The 2025 Condo Week Trip, That Last Little Bit

 This is the last of a series of posts, which I think you should read in order. Read the first part here. And you can see all the pictures from this trip in the Google Photos album here.

 

Monday, September 1

 We didn't have any clear plan for this day, so after a discussion over breakfast at the hotel, we decided to go back up to Holy Hill, in Hubertus, some thirty miles northwest of the city, to see the basilica that we'd been too late to see on Friday. We thought we'd also go to the labyrinth in West Bend, which is maybe fifteen or twenty miles farther, since we'd skipped that in hopes of reaching the basilica in time.

 We did get to the basilica fairly early, and that's when we discovered there's an elevator. I took that up to the porch; Jeff did too, a little later. I don't know how Sherry and Nancy got up there; they rushed off as soon as the car was parked and disappeared, like they usually do when they're together. For all I know they had themselves beamed up.

 Sherry took the stairs up the "scenic tower". I looked at the stairs and decided there was no way I was going to climb that narrow little staircase up seven stories and come back down without assistance from emergency medical technicians, so I just looked at her pictures. Oh, for the days, now so far in the past, when I would not let a tower go unclimbed. 

 While we were there, we saw a procession of young girls with wreaths in their hair, carrying a statue of the Virgin Mary up to the porch. I wonder if they came all the way from the bottom, because they were singing as they climbed up the last flight of steps (the part of their procession that I witnessed) and none of them seemed the least bit winded. Maybe they'd come just the one flight. 

Anyway, so the inside of the basilica is, as I said somewhere earlier, very spare in its decoration. It has ribbed vault ceilings in the gothic style, with almost no iconographic decoration on the walls. There are images in the stained glass, and a few icons across the front of the sanctuary, but by Roman Catholic standards the decor seems positively protestant in is sparseness. Beautiful, but in a very different way.

 We ditched the labyrinth again, because the Art Museum downtown was open only until five today (usually it's closed on Mondays, but today is a holiday, so it's open) and this was our only chance to see it, as it would be closed all day on Tuesday and we'd be leaving on Wednesday. We got down there and found a parking place in a nearly-empty garage across the street, and the first thing we did was have lunch in the cafe on the Lake level. It was nothing special: fruit bowls and prefab wraps with captive-audience price tags. I went out on the terrace to look at the lake and ended up staying out there for two hours or so, while everybody else toured the museum. Judging from their photos of the artworks contained inside, I made the better choice. I'd had a look at the museum's map of galleries and felt just from that that I'd be dissatisfied at having paid something like twenty bucks to see a bunch of abstract and postmodern crap. There was one gallery of paintings I might have liked to see, and an exhibition in the basement on the history of photography, but the map and the pictures my peeps took tell me I made the right choice (for a change) for myself.  

North Point Lighthouse

 Next we drove up to the North Point Lighthouse, which was small and really kind of squat and dumpy (it was built in two phases; first the top portion, then the bottom part was added later on). But it's a very pretty setting, sort of at the end of a miles-long string of parklands along the lakeshore that start way down below the art museum. The lighthouse itself, though, wasn't very impressive, especially after having seen the one at Wind Point in Racine.  

On the way to our next stop in our off-the-cuff tour, we stopped to get a photo of the Water Tower, built in the 1870s. Then we just sort of cruised around the Third Ward, a gentrifying artsy-fartsy area on the southwestern corner of downtown. It's got a lot of warehouses converted to expensive flats, and trendy restaurants and boutique shops, and is centered on the Milwaukee Public Market. The whole area is a duplication of the Pearl area in San Antonio -- all the same characteristics, right down to the enclosed mall of pop-up shops -- so I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that every major city in the country has a gentrifying artsy-fartsy area just like the Third Ward, or the Pearl, and they all believe they're special because of it.

 While we were there Nancy found that there's yet another lighthouse in Milwaukee, the Pier Head Light, so we drove out to see that. The lighthouse itself is a grafitti-covered lump of metal maybe fifteen or twenty feet tall, but it does offer nice views of the skyline. Then she found a listing for something called the Schlitz Audubon center out in a suburb some ten miles north, but the website said they were open until 8pm, so we went. Got there just after five o'clock, to learn that, as of today, the first of September, their closing time is five o'clock.  Probably just as well; there were a lot of mosquitos.

 It had been a day of some disappointments, obviously, but still an enjoyable day, and I think we all kind of needed a low-key day like this. And we finished it off on a high note by going back to Oscar's Pub for dinner, where we'd had such great food on Sunday (I think it was Sunday) before the Conservatory. 

 

Tuesday, September 2

  Our last day in Milwaukee began with a morning at the Pabst Mansion. When this Flemish revival house was built, in the late 19th Century, it was one of about 60 large houses on what was then called Grand Avenue. (Now it's Wisconsin Avenue, and all the other mansions have been torn down or repurposed to economically more rewarding uses than mere dwelling spaces.) After the Pabsts died, the house was sold to the Archdiocese of Milwaukee for a bishop's palace. When, in the 1970s, it became too expensive to maintain, it was sold to a neighbouring hotelier, who planned to redevelop this space into a parking lot. This was the catalyst that resulted in a save-our-history upswell among those in town who saw more value in the property than just the money it could make for the owner. Visionary fools, always getting in the way of progress. 

 To get their way, the visionaries had to give up the carriage house; but they did save the old house, now the last one remaining on the street. As someone in the gift shop's documentary video said, "a few pieces of this history to tell a larger story." 

 There was also a small domed temporary building, originally the Pabst pavilion at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, that had been transported from there to Milwaukee when the fair ended and attached to the east end of the house. I don't think its removal had to do with the property deal, because the temporary building has been dismantled and stored in the big house's basement, awaiting a spare twelve million dollars to reconstruct. I think it was just in bad shape and they couldn't afford to fix it up. Too bad, really, because architecturally it's prettier than the house. 

This year's HQ

 Anyway: so when we arrived I realized we had actually driven right by it when we came to see the Joan of Arc Chapel, I hadn't realized it because it is serving as this year's headquarters for the Fog & Scaffold Travel Club; I just saw the historic marker for Captain Pabst, off to the side of the front lawn, as I executed a (probably illegal) three-point turn.

 We parked around the corner, not knowing there's a lot just for the Pabst Mansion across Wisconsin Avenue. We spent the few minutes we had before the tour piddling around the gift shop. Sherry found me another sweatshirt on sale ($20, not bad, and a nice bright red colour) and I stashed my camera bag in one of their lockers. Wish I'd left the camera too, as the house turned out to be so dark inside that I couldn't get any decent photos without a flash. Fortunately, Sherry got a few good ones with her cellphone camera.

 The tour itself was excellent, largely because we had a retired history teacher to show us through the place. She didn't know everything about the house -- she's only been a docent there for a couple of years -- but what she did know, she knew well, and told in an interesting fashion, without a lot of hype or melodrama.

 We located a place for lunch close to the dock where our afternoon river-and-bay boat tour would start, a sort of dive bar called München Biergarten, where we got light lunches of wurst and a big pretzel for Nancy (and I do mean big) with beer and bad service. Nancy asked for tea, which was on their digital menu, but the bartender denied they had any. Then she asked for something else on the menu, which he also said they didn't sell. She got water; they had that.

  As enjoyable as the Pabst Mansion tour had been, the afternoon's Milwaukee River & Harbor Cruise was even better. Mostly because we could sit down the whole time. (Tourism is tiring, and hard on the feet, especially for us old folks.) We booked our places on Edelweiss, which for all I know is the only company offering boat tours. They have a warning on their web site saying they cannot delay the tour for late-arriving passengers, because of "scheduled drawbridge openings." And they didn't give refunds just because you miss the boat. So I was picturing a two-deck vessel such as I'd seen by the art museum, and was looking forrward to watching the drawbridges operate from river level. But on a Tuesday afternoon after Labor Day, there aren't enough of us tourists left in Milwaukee, so we got a single-deck vessel, sort of a wide bateau-mouche, which didn't need to have the bridges open for it. That was the only disappointment of the trip. (And I wonder: if the reason they can't wait is invalid, would they wait?)

  The cruise lasted a little over an hour, I think, going out into the bay behind the breakwater on a beautiful cool late summer's day, We had an excellent narrator, one who told amusing stories about the chequered history of Milwaukee, many of them featuring the same Mr Kilbourn for whom Wisconsin Dells was originally named; a man who knew how to run roughshod. 

 Milwaukee is an architecturally interesting city.* In the late 19th Century, when all the world was putting up gingerbread houses and Neo-Classical Revival buildings, Milwaukee was too; but they also seemed to have a thing for Flemish Revival. Besides the City Hall and the Pabst Mansion, there are a number of buildings in that uncommon style, like the Dubbel Dutch Hotel. Collectively, they give the city a slightly distinctive flavour, which, being from New Orleans and living by choice in San Antonio, I appreciate.

 Most of the new stuff, of course, is dull in a postmodern cost-saving way, but in between those, there remain some attractive structures. Like in the photo above: the brown building at the right is an event venue called the War Memorial Center. Its height is the same as the cliffs at Omaha Beach, it is set back from the water's edge by the same distance as those cliffs, and the design of the building's facades is meant to evoke the German pillboxes American soldiers faced on D-Day. 

 The pointy white building behind it, by the way, is Milwaukee's first high-rise apartment building. It is now, not surprisingly, unaffordable to most people. The old building at the far left is the local gas company, so the neon flame on top lights up in different colours to show how much money they're going to make, depending on the weather. (If it's going to be really cold, it lights up gold.) The glass-and-steel buildings in the middle, behind the beautiful art museum (seen with its vanes closed, because the museum's not open on Tuesdays) are typical uninteresting glass-and-steel buildings, with curves and lumps and bulges added in the vain hope of giving them some attribute to set them apart from other typical uninteresting glass-and-steel buildings. Didn't really work.

 We were then at that closing stage of our Condo Week Add-On, a time when we just kind of roam around, making random turns and seeing what chance brings us. We saw a mouse climbing up a pole next to a railway underpass; we saw a city park that seemed to contain a small reservoir; a shop selling "bubble pancakes" and ice cream; and then we went back to the area around the Domes so Nancy could get a picture of a building she'd seen on a previous visit, the Knitting Factory. They used to make underwear there, but now it's low-income housing of some kind.

 By this time it was getting on toward being late, and we all had to pack for the next day's departures; so we started back to the hotel. We weren't in a great hurry, so I decided to take city streets all the way back, about a dozen miles. That took us through a variety of neighbourhoods in Milwaukee and into a separate city called West Allis, where we decided it was time for something to drink. We'd had such good luck in stumbling across Oscar's Pub and Grill that when I saw Paulie's Pub, I felt a sort of hopeful kinship, so I found a parking place and we went in. They were producing a (I assume) local radio show about car racing -- there was what looked like a demolition derby car parked outside, with decal illustrations of a grille and headlights where the real things would normally have been -- and it was so loud, and crowded, that when we got our drinks and a couple of small snacks, we took them outside to the porch that ran down the side of the building. One of the snacks was called jalapeño poppers, but they were nothing like what we'd get if we ordered that back home. They were more like flautas with a cream cheese filling. We also had cheese curds, which weren't nearly as good as the ones I used to get out in western Wisconsin; but despite that, there were quickly none left.

________

* Unlike Minneapolis, which contains many of the ugliest buildings I've seen, all in one central business district. 

________ 

The Drive Home: Wednesday, September 3 through Friday, September 5

 It was basically an uneventful trip home. We left the hotel at around eight in the morning and had a few spells of light rain in the first hour or two. In northwestern Illinois, we met my former law partner Curtis, who recently moved to that area from Nevada. We used to go hiking while Sherry played soccer at the Huntsman Games in Utah every year, but I guess that won't happen anymore. And we're both at an age when travel is becoming increasingly difficult, so while this is likely not the last time he and I will see each other -- a thought too sad to contemplate -- it's surely one of the last. Unless I contrive excuses to revisit the Old Northwest, or the Upper Midwest, or whatever you like to call that part of the country.

 Sherry and I started listening to an audiobook by Danielle Arceneaux called Glory Be, a funny little murder mystery set in Lafayette, Louisiana, where I used to live. The reader happened to be the same reader as the one that read Hollywood Homocide, which we'd listened to on the drive up, across Iowa. She's a good reader, but being intimately familiar with the pronunciation of place names in Acadiana made me wince from time to time. Especially the way she would pronounce "Lafayette", like it was in Indiana. Enjoyed the book anyway, and the mystery kept us both engaged until the very end.

 We spent the first night, Wednesday, in Jefferson City, Missouri, at a so-so chain hotel. We drove downtown for dinner at a place called Ecco Lounge ("Jefferson City's oldest restaurant"), where they had good food and excellent service; then we walked down to the corner where there was a place called the Ice Cream Factory still open. One of those local places that makes all their own product, and you want to try every flavour. It's been several days now, and if I meditate on the question I could probably remember which I had, but all I remember at the moment is that we ate it outside at a cafe table, I had mine in a waffle bowl, and there was some guy who'd left his car running in the parking lot with the headlights shining in our eyes while he went inside. Anyway, it doesn't matter what flavour it was; it was good, and next time I'm in Jeff City I'll probably go back and get something completely different. 

 On Thursday we drove from Jefferson City to McKinney, a northern suburb of Dallas. Freeway as far as Joplin, but then we took the highway that goes through several of the Indian nations in eastern Oklahoma (because most of that state's freeways are toll roads, and I feel like we've already paid for them once and shouldn't have to pay again). It wasn't as bad a drive as I remember it being, maybe because we finished Glory Be and started Skin Deep, by Timothy Halloran. He wrote a series of maybe eight or ten amusing mystery novels set in Los Angeles with a "detective" -- actually, a thief -- named Junior Bender, all of which we enjoyed; this series -- Skin Deep is, I think, the third in the series -- is also set in L.A., with a detective (Simeon Grist) who's actually a detective. In this book, he gets hired by a film producer to babysit the movie star he beat up at the beginning of the story, and it goes on from there with wit and a little sophistication. I recommend both series. (Halloran, if I remember correctly, also wrote a series or two of books set in Burma, but I haven't read or heard any of those.)

 Dinner in McKinney was at an Iraqi restaurant near the hotel. Sherry ordered "tawook," which is chunks of chicken marinated and grilled and served wrapped in a pita-like bread. I had a half-order of "Iraqi kebab," which was served with a piece of soft naan-like bread as big as a pizza pan. Neither of us had ever had Iraqi food before. I honestly can't tell it from Turkish, or Lebanese, or generic "Mediterranean" cuisine. It was very good, and not particularly expensive, but the first employee we encountered seemed to be a teenaged girl who spoke (or pretended to speak) no English and had been grounded for some reason by her parents, and was working at the shop as some kind of horribly unjust punishment. She was fairly quickly sent to the kitchen and replaced by what I assume is her mother, who was much more adept at welcoming customers. She did a lot to counter the offputting feel of the first encounter.

 And on Friday morning, after getting through the rush-hour traffic in Dallas, we had a light breakfast in Waxahachie, at a local shop called Oma's Jiffy Burger, which seemed to be the place for breakfast in that town. We each had just a breakfast sandwich of egg, cheese and sausage, and coffee; it was all good, and filling, and the atmosphere was pure small-town-Texas. Couldn't be better.

 And then we were home. In plenty of time to collect our Carly from the kennel and apologize profusely to her for having left her alone for nearly three weeks, when there were thunderstorms twice a day every day &c &c. She'll never let us live that down.

You will pay.

 

The Last of LA

If you want to be notified of postings on this blog, send me an email at passepartout22@gmail.com and I'll have this platform send you an invitation to subscribe. It seems to work like half the time....

This is the fifth post in a series; sixth if you count the prologue. You really should read them in order, so click on this link for the Prologue or on this link for Part One. And if you want to see all the pictures from this trip, click here. 

Saturday in Los Angeles

 This time we actually made it to the cafe I'd been aiming for the other day, on Wilshire near the Petersen Museum. It's called ... well, now I've forgotten. Cafe Fresco. They've changed their signage but it's the same place I went to last time, on the Stained Glass Trip. Excellent service. Good food, too. I had lox and bagel; it came with huge slices of cucumber and some red onion that made it hard to eat, but well worth the trouble. 

 Since by this point we had pretty much done everything we wanted to do, we decided to take a cruise down toward a part of town we hadn't already seen, and ended up at Venice Beach. Hank's trainer used to work there, at the original Gold's Gym, and had asked Hank to say hello to the manager for him. So we went by there. I dropped Hank off and drove around the block, then found a parking place and just waited until he texted me. The manager wasn't there but Hank got a swag-bag to take back with him. I wonder what's in a gym swag-bag?

 We decided we could just make the 1:30 tour at Paramount Studios, so we drove there. Got there with about 5 minutes to spare. Paid $24 to park but the attendant promised us a refund if we didn't make it to the tour (which was just across the street). Practically ran over there, only to discover that the 1:30 tour was just starting but there were no more spaces available, despite what it says on the web site. "Yeah, I know," said the ticket-office guy, "The web site's wrong." Like it's apparently always wrong. So we got our parking money back and went to the hotel to prepare for the evening's entertainment. Which, considering how tired we'd gotten in three days, was probably a good idea.

delivery robot, Melrose Ave

 The Hollywood Fringe Festival started the day we got to town, and I've kept mentioning to Hank that we should do something. He seemed unexcited by the idea, so I had to insist, and on Saturday night we had dinner at a little Mediterranean place on Melrose, and then walked up to the Actors' Company Other Space for a play. I'd thought it was just around the corner, but I had misremembered the street number, and it was three long blocks away. We still got there in time to see a stageplay called The Altruists, a dark comedy of errors involving people who concern themselves with Causes. We both enjoyed it, and I was happy to have gotten to see something of the Fringe. If I had somebody to go with, I'd come back every year just for that. But I don't.

 We stopped for some gelati before heading back to the hotel, but that was about as much nightlife as the two of us could take.

 Sunday in LA and gone

 We checked out of the hotel and went for breakfast back to the Continental Kitchen, which we'd enjoyed so much the other day; but it doesn't open until 10AM on Sunday, so we went looking for somewhere else. Hank found a place on Google Maps, not too far away, called Lazy Daisy, and despite the unimaginative name, it turned out to be pretty good. Kind of trendy, I guess, but it managed a really good cup of coffee. After relaxing there for a while, we went to Mass at the Good Shepherd Catholic Church on ... Santa Monica? I think so. It was a very diverse congregation, which surprised me. And there were about 300 people in the church, which surprised me even more. Last time I went to a regular mass, there were about 20 old ladies in a gigantic cathedral, and me. That was a long time ago, so I guess the most recent popes have had a positive effect on the Church.

 It was Father's Day (surprised me!) and the homily was all about ... abortion. The priest was agin' it. That did not surprise me.

It's a Jag.

 When mass was over we drove basically across the street and looked for a parking place to go see the Rodeo Drive Concours d'Élégance Car Show (sic). Several blocks of the iconic Beverly Hills shopping street were closed off and loaded down with fancy European sports cars (and a few American products, some old, some just gussied up so they'd seem special) There were a lot that I just didn't bother taking pictures of ... Shelby Cobras, Mustangs, Porches, new Aston Martins, yet another tranche of commonplace Lamborghinis and some of the more ordinary Ferraris, but there were also a lot that I did take pictures of, and I know you're gassed up about the prospect of seeing them; so click on the photo link at the top. Go ahead; I'll wait.

 Having had a nice lunch at a sidewalk cafe nearby (Via Alloro, if you're wondering; Italian, and some of the staff is actually Italian, including one waiter who takes as his model for service the performance of Magenta and Riff Raff in the feast scene of Rocky Horror Picture Show; but otherwise very good), we drove up into the Hollywood Hills to see the ugly new houses. They used to be pretty small places, and kind of ordinary. No longer. They now sprawl across as much land as can be built on, and none that we saw had any architecturally redeeming features. 

 That did it for our guys' weekend in L.A. I drove Hank to the airport, getting there around 4pm, and then took off east for my reserved room in Blythe, on the Arizona state line, and what I'd hoped would be an uneventful drive home. 

 The start of it was inauspicious. First I had to stop in West Covina, just outside LA, for a nap in a shaded spot in a liquor store parking lot, as I found myself almost falling asleep at the wheel. I must have slept for about half an hour, until some guy in a truck that had pulled up next to me unobserved shouted in Spanish to someone else that I was sleeping. That woke me up, and I found myself feeling refreshed. I got to my hotel, a Motel 6, just before 9pm, but there wasn't anyone in the office. Just a sign saying they had "stepped away for a few minutes." I waited a few minutes, then knocked, then tried calling the motel on the local number. It rang for about 5 minutes but nobody ever came. I waited a while longer -- about half an hour all together -- then made a reservation at another motel in the area and left a bad review for the Motel 6. Turns out I'm not the first person that has encountered this eventuality at that motel. If it shows up as a charge on my Master Card bill I'm going to be pissed. I expect to be pissed.

 The Travelodge I moved to wasn't a whole lot better. The new owners had just taken over the day before, a young couple from LA. The first room they gave me was clearly not ready for occupancy, but they found me another one (there were plenty of choices) and in the end I was satisfied with the room, except that somebody in the neighbouring room started slamming doors at 1AM, and the light and fan in the bathroom kept turning itself on. Weird.

 Now, Monday night, I'm in El Paso and have one more day's drive to deal with. My car's "engine coolant low" light has come on again, so I'll top off the reservoir in the morning when it's had time to cool. I know when I open it it's going to be full. It's the sensor; it sticks. If I ignore it the light will go out.

LA Trip reprise: Havasu Sentence & Escape to LA!

 Monday & Tuesday

 It hit 122 degrees Tuesday afternoon at the house in Havasu. I think that pretty much says it all. Don't you tell me it's a dry heat.

 The highlights of my time in Havasu are as follows: early morning walks around Carly's Island, followed by breakfast at Peggy's Sunrise Cafe, my favourite place in the city; really the only place I've found for a decent breakfast. And I got an oil change in the Jag. I thought when I left home that I could just do it when I got back, but it was already 1400 miles past-due, and I wasn't even to LA yet. So what the hell. And I learned that, if you're looking for a solid career with growth potential, you should open a drive-through oil-change shop in Lake Havasu City. The first shop I called had an opening for a week from Friday. The second could get me in on Monday. Third time was the charm, but it cost me more than twice what it would have back home.

 I decided not to return to Havasu after LA; I wouldn't be able to get there before 10PM or so, and then all I'd do is wake up and shut up the house before heading home. No point, really: it wasn't worth the savings of one extra night in a motel, especially when you consider the added gas to get there, at $5.59 a gallon (for premium).

 So I made a reservation for that first night of the return trip, in Blythe, California. I also made a reservation for Wednesday night at a motel in a suburb called Lawndale, not far from LAX, so it'd be easy to get there to collect the Hankmeister when he got in. Then I checked my route across the Mojave Desert, and went to bed. 

 And finally, I've had three more people compliment the car since I got to Havasu. That alone is worth the extra expense.Well, maybe not, but it doesn't hurt.

 Wednesday, June 12

 I managed to shut the house up pretty quickly; really the only time-consuming part was making the bed. It's so low to the ground that it's difficult to get down there and tuck the sheets in. I was on the road by 6:30, I think. Stopped for coffee at the Running Man C-store in Parker, then crossed into California. My first stop was a small monument on the side of the road to mark one of the desert training bases used during World War II. On the way there a white lizard at least a foot long ran across the road in front of me. I'm not sure if it was an albino or if there's a species of lizard in the Mojave that's actually bright white. But I know it was more than a foot long because it was on both sides of the double yellow stripe in the road at the same time.

 After that I tried to find a place called the Desert Castle, a private home of unusual architecture, but after a dozen turns, alternating right and left, I was faced with nothing but dirt roads. I was hungry by then, so I blew it off and went for a restaurant in Joshua Tree -- the town, not the park. 

 OMG I had the best breakfast I've ever had between San Antonio and Los Angeles! At a place called JT Country Kitchen, I got excellent coffee, three huge Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Pancakes (the special of the day) and a side of perfectly cooked bacon. I'm sure I gained weight just from the aroma. Then back on the road. I decided to top off the gas tank, so I asked Google Maps for a place, selected one, and set off to find it. GMaps took me down the highway heading west for about four miles, then directed me to make a U-turn. Huh? Okay.... Went back east on the highway and found the gas station, next door to the restuarant where I'd had breakfast. 

 Technology.

 So my next stop was at a place called the Devil's Punchbowl. I followed GMaps west until it took me up into the mountains north of the city. Sixteen miles uphill behind a slow truck. Then GMaps directed me to make a U-turn and directed me sixteen miles back the way I'd come. I kid you not.

 As I said: technology. 

 The road I pointlessly went up into the mountains on is one that passes by a cement plant. That cement plant was built by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Water Authority in the 1920s in order to provide concrete for the construction of the famous aqueducts planned by William Mulholland (of Mulholland Drive fame) for the theft of all the water in the Central Valley of California. It's a famous episode replete with corruption and self-dealing, and as it happens I was listening to an audiobook about that very subject the last time I passed that way, on the Stained Glass Trip a few years ago.

 This trip, I'm listening to podcasts (because I'm out of audiobooks). I've been listening to Empire, a series Sherry got us started with on our Condo Trip last month. I've finished all the episodes about India and Pakistan and am now mostly done with the Ottoman Empire. The podcast is presented by two very accomplished historians: a Punjabi woman named Anita something who lives in London and an Englishman named William (his last name is either Drimple or deRimple or Dalrymple, depending on what day it is, I guess) who lives in India and seems to be related to everybody who ever did anything imperial in British history. Anita wants us to believe she's shocked -- shocked, I say -- by all the nonstandard sex around the world, but she can't help raising the question every time there's an opening. And there's always an opening. They both have posh-sounding English accents that are very easy to understand; most of their guest presenters are easy to understand, too, except for one guy who is an authority on Gandhi. He's either Indian or Pakistani, I believe, and it sounded like he was standing in a cave and chewing on licorice while speaking in a heavy South Asian accent. I gave up on that episode.

 But most of the time it's a hoot, listening to erudite scholars talk so enthusiastically about things that I, at best, knew only a bare minimum about. Most of what they discuss, I had no idea about before, so it's fascinating stuff. (I also listened to five episodes out of order about the United States' founding fathers. I did not find those five episodes as interesting, partly because I already knew most of it better than the two of them seemed to, and partly because they seemed to want to focus entirely on sex and slavery, especially where those two subjects intersect.) Anyway, I heartily recommend the podcast series to anyone who's interested in history other than US history.

The Devil's Punchbowl

 I finally reached the Los Angeles County Park called the Devil's Punchbowl. It features an interesting sandstone outcropping lying in a small valley. I started to walk down but I didn't relish the prospect of walking back up in the heat, so I just took some pictures and went to the park office, where they have specimens of some of the local fauna and flora. Nearby is a small altar or a big bench built of rocks, and on the side of it there are two round light-coloured stones. Each one had a bronze lizard on it. At first I thought they were actually bronze lizard statues placed there for decoration, but when I shook my phone to turn on the camera they both took off. I managed to get a picture of one.

 From there I went to check out two musical roads. 

 Here's the story, as I understand it from several sources: Some years ago, Honda wanted to do a car commercial wherein their car drives along and the road noise plays a familiar tune. They hired somebody to cut grooves in a public road in Lancaster, California, and shot their commercial. They left the grooved road behind. It attracted people from all over, excited to drive down this road in a residential area of town and listen to the 30 seconds of familiar music. People who lived there got pissed at all the traffic zipping up and down their road, so the city paved over it. Then other people started complaining because they wanted the experience. So the city contacted somebody who'd been involved in setting up the original musical road for instructions, and hired somebody to put it back in, but in a more remote area of the same road -- way out on the way to the little-used airport.

 Sadly, the person cutting the second set of grooves didn't quite understand the instructions, and as a result, the grooves are not quite correctly spaced. Here's what it sounds like now (the music starts at about 19 seconds in; sorry about that):

 So this musical and technical failure so exorcised a local citizen that he decided to show the City of Lancaster how it's done, and he got permission from the neighbouring city of Palmdale to cut grooves into one of their roadways (though he only did a narrow strip along the road edge; much cheaper that way). It sounds like this (I missed the first few notes, but the music starts at about 8 seconds):

 So there.

 My last stop before braving the permanent rush-hour traffic of Los Angeles was Vasquez Rocks, a famous film shooting site. In the visitor's center there were posters for a number of films that had been shot out there, but I was only interested in the spot used in the Star Trek original-series episode called "Arena," where a busybody race called the Metrons force Captain Kirk to fight the unnamed captain of the Gorn spaceship that the Enterprise has been pursuing through Metron space. It was also the site where Sheldon, Leonard, Raj and Howard were humiliated in The Big Bang Theory while photographing themselves in Star Trek costumes. 

 Turns out the two episodes were shot at a place called The Famous Rocks. How apt.

The Famous Vasquez Rocks

 I drove into LA from there, top down. As I crested the mountain by the Getty Center on Interstate 5 I was hit by a wave of cool air. I just that moment, the outside temperature dropped from about 90 to 75. Sweet.

 So now I'm settled into an inexpensive motel in Lawndale, ready to head out to LAX in the morning.

LA Trip reprise, continued

If you want to be notified of postings on this blog, send me an email at passepartout22@gmail.com and I'll have this platform send you an invitation to subscribe.

If you already subscribe to this blog, please click the link at the bottom of the email notification to read it on the web, so I get credit for your visit. (It only matters to me, so no big deal if you prefer to read it in email.)

This is the second post in a series; third if you count the prologue. You really should read them in order, so click on this link for the Prologue or on this link for Part One. And if you want to see all the pictures from this trip, click here.

 

 Day 3: Sunday, June 9

 I got an early start this morning; I was out of my hotel before sunrise, though it was already light. There was a lot more cloud cover than I was hoping for as I drove to the Point of the Mountain, a viewpoint in the White Mountains south of Springerville. There was a small herd of cattle in the road just as I got there, and I thought they weren't going to let me through, but I crept forward slowly and they finally, after much consultation and a motion to table from one of the two donkeys in the group, they moved aside. 

view from the Point of the Mountain

 I can't say the view from there was worth the twenty-mile drive.

 I had plugged today's entire drive into Google Maps last night. This morning it was gone, so I had to do it again. I remembered all but one of the stops, so it didn't take long to re-do. But it was mad at me for some reason this morning, and she wouldn't talk to me until after lunch. 

 From the Point of the Mountain I drove to Show Low, where I had a not-very-memorable breakfast at a cafe called Monica's or Monique's or something like that. Then it was on to the Mogollon Rim.

 Ever since I started working out a route for the Stained Glass trip a few years ago, I've been curious about this Mogollon Rim. From a number of descriptions of it that I've read and stored in memory then and more recently, I had built it up in my mind into a super-dramatic spot of incredible scenic beauty. Now that I've seen it, I suppose it's inevitable that I feel disappointed.

Mogollon Rim from the Visitors Center

 The Mogollon Rim is the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau, that vast high area of red rock that hosts many of the most incredible scenery we have in this country: the Grand Canyon, Vermilion Cliffs, Black Canyon, Arches, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Natural Bridge, and more. It is the place where all that ends, suddenly, and I expected from the descriptions I'd seen that the transition would be sudden and dramatic. I expected high red cliffs, or something. I don't know.

 It's pretty, but it's not really all that dramatic. There's a road off the highway that runs along the edge of the Rim -- Rim Drive, it's called, for obscure reasons. Along that road are several overlooks. I stopped at two of them: Military Sinkhole, and Woods Canyon. At the first, I took a short nap in the car as I was feeling fatigued and it was plenty cool enough to be comfortable. When I got there I was alone in the small parking lot, but within a few minutes there was a flash mob of motorcyclists and camping trailers milling around. I had better luck at the second stop. It showed as closed on Google Maps (it wasn't) so maybe that's why no one else was stopping. I snapped a few pictures at each location and then went to the Mogollon Rim Visitors Center across the highway, which is very much a spot for small children. So I didn't stay long.

 Next up the highway was Tonto Natural Bridge State Park. It features two waterfalls and one unusual natural bridge. The first waterfall was at the end of a short trail, a tenth of a mile each way, except that it was stairs the entire way, just about; roughly two hundred feet down, two hundred feet back up. I decided to try it anyway. I got to the first turn in the trail, where the steps were so steep I wasn't sure I'd be able to get down them, let alone back up. I stood there for a while thinking about Teotihuacán and the Pyramid of the Sun, but in the end I decided I wouldn't be able to make that climb, down or up. It's a shame, because I saw a picture of the waterfall and it looks gorgeous. (On the other hand, from the top of the trail I could hear the chattering of dozens of children down below, so maybe I wouldn't have found the waterfall all that pleasant.)

 So I moved on to the far end of the park, where there were four viewing platforms constructed on either side of the narrow box canyon. At the top end of it, there's a waterfall, where a spring-fed stream drops two hundred feet into the little creek. The ground under the waterfall is all eroded away, and I thought that was the bridge the park is named for. But at the last viewing platform I went to (Viewpoint Number 1) I found a good view of the bridge. It was pretty stunning. You can't tell how big it is from the pictures I took until you notice the two people by the creek at the bottom. Here's a hint: one of them is wearing a red shirt.

 My day took a turn for the worse after that. My next stop, Fort Verde State Park in Camp Verde, turned out to be crap; the next stop after that, also in Camp Verde -- the World's Largest Kokopelli -- turned out to be just the sign for a strip shopping center and not all that impressive. Google Maps took me past it three times before I noticed it. So I decided to just move on. I went a short distance up Interstate 17 (which was not on the route I had laid out) to a rest area where I looked at what my route included from that point, and I decided to skip the rest of it and just head for Havasu, figuring to arrive around 6pm. Then I decided to take a more scenic route, which would add an hour to the trip but still get me to the Totem house before dark.

 Google Maps took me south on I-17. After a short distance, it had me exit the freeway, then cross over, go through the first roundabout, do a 360 at the second, recross the freeway and get back on, heading in the same direction. Why? Why does it do this? Then, as I drove along my route through the scenic areas of Arizona around Sedona, it made some kind of electronic noise. I looked at my phone, but of course I can't actually read what it says through my tri-focal lenses without picking it up and holding it in front of my face. In trying to do this I apparently consented to the "faster route we found", and the next thing I know I'm getting on Interstate 40. I gave up at that point and just went with it. I did stop for a very late lunch (4pm) at the Roadkill 66 Cafe, where the food is so-so and the staff, though pleasant, is unable to operate their cash register. I got tired of waiting for an itemized receipt and just left. I'm not proud of under-tipping the waitress, but by that point I was pissed that not only do they charge 4% for credit card use, but they charge tax on that 4%. I'd paid cash, but I wanted to see how the amount was calculated because I know they did it wrong; I know how much it should have been and how much my change should have been, and I know how much I got back in change, and that ended up being the waitress's entire tip. I'm sure she wasn't happy with it, so we're even.

 So. Now I'm at the house in Havasu. I will be here tomorrow and Tuesday, and on Wednesday I'll leave for LA so that I can be there early enough to meet the Hankmeister at the airport on Thursday morning. There will be nothing to report between now and then. I plan to make a circuit of Carly's island tomorrow morning and again Tuesday morning before it gets too hot; maybe more than one. And I might go see if my favourite restuarant in town has reopened after the kitchen fire a while back. And maybe I'll get a video or two from the library, so that I'll have something to do here. Maybe Curtis will be able to meet up for lunch, which will involve a trip to either Laughlin or Las Vegas, but I"m not counting on it. And maybe I'll do laundry before I head to the Big City.

Second Attempt: the trip to Los Angeles; Prologue

 The last time I was in Los Angeles was in August 2021. Was the pandemic still going on then? I don't remember. Anyway, I had gone to see a museum exhibit on stained glass, and to get there I had plotted out a route that would get me all the way to Los Angeles from San Antonio with only two hours of freeway driving, the unavoidable passage through the West Texas wasteland from Sonora to Fort Stockton. 

 Well. If you've read the blog posts from that trip, you may remember that, while it was a good trip overall, certain things prevented me from taking my intended route; three things, in particular. (You probably didn't read them, and if you did you probably don't remember. That's OK; I really only write for myself.) First, I had no cell service in the area west of San Antonio, so I couldn't access the route-plan on my phone; and I had also neglected to bring along paper maps. I couldn't remember the route I'd laid out several weeks before, so ended up getting to the freeway in Junction, Texas -- normally a two-hour trip from San Antonio -- in just about four hours. And that was just the first hurdle.

 Second, the roof-raising mechanism on my convertible broke in the middle of nowhere, at that time located in west-central New Mexico, near the Arizona state line. That eventuality meant I had to abandon the middle portion of my planned route, and instead go into Phoenix for repairs...which proved to be unavailable. But the shop there at least got the back windows up and deactivated them. So the top stayed up from that point on, until I got the repairs done after returning home. (It's just now, as I'm writing this, that it occurs to me: would the top have gone down without the back windows going down first? I don't know; I never tried.) Anyway, having the top up for the entire trip kind of negated the whole point of having a de luxe touring convertible.

 Third, Google Maps stopped talking to me. I had not realized this until I found myself on a freeway entrance somewhere in Los Angeles County. That was when I realized I wasn't on the route I'd so carefully planned out. Now, I have had many issues with Google Maps, despite it still being (far as I can see) the best navigational aid available. It used to tell me the names of streets to turn on, and the names and numbers of freeway exits. Then it lapsed unbidden into Brit-speak, and would say things like "take the slip-road on the left." Then it stopped speaking altogether, as during my last trip to LA. 

 We're on speaking terms again, Google Maps and I, but it's of a strained and limited variety: now it'll just say, "In two miles, take the interchange on the right." Usually that's adequate, but when, as occasionally happens, there are two possible turning points in very close proximity, I never know which to take. It has never worked out well.  At the worst point, it not only stopped speaking altogether, it stopped moving the map to show my position. Ask me about Dayton. Thank goodness that didn't last long! (I noticed that, when we were using my sister in law's version of Google Maps in North Carolina last month, street names abounded.)

 In the case of the Stained Glass Trip, I ended up trying to wing it; I got off the accidental freeway, selected a destination that I knew was along the intended route, and asked for directions. It gave me what I wanted, but it wouldn't say anything. I would have to look at the phone to see if I was going the right way. If I missed a turn, I got a little electronic noise, but as someone who wears trifocals, I can't actually see my phone in the car unless I hold it in front of my face. You will agree that this is not the best way to drive, especiallly in an unfamiliar area.

 Since that trip, I've figured out that if the phone is connected to the car radio by bluetooth, Google Maps won't say anything unless the radio is on. As long as I remember to turn it on, I should get some instructions from the program, even if I still don't get the names of streets. I've also made sure to have a paper map in the car this time, and I've highlighted the route through the Hill Country. I've also laid out the route on Google Maps on my computer and sent it to my phone. Twice. I hope at least one of these things works. Because I'm leaving again for Los Angeles soon, and I'm going to try basically the same route, with a few changes: adding a waterfall in New Mexico, dropping a couple of places in New Mexico and Arizona that, I've since learned, are just fire watchtowers in the national forests. (From their descriptions on RoadTrippers, they sounded like scenic viewpoints.) And since I left off the places along the old route that I actually went to on that trip, I could change the route enough to (a) stop over in Havasu, where we have a house I can stay in, and (2) add a whole bunch of potential places I probably won't go to and a few I probably will (like the out-of-tune singing road in Lancaster, California).

 So fingers crossed! Will the car function within acceptable parameters? Will the weather cooperate? Will any of the sites I've picked out on my route prove at all worth seeing? Will I be attacked by a bear, or a mountain lion, or a MAGA Republican? 

 I'm meeting my friend the Hankmeister in LA; he flies in on the Thursday after I leave for LA, so I have six days to get from here to there. Since San Antonio-to-Los Angeles is normally a long two-day trip or an easy three-day trip, I have the luxury of no real constraints on my wandering. (I suspect this is proving a little irritating to my sister-in-law, who has to deal with the caretaker of the house in Havasu; but she's being flexible.) That is the best way to wander, the way I always try to plan, but seldom actually get to do. May this time be different!

 When the Hankmeister flies home on Sunday, I'll go back to Havasu that night. At least, that's the plan. It's a 5-hour drive and he doesn't have to be at the airport until about 4:30 in the afternoon, so I may be driving late into the night. I don't like that thought, but one does what one must.

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.