still the quality, but almost everything had a derivative quality about its design, and the colour choices of the various artists fell only into two categories: mundane and garish. After a good look around the gallery, we had a pleasant lunch at Blueberry Hill. So, that was two boxes ticked. That left us with a few hours to kill in the city before we headed across the river into Illinois, where our hotel is.

1931 Chrysler Imperial

 Roland has no notion of what there is to do or see in St Louis, and seems to have no ambition in that regard; so I decided to go to the St Louis Car Museum and Sales Company, about ten minutes west of the Delmar Loop. It's a big warehouse-like space where individuals who own special cars can have them stored in a climate-controlled environment, and offered for sale if they desire. The paltry entrance fees for gawkers like me (Roland waited patiently for me in the lobby) only help defray some of the costs of keeping the cars for their owners. More than half the cars on display were for sale. A couple were reserved for pending sale; others were just being stored.

 With the exception of one ragged-looking 1960 Volkswagen Beetle that seemed to have been fresh from the barn, all the cars there are in excellent shape. Many of them were of no great interest to me: muscle cars such as I've seen over and over in fifty other places (including on the street). And while I love certain muscle cars -- certain Chevy Malibus and Pontiac Grand Prix and GTOs -- I no longer get excited by them. Commonplace classics like '55, '56 and '57 Chevies. The kind of angular supercars that titillate the twits on the old Top Gear series, Lamborghinis and Ferraris and later-model Corvettes: Lambos have always been ugly; Ferrari makes mostly ugly cars, though with some stunning exceptions; and Vettes haven't really been pretty since the third generation was discontinued in 1984; each one since (4th through 8th, so far) has gotten progressively uglier. 

 There are lots of mid-engined sports cars with poorly balanced proportions, like Audi R8's and Porsche Cayennes on display; and ubiquitous models like Porsche 911s. Seen one, seen 'em all, or don't care because they're not really that attractively designed. They're just powerful, loud and fast, and I don't care about that because they're just sitting there on the floor. Maybe if I were driving them I'd be more interested, though I doubt they're as comfortable on a road trip as my gorgeous little Jag. And there are cars that are only remarkable because they're expensive, and therefore relatively rare, like the 1996 Rolls Royce Silver Spur, which has nothing beyond the nameplate to make it desirable. And there are some vehicles that are clearly held as bets on future value, like the Hummer and the gussied-up Dodge Durango.

 (The Rolls, by the way, is for sale with an asking price of less than $23,000. Keep in mind that anyone who sees you in it will assume you bought it new for six figures.)

By the time I finished going through the museum, it was nearly 4pm; too late to do anything else in St Louis. So we crossed over to our hotel in Collinsville, Illinois, where we're booked for three nights. It's the same hotel I've stayed in on both previous visits to St Louis. I really wanted to stay on the Missouri side this time, but the hotels over there are so much more expensive and not really worth the added costs. That, and in one case, a hotel I was all set to book despite the price wanted to add nearly a third of the price in "taxes and fees", but wouldn't tell me what the "fees" were. ("See our Terms and Conditions." I did: the information wasn't there.) And after we checked into our hotel, I started work on this blog, finishing up yesterday's post on Day 3, and writing up the start of our St Louis sojourn. After getting to this point, we went downtown (Collinsville) to find a place where my wife and I ate when we were here a couple of years ago. It wasn't quite where I remembered it, and even now, having just been there, I can't remember the name of it; but we found it and had dinner there and I've decided it will be a good place to watch the US whoop up on Jamaica tomorrow night (fingers crossed).

 Thus endeth the first day in St Louis.

Saturday, June 24:

Gateway Arch from Illinois

 We slept in until nearly 8:30 this morning. Well, I slept in. Roland appears to have woken up at 5:30 and surfed Tik Tok posts for two and a half hours. We got ready for the day and went first to the Mississippi River Observation Deck, in a scary part of East St Louis. There's a ramp there that takes you above the river levee so you can see the Gateway Arch unencumbered. Roland insisted he couldn't walk up its gentle slope because of his knee. I had already been up there on a visit here before, but went up anyway. The river, now, is way down. There are roads and parking lots along it that were under water last time I was here. It was kind of surprising to see.

 Afterwards we crossed the Eads Bridge into St Louis and went to see the Graffiti Wall, a stretch of retainer wall built for the use of random graffiti artists. There was nothing the least bit impressive on it, so after scanning it from the comfort of the car, we went on to brunch at a place called The Egg, on Gravois Avenue. It's a trendy place, apparently, but has a very nice ambience about it. We both had something called "beermosa" -- Hefeweizen and orange juice. It wasn't too bad, but I'd never order it again. I got pulled pork cornbread Benedict. It had two slices of sweet corn bread under three slices of nicely barbecued pork belly, topped with two poached eggs and Hollandaise sauce. On the side was a generous portion of perfectly fried potatoes. 

 From there we went to the St Louis Museum of Fine Arts, in Forest Park. Roland parked himself on a sofa in the first room he came to and stared at a crappy Max Beckmann painting for about four hours while I explored what I could in that time. I saw a few Assyrian animal sculptures and Greek and Roman pieces before tracking down some paintings. If there is a coherent order to the many galleries in this museum, it isn't obvious to me, but each room has a theme, even if it's not connected to that of the next room. 

Martin, Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion

 In the hours I was there, I saw maybe a third of the main floor and most of the floor below, which houses the decorative arts that interest me the most: furniture design, ceramics and glass. By the time I'd looked those parts of the musuem over, I didn't think I could stand up any longer, so I collected my passenger and left. We went to Ted Drewes' Frozen Custard shop on Chippewa, a local institution according to something I had read. My source seems to have been accurate: neither of us had ever seen such long lines at a custard shop. It took us at least ten minutes to get to one of the six customer windows to order. I had a Big Apple Concrete, which is apple spice and baked apple chunks mixed up with the frozen custard. "Concrete" is what they call it when it's been mixed on a machine, like a root beer freeze or a Dairy Queen Blizzard. Anyway, picture Sheriff Andy Taylor saying "It was gooo-ood!" It was.

 At that point we had nothing really to do, so we drove back over to our hotel in Illinois and relaxed until it was time to go to dinner. Some source I had checked had recommended a place called Rigazzi's in The Hill, the Italian neighbourhood in St Louis, and since we had no other information, we went there. It was in an early-twentieth-century house, expanded and converted, in a mixed residential and industrial neighbourhood. I'm not aware of a comparable area in San Antonio.

 Even though we'd come early (6:30) there was a wait for a table that ran to about 45 minutes. Then we faced slow, indifferent service: a long wait for drinks, a long wait to order, a long wait for our salads, a long wait for our food, a long wait for our check (even after we'd asked for it). I'd give the service one chili pepper out of five. The food was meh at best. The salads were out of a bag, the bread was off the shelf, the pasta was heavy and overly salty. Two chili peppers out of five. 

Capone at Rigazzi's

 (While Roland was waiting for me to bring the car over from a block away, he encountered some other folks from San Antonio. They, too, thought little of the food or service at Rigazzi's. Definitely not a place to go back to. It is apparently most famous for its claim to be the place where Al Capone was taken prisoner.)

 Once back at our hotel, we threw our leftovers in the fridge and I headed out to watch the US:Jamaica match in the Gold Cup competition at the tavern we'd been to the night before. (I still can't remember the name of it!) I got there a few minutes before the match started, concerned about getting a good seat. I needn't have been. I was one of about 20 people in there.  I had a table with a clear view of the match on a large screen. My shot of bourbon cost me five bucks (I just had the one) and the Diet Coke I portion it in to was free. With refills, it lasted me the whole match, which by the was was a fairly exciting (as in frustrating) draw, 1:1. The US has sent its B team to the Gold Cup, not the first time US Soccer has entered a tournament it didn't take particularly seriously; but at least in this case there's the excuse that all the top players featured in the Nations League final just a week or so before, and they're back with their clubs across Europe. This tournament will be a test of BJ Callaghan's abilities as a coach. Can he get this second-tier group of MLS and Liga MX players to gel? Can he get them to the semifinal? The final? Or will they somehow contrive to not win their group of minnows? The world awaits.

Sunday, June 25:

 Our original plan was to spend Sunday in St Louis too, but since we'd pretty much done all the stuff I really wanted to do (and there was nothing in particular that Roland wanted to do) we've decided to move on. I told the desk clerk this yesterday morning, but he apparently didn't make note of the fact. So there was a discussion with the clerk this morning, but it worked out as it should have. As I finish writing up this blog post, Roland has found a tennis match on TV to ignore while he surfs Tik Tok. I expect he hardly slept at all last night, but he'll sleep in the car as soon as we get going.

 And, as I told Roland: Italian food is usually better as leftovers than as fresh food, even the best of it. The leftovers I had from last night were an exception.

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A New Wander, Day 3: Little Rock to Missouri

 This is part three of many. You really should read them in order. You'll find Part One here, and here's a link to the photo album for this trip.

 I found us a good place for breakfast in North Little Rock this morning. It was called BJ's Market Cafe, because it's in the Farmer's Market, a large complex of warehouses near railroad tracks and highways. It was also close to a branch of Chase Bank, which was my first destination of the day, so that was a point strongly in its favour. It was also the only place listed on Yelp's or TripAdvisor's top-ten list that wasn't a chain restaurant. 

 After breakfast (oatmeal, an homage to A Certain Person who has that most mornings when travelling) I plugged a route into Google Maps, then had to re-do it three times before I could get one that didn't take us down 15 miles of frontage road along Interstate 40, or along Interstate 40 itself. It's tedious, putting in meaningless intermediate stops along the roads I want, but it's the only way to get the program to take me down back roads when there's a freeway in the way. And then when we get near one of those useless intermediate points, I can cancel the stop and it should continue to the next. Sometimes I forget to cancel the stop, and end up turning down weird little roads and wondering why the Hell I'm going there.

says it all

 Our first stop after the bank was Toad Suck. Really just because of the name of the town. It's right on the Arkansas River, with its own lock and high bridge, but there's nothing at all to see there except the sign welcoming you to town. It's so Arkansas.

 Then we cruised up through the Ozarks. Hours of driving on well-maintained winding mountain roads with little traffic, top down, gorgeous weather, highs in the 80s. We stopped for lunch at Mountain View, a very tourist-oriented place. I parked on the street by the courthouse and was gratified by how many people stopped to look at the car and comment on it. (They didn't know it was mine; I was in the shade on the sidewalk some small distance away, enjoying the show. There was probably a Trump-like cloud of narcissism hanging about me, visible only to cats and witches.) Although I did notice that, last night in Little Rock, that son of a bitch with the red Nissan who parked too close to me at Club Taco scratched my car with his door. Roland said it was alright, because he'd put a nice big scratch in the red Nissan when trying to get back into my car. He had a hard time of it because he couldn't open the car door far enough (because of the red Nissan). Karma sucks, dude. 

 If I thought I could find that red car I'd go back to Little Rock and do some real damage to it. I'm thinking broken windows.

 There was a local crafts school on a corner in Mountain View. I went to check it out after lunch, hoping it'd be like the Kentucky state crafts operations I've seen. (Lunch, by the way, was unremarkable except for featuring a dessert of Ozark Mountain pie: coconut and chocolate. Sherry would have hated it, but I didn't.) Anyway, the Kentucky craft shops always have excellent work for sale. But no, this shop consisted of the kind of arts and crafts one sees in pop-up pavilions at the Strawberry Festival or the Taste of New Orleans: ticky-tack jewelry, cheap stained glass Christmas ornaments, some artless pottery and fabrics. Not really worth the block-and-a-half walk to get there.

 North of Mountain View, near a town called Allison, is an old one-lane suspension bridge, one of only two in the state. I'd been across the other, in northwestern Arkansas, a few years ago, and it had been kind of exciting. Roland was unimpressed in the extreme, though, so it was really anticlimactic. Still, glad I did it.

Rocky Falls

 Our main stop in the afternoon was at Rocky Falls, in Missouri. This is a very pretty place, but there were about 30 people there, which I hadn't expected, since it's so remote. Roland refused to walk the 80 yards down to see the falls so I went by myself, which made it less fun. But I took a few pictures and watched the kids and others climbing around on the rocks and swimming in the swimmin' hole and lounging on the pebble shore, and then wandered back to the car. We took the wrong road on leaving (no internet out there) and came to a dirt road after about three miles, and then the dirt road became a track and I said, No, I'll not be taking my pegasus down that trail, so we turned around and found the right road. 

 The only hotels we could locate were about 15 miles out of our planned route, so we had made a reservation in Farmington. It turned out to be a pretty good place: nicer than either of the hotels we'd stayed in earlier on this trip, insofar as it had carpet on the floors and the toilet didn't overflow. A little more expensive, though, but we're both rich old men and can afford it, however much we don't want to. 

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New Wander, Day 2: Sulpher Springs to Little Rock

 This is part two of many. You really should read them in order. Part One can be seen here, and here's a link to the photo album for this trip.

  We spent our first night on the road at a Motel 6. I used to hate those places; they were cheap, yes, but so uncomfortable, and usually in what seemed sketchier neighbourhoods. But when I was out in California a couple of years ago I was practically forced to stay in one, & found it much nicer than it used to be. I've stayed in Motel 6's a couple of times since, & the only deficit they have is the lack of carpet and, sometimes, furniture. Last night's was no exception: it was clean and the beds were comfortable. It had a hard floor, which was okay, but it had no furniture other than the beds. It was uncomfortable trying to write my blog post sitting on the bed; I know they call it a laptop, but that's not really a place to use it. Otherwise the room was fine.

 We found breakfast this morning at a nice little cafe near downtown called the Pioneer. Good food, good prices, good-ish service. Then we headed over to the glass bathrooms on the courthouse square so Roland could see them, inside and out. (As the waitress at the Pioneer said, "Ain't that something to be famous for!") After a brief break there, we drove up to Paris to see the famous Eiffel Tower, and then on to Idabel, Oklahoma, to see the small collection of American muscle cars at a roadside stop called Gasquatch. They had some nice ones, but muscle cars aren't really my thing. And, unfortunately, the display area was closed when we were there, so I could only see them from a distance.

Lake Ouachita

 After that, we drove on into Arkansas. We had a nice lunch at the 270 Cafe in Mount Ida -- I had pulled pork tacos for $6 -- and then up a gravel road to the Lake Ouachita Vista on Hickory Nut Mountain. Up to that point, it was a really nice day: good roads, not much traffic. The view of Lake Ouachita was a surprise: I'd expected a big open expanse of water (it's a pretty big lake) but instead it's a warren of small islands. This is a place to have a boat! 

 I'd used Google Maps to navigate successfully by putting in small towns along our route and telling it to avoid highways. Then I put in the address of our hotel in Little Rock and my good day came to an end. The route it showed looked good so I started off down the one road in the area coming off of Hickory Nut Mountain. Then I found myself in Hot Springs. We weren't supposed to be going through Hot Springs. I pulled over to check the routing and found it took us onto I-30 and into Little Rock. I set it again to avoid highways, had it re-calculate the route, and started off again. It took us on city streets through downtown Hot Springs, then on to the east ... to Interstate 30, where it put us on the frontage road. In what programmer's imagination is a frontage road an adequate departure from a highway? I stopped again to redo the routing, but then I decided, The Hell With It, and just took the freeway to our hotel. Consequently I was not in a mood to expand on our day when we checked into our hotel.

 After writing the paragraphs to this point, and watching a few episodes of Celebrity Family Feud (with celebrities I've never heard of, and their next of kin) we dragged our asses down to the River Market area, a short swath of overpriced tourist-oriented restaurants and clubs along the riverfront. Nothing appealed, but on the way we had passed a fun-looking place called Taco Camp (or possibly Camp Taco) on a bedraggled street along a detour route. We went back there and had an excellent (and inexpensive) dinner. The only thing we could have done better was that we decided to sit indoors, only to find as we  were leaving that outside, in the (relatively cool) open air of the patio, they had a solo musician performing music that we liked. 

Sunset over Little Rock, from the Junction Bridge

 After dinner, I forced Roland to go with me to the Junction Bridge, an old structure that is now limited to pedestrian use. There were nice views of the Arkansas River and the downtown skyline, such as it is. Then we went to a club he had found listed on line with good-sounding reviews, not too far away. It turned out to be a gay club (or maybe a mixed-crowd club; who can tell?) where they were playing bingo to raise money for some charity function. We took a table in the back and sat through a game of blackout (the final game of the night) while we each had a drink. Then it was back to the hotel where Roland turned on a Tyler Perry show on BET called Sistas, which seems to me as bad as any low-budget production can be. It would appear that the writers' strike has not affected this program. I'm guessing it was written by AI that has sampled too many angst-wracked teenagers' tweets.

 

 I have placed the pictures in an online album, but Google Photos will not let me edit them. Why? I don't know. I never know why a Google program never works the same way twice in a row. I'll try again later.

Click on "Newer Post" below for the next installment of this gripping story.

A New Wander

This is the first post of several covering this trip. You really should read them in order.

 Today, my friend Roland and I left San Antonio to go a-wandering. While I've planned out a route on RoadTrippers (one of my favourite travel planning websites and the only one I pay money to use) the theme of the trip is as always: Every intersection is an opportunity to change plans.

 I'd expected to get to Paris, Texas today. That plan was foiled by a late start -- we didn't get away from Roland's house until about 9:30 -- and an unplanned detour of about 60 miles caused by the driver's selection of the wrong highway immediately after lunch. (Lunch, by the way, was at a surprisingly interesting and inexpensive little cafe in Caldwell called the Pink Kangaroo, owned by an Australian ex-pat and her daughter.) If my little compass indicator on the rearview mirror -- not the most reliable source, but useful in this particular instance -- hadn't alerted me to the fact that I was headed southwest instead of northeast, we might be spending tonight in Port Arthur or Goliad instead of Sulphur Springs. Oh, well, who cares.

 It was nice enough this morning to have the top down. We drove along the Death Loop (1604) and up 281 to Highway 46; along that road I felt a little lightheaded a couple of times, just for a moment or two each time, so we pulled into a parking lot so I could take my old-man meds. Have felt fine ever since. 

 In San Marcos I tried to switch on Google Maps. Every time I use that app, there's a problem of some kind, always a different one. Finally got it sorted after half a dozen attempts at changed settings and such; and after a while I remembered something I'd learned on the last trip: that it won't actually say anything unless the radio is on, and set to Bluetooth Audio. Now if I could just get it to say the names of the roads where I'm supposed to turn....

 Our only real stop this morning was at the Dinosaur Park in Cedar Creek, east of Austin. I'd gone there a year or two ago, but got there just as they were closing. Today we got there around noon, so I got to walk through the entire park. It was much larger than I'd expected, probably more than 5 acres. There were dozens of dinosaur sculptures and other long-extinct creatures (dimetrodons, smilodons, pterosaurs, etc.) and the park managed to place them so that each one is invisible until you're right on top of it, so you don't see the "next" dinosaur until you've had a good look at each one. It's all very well done. (Roland didn't have the energy to walk the park, so he went back into the air conditioning and waited. I did not hurry.) Took a lot of pictures but haven't gone through them yet, so will post a link to the album when I get it set up, maybe tomorrow.

 Here, though, is a single picture to tease your interest:

 After that we put the top up. It hit 105 this afternoon. Tomorrow (and the rest of the trip) should be a little cooler, but we won't be surprised if the top goes up every afternoon.

 

Click on "Newer Post" below for the next installment of this gripping story.

Williamsburg Again, and More: the 2023 Condo Week in Virginia

 All the pictures I took on this trip -- not very many, really -- can be seen online here.

Mardi Gras

 As much as I love the thought of travelling by car around the country, I've not been particularly satisfied with the trips I've made so far this year, in some ways. My first, to New Orleans with my friend Marty, was as much fun as I'd hoped it would be; nice hotel, mostly good-enough weather while there, and we caught a Krewe of Chewbacchus parade. The only disappointment being that because of the threat of bad weather, I took the Subaru instead of the convertible. It was January, after all, so I couldn't be surprised that it was too cold to go top-down. Plus, the car mostly sat by the hotel anyway, while we took the streetcar or walked everywhere. Really the only driving was across Louisiana on the freeway, and how much fun would that have been? (I had, at one point, considered taking the coastal roads back -- from New Orleans to Houma and New Iberia, then across on State Highway 14. That would only have taken a couple of hours longer, but (a) I had the Subaru and (2) Marty had a plane to catch. Plus it rained pretty hard in Louisiana on the trip home.)

on the beach, South Padre Island

 The second trip was to South Padre island, just a few hours away. That was really good, first because the weather was glorious, second because we got to take Carly with us, and third because we got to visit with a good friend we hadn't seen in a while. (Joyce, who is one of about three people I've known for half a century. It seems impossible, given that we're both so young.) But, good as the trip was, it wasn't a wander.

 The third trip, to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, was also about what I'd expected. The trip up didn't go as planned, but it was okay. Freeway all the way, though I finally got to go to the lynching memorial in Montgomery, but was rushed in the nearby museum, and there was so much to see that I want to go back. We didn't get to the Georgia state park I'd planned to stop at, but we did go to an unexpected park in Alabama and had a good long hike to a waterfall. 

 It was on that trip that the Wyndham Rewards mobile web site stopped working right. (And I thought Google Maps was irksome!) I've tried the app, but it never worked right. Now the web site fails consistently as well. No matter what location I plug into it, it's unable to locate any hotels. A couple of times I've tried just calling the toll-free number and making a reservation that way, but that involves (usually) about 20 minutes on hold and a lot of questions that Wyndham should already have the answers to. I've also tried using their regular web site, and have had intermittent success with that. Lately, though, I've just gone with other hotel groups. I pay a little more for lodging (I'm sure) but have a lot less frustration. (The Wyndham Rewards website works fine on my computer at home, but most of the time I don't know in advance where I want to be at night.)

Big Dam Bridge

 This latest trip was, all in all, a good trip as well. The outbound leg could have gone better, but I didn't plan it well enough. First, there was a failure of communication, in that I'd expected to come home from my first-thing-in-the-morning doctor's appointment to find that Sherry had taken Carly to the kennel and was ready to go at 9:30 in the morning. She had not, and was not, so we got away kind of late. (I'm not saying it was her fault, I'm just saying I blame her.) We got across Texas with the top mostly down, and pulled in late at Hope, Arkansas the first night (because Wyndham couldn't locate any of its three hotels in Texarkana). The next day we drove to Little Rock, then spent the morning at the Big Dam Bridge, a scenic spot west of the city. I found a route to Memphis that avoided freeways for the most part, and even though the secondary highway route was less than scenic, it was still a grand improvement on Interstate 30. At Memphis, we walked across the Mississippi River on the Harahan bridge, an old railway span where the accompanying roadway has been converted to pedestrian use. It gives a nice view of downtown Memphis, which unfortunately isn't really much to see. From there, we went to the Crystal Shrine Grotto, in a local cemetery, which was a cool (literally) break from the heat (which was made worse by the fact that the car's A/C had stopped cooling; we got that fixed in Williamsburg). 

 I had planned to go up to Houston and Montgomery Counties, the last two Tennessee counties I haven't visited already; but I didn't accurately foresee the times and distances involved, constrained by the need to be in Richmond at a certain time on Friday. I also didn't foresee the fact that there are only three people in Tennessee who know how to drive on the freeway, so we faced long delays west of Jackson, in Nashville, and east of Knoxville, to go with the prior trip's hour-long stoppage in Chattanooga. So that planned diversion was tossed out, and we crossed the state on the freeway.

  I did, though, stop at the Parthenon in Nashville as planned, because I really wanted Sherry to see it. It's as much a Wonder of the World as the original in Athens, and is truly Not To Be Missed. So we didn't. (The picture here, by the way, is from a previous trip; I didn't take any pictures of it this time. The only difference is that the landscaping is now finished, and some of the irrelevant exhibits in the basement art gallery are different.)

Once we got past Knoxville the travel got easier. Even the freeways in the southern Appalachian Mountains are pleasant to drive. If Wyndham Rewards could have located any of their seven hotels around Wytheville, Virginia, it would have been nice. (Bitch, bitch, bitch.)

  I should mention the Muffin Incident. Years ago, during a condo week in Branson, the office sent over a box of doughnuts to welcome us to their complex. Sadly, Sherry answered the door, thanked the woman, and sent the doughnuts away because we were "all on a diet." This is now known in our circle as the Branson Doughnut Incident. None of us has forgiven her that bit of scruple, but at least I thought baked goods would be safe around her. At one of our hotels, I picked up a chocolate chip Otis Spunkmeyer muffin, and just in case she wanted something -- even thought I knew she wouldn't -- a packaged cinnamon roll. If it turned out she did, in fact, want one, I'd be perfectly happy with the other ... though I would have preferred the muffin. Both packages were lodged in our back-seat cooler.

  After a couple of days of patting myself on the back for my will-power, I said I wanted the muffin. "The muffin is gone," she said. "Then I'll have the cinnamon roll." "That's gone, too." I was astounded. Had they both gone bad, sitting in the cooler for two days? No, they'd been eaten. Shocked. Dismayed. Betrayed. In fact, this Muffin Incident stands to be the signature event of the entire 2023 Condo Week trip. I may never get over it.

 Next day, we got to Richmond, picked up Jeff's rented oxygen machine and went to the airport. Richmond has a nice, small airport, and offers an hour free parking in their garage, which made it convenient to meet up there before driving to Williamsburg, where we checked into our condo at Vacation Village. The people in their office tried hard (then, and again later) to get me to commit to a time-share song and dance, but after Pigeon Forge I wasn't about to sit through that again. 

It needs a name.

 One of the things I like about these condominium complexes we go to on these trips are the activities they provide. Most of the time we ignore them, but on occasion they prove fun or interesting. This year, we took advantage of two offerings. We went to the Activity Center on Sunday and painted ceramic piggy banks -- I particularly wanted to do that because the plastic plug on my cute little penguin piggy bank has failed; I really only wanted a new plug but came away with a new dinosaur bank. (Its plug doesn't quite fit the penguin. ¡Que lastima!)

 The other activity we took advantage of was a talk by a man who portrays an XVIII-Century Virginian, whose name I forget, as a means of bringing the Revolutionary Era to life. Think Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain. It was entertaining and informative, even if it wasn't especially accurate, and made for a relaxing evening.

Zoom in

 The first thing we did, though, was to go to a local car show. It was advertised as "British," but about a third of the cars were Ferraris, Porsches or Mercedes. (They were interesting, too.) But I must be getting jaded, as I only took one photo, and that as much for the window sticker as the car. There were a few Jags in the show, but not nearly enough, and none as pretty as mine.

 We got a three-day ticket to Colonial Williamsburg, which I thought was more time than I would want, but it turned out to be just right. I won't go into all that we saw there; we had been to the place 15 years before and I remembered it pretty clearly. (Luckily for you, that was before I started blogging, otherwise I'd give you a link to a long-winded recounting of the visit, which you would be morally obligated to actually read. Here, though, is a link to the pictures I took on that trip, which include many of Williamsburg.) Not everything in Williamsburg is open every day, and some of the shops that were open during this visit were new to us: the wheelwright, for example. And this time, instead of getting to watch a stage performance of the type that would have been seen in Colonial times, we got a short lecture about theater of the era (because all the other actors had the day off). 

 But I'm not going to dwell on Colonial Williamsburg. It's a lot of fun, despite being educational, and very prettily restored. The artisans at work there, both in costume and behind the scenes, are a great historical resource, on a par with the National Parks Service (and better funded), and having Colonial Williamsburg available to visit is a treasure everyone should take advantage of. If you haven't been, go. If you have, go back.

 We stopped at Fort Eustis to see the US Army's Transportation Museum, which was closed for some unexplained reason, so we only got to look at the outdoor exhibits through the fences. What a collection of oddities it is! Then we headed over to Newport News to revisit the Mariner's Museum. We'd been there on our prior condo trip to Williamsburg, just a few years after the Monitor had been located off the North Carolina coast; now there's an extensive new exhibit about the famous Ironclad and its encounter with the CSS Virginia (better known as the Merrimack), that we wanted to see. Again, not enough time. Afterwards we drove around looking at some of the public art that Newport News makes a small fuss about.

on the VMFA lawn

 More interesting, though, was the art on display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. While not as big as my favourite art museum, the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City, this fine collection runs a close second. Probably because it has a lot of glass in it, ancient and modern, from art glass to leaded glass, and because it displays works by one of my favourite underappreciated artists, Charles Rennie MacIntosh (though, sadly, none of his glasswork). It also has a collection of Fabergé eggs, which are pretty but utterly decadent, and a good collection of Great Masters paintings.

 We paid a visit to the Virginia State Capitol building, which was not as architecturally interesting as its staff seems to think. (It was designed by one T. Jefferson, whose name is everywhere in Virginia, and who is mostly famous for having once written a deathless sentence -- "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal...", yada yada yada -- and for having known when to abandon principle for practicality; specifically, May 2, 1803.) The building's main attraction for me is the life-sized statue of George Washington, which was done at a particularly poignant moment in his great and eventful life, midway between his astonishing success as commander of the Continental forces that had wrested thirteen North American colonies from the powerful British Empire (with a little help from nos amix) and his return to public life to initiate the Federal government we have today. If King George III got one thing right in his life, it was this: 

When the King asked what General Washington planned to do now that he had won the war. [Benjamin] West replied: "They say he will return to his farm." King George exclaimed: "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world."

Yup.

So we did some other touristy things around Richmond: a boat tour of the canals built before the railroads came, and a visit to a Tudor-style manor house of sorts, built from pieces of the genuine article transshipped from the English Midlands in the 1920s; a visit to the Old Ironworks, part of the Richmond Battlefield National Historical Park. We also spent an afternoon with some of Jeff's family, who held an impromptu get-together in honour of his return to Virginia. I had only previously met one of them, his sister Kathy (or Cathy; I don't know which spelling she uses), and that was decades ago. But sitting in the dining room of the vintage house (a very pretty, and nicely updated Arts-and-Crafts place) listening to the mostly 20- and 30-somethings talk, it struck me that of all these people, all of them born and raised in Virginia, not a one had the least hint of a Southern accent. In fact, their speech, both in accent and style, was indistinguishable from the unstressed postmodern open tones of the Great Plains. They all sounded as if they had been brought up in the same rooms as my niece and nephews. Any of them could host late-night talk shows and everyone from coast to coast would be able to understand them easily. I wasn't prepared for that, and I can't account for it, unless everyone of that generation got their diction from network television. (I blame the bloated Federal bureaucracy, the epicenter of which is only a few dozen miles to the north.)

 Richmond seems a much more pleasant place than I'd expected. Not that I saw all of it, or even much of it. We stayed in a hotel near the airport, in a suburb that I would call middle-class; on the way into town from there we passed through working-class neighbourhoods and one area that I would feel uncomfortable in, day or night. The area south of the James River, along Hull Avenue, seemed to me a vibrant working-class area full of potential, while downtown (on a weekend) was nothing if not sleepy under the soporific weight of government offices. Richmond, like San Antonio, is suffused with a largely ignored history. But everywhere in the city we encountered lively areas of small-scale commerce (the best kind) resisting the blight of franchise shops and chain stores; I doubt that there are a dozen Starbucks in the whole town. The streets of the older sections, where we spent most of our time, felt to me like Southtown, or New Orleans, or South Philadelphia: all places I enjoy being if it's not too hot. I liked it.

 The drive home was pleasant enough. We were concerned about rain along the way (there wasn't any, it turned out) and we both missed our dog Carly, who had endured a number of thunderstorms while in the kennel back home; like many dogs, they terrify her. I thought about going through Tennessee again, just to go through those two remaining counties that I'd hoped to get to on the way up, but decided instead to stick with my original plan of getting the last remaining county in North Carolina. I did that (making it the 38th state I've been to every county in), though we decided against going to Hanging Rock State Park or driving the Cherohala Skyway. Those would have added another day to the return trip, and would have forced us to take the same routes we had taken on the trip to Pigeon Forge a couple of weeks before. Instead we dropped down to central Georgia, where we were able to put the top down and spend a whole day wandering across the state from east to west, picking up 17 of the nearly 60 remaining unvisited counties there: the kind of travel I most enjoy. That done, we got on the freeway and headed home. The only departure from the tedium of freeway driving across Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and east Texas came when we stopped for dinner in Flatonia, about an hour and a half east of home, and stumbled upon the Red Vault, a very nice restaurant owned by a French chef retired from California who shares my appreciation for old cars. (Wednesday is sushi night, by the way, and it was as good as any I've had anywhere.)