The Second Annual Havasu Film Festival, Part One

Having returned to Lake Havasu City for the umpteenth time, and being once again required to spend many consecutive days with little of interest to do, I found myself a bit of distraction last year by watching DVDs of old movies borrowed from the local branch of the Mohave County Public Library. This year, we started with a number of films watched with my family members (my wife and her sister); once they were gone I had five days on my own in the desert (a description that is both physically and culturally apt). The films watched with other people are Part One of this post; the films I watched alone are Part Two. The difference between the two groups of films is that my wife and her sister are choosy about which films to check out; they look for things they have enjoyed in the past, or think they will enjoy on first viewing. I tend to be more random in my selections: I go to a portion of the shelving in the library and just take whatever looks at all interesting for any reason, based solely on the covers’ content. As a result the films reviewed in Part One are probably better than the ones in Part Two.

I should mention that there are a few films that I didn’t watch. We had Puss in Boots: the Last Wish, an animated sequel that, almost inevitably, wasn’t as good as the first film. I’d seen it before and knew that going in, but still intended to watch it all the way through, if only so I could include it in this blog post. But I was too tired — I don’t know why, as, other than having gone for a short walk in the morning around Carly’s Island, at the edge of the lake, and doing a little geocaching during the afternoon, and cooking dinner (pickleburgers and cabbage with tomato, not a particularly challenging menu) I’d done nothing in the way of exertion all day. So I went to bed early. I don’t feel like I missed anything.

The other one that I didn’t make it through was Les Miserables, starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway. I’d read the book many, many years ago in the last century, so I knew the story and knew it was a great piece of fiction. I also know that it’s a much-lauded stageplay that ran for ages on Broadway. So I was looking forward to the film with high expectation. It started off with a musical number sung by prisoners dragging a computer-generated warship into a drydock, and clearly little expense had been spared on special visual effects; but it didn’t take long for me to realize that this was not, as I’d been led to believe, a musical, but a fucking opera. Much as I respect tradition, and despite the hundreds of years of tradition that opera as a medium brings to culture, I won’t sit through it. The songs themselves are okay, but the actors’ lapsing into sung dialogue in fitful and monotonous bits of tune is an affectation up with which I will not put. I was fooled once into sitting through a stage production of Porgy and Bess, having thought that was a musical when I bought the tickets, and I hated it. I won’t suffer such an imposition again. (Plus, in this case, it was obvious that at least one of the major characters was clearly chosen for the name rather than the talent; I haven’t heard so much off-key singing since the last time I attended karaoke.)

Part I: Family Film Fest

The film festival started off with an entry of known quality: The Greatest Showman, starring Hugh Jackman (who can sing, and well) a musical -- a real musical -- that I’d already seen all the way through at least twice, and one that I enjoy enough that, if I find it playing on television, I’ll always stop surfing channels to watch it. It may not be the best movie of all time, and will probably never make the list of 100 Best Anything, but it’s a good romantic story, with good performances and very good singing by literally every member of the cast. And the music is great; I like it enough to have bought the soundtrack album and incorporated some of the songs into the mix that I play in my cars, especially a moving piece called Never Enough. I don’t know how closely the plot hews to fact about the historical character P.T. Barnum, but who cares? This is an excellent show, even the third time through.

There are a few actors that I will always watch: Jennifer Aniston and Julia Roberts are top of that list, but there are quite a few others on it as well. One is Jodie Foster. She stars in Stealing Home, a somewhat predictable drama also starring Mark Harmon. I can’t watch him without seeing Leroy Jethro Gibbs, his character on NCIS for more than two decades, even though I was a third of the way through this film before I realized it was him. Stealing Home is a sweet little movie, set among well-to-do Philadelphia suburbanites, partly in the early 1960s and partly in the 1980s, in which Gibbs’s character — sorry, Harmon’s character — has to deal with the ashes of his dear friend, Jodie Foster’s character, who has committed suicide. Most of the movie is flashbacks illuminating her character, and to a lesser extent Harmon’s. I can summarize his in a sentence: he’s a good boy growing up to be a man troubled, for unexplained reasons, by the death of his father. I suppose some people just lose their focus when a tragedy like that happens, but his character didn’t seem the type to be so strongly affected for so long. I consider it insufficient motivation, one of the weaknesses of this movie.(The half-hearted attempt to make baseball a meaningful metaphor in the film is another.) On the other hand, the development of the relationship between the characters played by Foster and Harmon is completely believable, and if we don’t really know how far it extended, we are satisfied that it was, in every way, plausible and honourable. And, of course, the cars from the ‘50s and ‘60s are way cool, except for one ugly red station wagon.

Another actor I’ll always want to watch is Antonio Banderas (who voices the title character in Puss in Boots, by the way). He stars with Salma Hayek in Desperado, one of the sequels to Robert Rodriguez’s 1992 film El Mariachi. Rodriguez is from my home town and went to college at my alma mater, so I suppose I should feel some slight kinship with him for that; but I don’t. I don’t know him or anybody who does, so other than the pride I feel whenever San’tonio gets a mention in the press, there’s nothing. (Wikipedia says he’s a close friend of Quentin Tarantino, so if we’re playing Kevin Bacon, that puts me 4 degrees away from Rodriguez, and more importantly, 5 away from Banderas. And Hayek, which is equally titillating in a different way. (And I bet Tarantino, who has a small part in Desperado, knows both Banderas and Hayek. That would put me only 4 degrees away from both of them. Ooh! Now I’m excited.)

Anyway, Banderas plays a nameless former mariachi musician who has embarked on a hobby of murdering drug dealers in Mexico. At the start of this film, he arrives in a stereotypical town in northern Mexico to track down “the last one.” The film follows him for the few days he’s there. There’s some humour, mostly provided by the over-the-top violence and the cluelessness of some of the minor characters, but some of it is written into the script, apparently on purpose. The climax of the movie comes when the mariachi finally confronts the “last” drug lord. All in all, an enjoyable movie to watch; kind of like one of those Marvel Comics movies, but with a sex scene for the grown-ups in the audience.

Morgan Freeman may not be one of those actors I will always watch, but he is one that always delivers in his signature style. He stars with Monica Potter, who is unknown to me, in Along Came a Spider, a police-procedural of sorts from 2001. My only complaint about this movie is that it really should be maybe 20 minutes longer, because the film seems to rush through some complicated twists near the end. I get the feeling that they kept it to 103 minutes so that there was room to stuff in lots of commercials when it gets a 2-hour slot on cable. I feel cheated, like in that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “The Game,” where everything is resolved suddenly and without warning when (spoiler alert) Data comes in with a light. It kind of ruins all the tension built up gradually over the course of the film, when Freeman’s character, Dr Cross, almost miraculously figures out what character X and character Y are up to, deception-wise, and acts without taking us along. He does what cops do, and then just explains it to us as he’s doing it. I think if the director (Lee Tamahori) had taken as much care with the last quarter of the movie’s plot as he did with the first three quarters, it would have been a much better movie.

He probably blames the studio, and he’s probably right. But still, it’s his name on the film.

Midnight Run rarely makes it onto lists of Robert deNiro’s best films, but that’s probably because he’s been in so many great ones. In this 1988 buddy film, he plays a former policeman, Jack Walsh, who had to leave his home in Chicago because he wouldn’t be bent, and took up bounty hunting for a living. He gets hired to bring in a Robin-Hood embezzler, “the Duke,” played by Charles Grodin, and the movie deals with the pair’s adventures in crossing the country, pursued by the FBI, a crime boss and a rival bounty hunter, from New York to Los Angeles*, where Walsh means to turn the Duke over to the bondsman who hired him. Despite the geographically challenged location shooting (what’s that mountain in the background in “Amarillo, Texas”? And why does the downtown area of a city of a hundred and sixty thousand people not rise higher than two stories?) the resulting film is a thoroughly enjoyable piece of work. If I had to say, I’d allocate most of the credit for that to Grodin. DeNiro’s character is exactly what we’d expect from him and from a hard-boiled cop; Grodin’s character is nothing like what we’d expect of an embezzling accountant. 

*Why is it always New York and Los Angeles? How come nobody in the movies ever crosses the country from Brownsville to Duluth? Or even from Seattle to Miama? 

Begin Again, from 2013, was a slight surprise. While Keira Knightly makes my list of favourite actors, Mark Ruffalo does not. And since both their names were covered over by the library’s label, I didn’t know they were in the movie until the opening credits came up. More significantly, Ruffalo did a creditable job of portraying Dan, an almost-washed-up music-biz guy who happens to be in the bar when Gretta, Knightly’s singer/songwriter character, is badgered into performing one of her songs. The plot is predictable from there on, including Dan’s renewed relationship with his ex-wife and teenage daughter (thanks to Gretta’s sensible influence) and Gretta’s relationship with her rock-star boyfriend Dave (played by Adam Levine, who actually is more a rock star than an actor). It’s saved from provoking complete ennui by the interesting telling of the opening of the story, before the two characters meet. The music is, to my aging ear, somewhat insipid but I very much enjoyed the outdoor recording sessions, as much for the scenery as for the performances. The slight surprise of the movie came from the fact that Knightly actually can sing, and learned to play some guitar. (She sounds a lot like Dido.) I didn’t understand exactly what happened at the very end of the film, but I don’t care. (And, on the plus side, Ruffalo’s character Dan drives what looks to me like a mid-60s vintage Jaguar Mk X saloon. Très cool.)

Another surprise was a little movie from last year called Emily the Criminal, starring nobody I’d ever heard of (although Gina Gershon has one scene late-on in the film; I’ve heard of her but know nothing about her beyond her name). It involves a young woman, Emily, played by Aubrey Plaza (who’s been in a lot of TV shows that I never watched and a lot of movies I’ve never heard of), who falls in with some credit-card scammers, and thereafter leads a life of crime because of society’s stupid rules: she can’t get a real job because (1) she lies about her record in a job interview and they know they can’t trust her with the sensitive information the job deals with, and (2) she’s unwilling to take an unpaid internship her idiot friend arranged for her. That second one, I thought, was a good reason, and such internships should be paid. That job interview is one of the highlights of the film. Emily is a pragmatic, decisive young woman, and despite her moral weaknesses (ones that the movie would have us believe are forced on her) I found myself feeling that (1) everyone got what they deserved, and (2) Emily’s kind of stupid. I say that, not because of the character’s irritating Noo Joisey accent, which does make people sound kind of stupid, but because, when her mentor sets her on her way to criminal success, he gives her several “rules” born of his experience, and she ignores them, each time leading her to the next pothole in her road of life. In the end her pragmatism sees her through and she achieves her dream.

Next up was a movie that all of us had heard of and two of us had seen, You’ve Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, a box-office hit from the end of the last century. I thought I’d seen it too, but apparently I was thinking of some other Hanks/Ryan rom-com from the late ‘90s. This one is a remake of a Jimmy Stewart-Margaret Sullivan movie from 1940, which in turn is based on a Hungarian play from the 1930s. The playwright, Myklos Laszlo, is a pretty big name; the director of the Stewart-Sullivan film (The Shop Around the Corner) was Ernst Lubitsch, also a big name. Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are still big names, and the co-writer (along with her sister Delia) and director of this movie, Nora Ephron, was a big name right to the end of her life as well. The movie has great bones, and a timeless story.

In this incarnation, Hanks plays the scion of a big-box-bookstore family à la Barnes & Noble, while Ryan is the daughter and successor of a woman who opened a children’s bookstore in the 1950s. Hanks’ family is opening a bookstore around the corner from Ryan’s shop and drives her out of business. The two hate each other IRL; at the same time they are corresponding anonymously in an AOL chatroom and falling in love. (In the Jimmy Stewart version, they write letters, so the pace of the story in You’ve Got Mail is much faster.) When the anonymous correspondents arrange to meet, Hanks realizes Ryan is his correspondent, while Ryan is not privy to similar knowledge about Hanks. Hanks, having identified his feelings for Ryan, manipulates her into falling in love with him before he reveals himself to be her chat-room correspondent. (In the ‘90s, this sort of manipulation between the sexes was acceptable, at least to Ryan’s character. Today it's only acceptable if it's successful, otherwise it's a lawsuit or online harassment.)

Anyway, the movie is a good story well told, with a script that is as sophisticated and witty as anything Nora Ephron ever did, I think. Ryan and Hanks both turn in top performances, as do other well-known members of the cast (Maureen Stapleton, Dave Chappelle, Greg Kinnear and Dabney Coleman). And it doesn’t seem at all dated, 25 years down the line, except for the price of coffee at Starbucks, and the dial-up modem.

The ‘90s sophistication of You’ve Got Mail gave way to the ‘50s sophistication of Carol, a lesbian love story made in 2015 but set in 1952-53, the time frame of the underlying novel, The Price of Salt by then-well-known writer Patricia Highsmith. I resisted seeing this film, as I’m pretty tired of the modern artistic obsession with alternative lifestyles; but I’m glad I did. Despite the subdued, almost somnolent tone of the film, the two stars, Cate Blanchett (“Carol”) and Rooney Mara (“Therese”) give excellent performances, and the 1950s setting gives the film a layer of interest I enjoy: the clothes, the music, the big-city ambience, and especially (of course) the gigantic cars. Carol drives a Packard, and I could almost feel the squishy suspension, weak brakes, loose steering and fuzzy seat covering as the two women take a road trip west. In any case, the film seems to me to be not so much about the developing lesbian relationship as about the social attitudes toward such things, as a counterpoint to our own much more (generally) accepting outlook. In the 1950s world of this movie, homosexuality was a psychological aberration that could be dealt with by psychotherapy. Most of us can laugh at that now, but we can also recognise that, then as now, most people just didn’t really give a shit about how other people ordered their private lives.

The next film we watched was an action movie from 15 years ago, a very complex tale about a terrorist attack in Spain. The action in the movie takes place over the course of about twenty minutes, but is told and re-told from various points of view until, at the end, the audience understands what happened, who did it, and how. The acting in Vantage Point is second-rate, despite being the work of some fairly heavy Hollywood hitters: Dennis Quaid as the damaged-goods Secret Service guy who triumphs in the end; Forest Whitaker as a tourist with a camera; Sigourney Weaver as a hard-boiled news director; and William Hurt as the world-weary target of the operation. All of their roles could have been filled as capably by unknown actors, with no loss of storytelling quality.

Vantage Point succeeds as entertainment not because of the acting -- or lack thereof -- but because of the film’s technique. Almost nothing that happens in the early part of the movie makes sense, but in the end it all makes sense. The way the story is told is, to my way of thinking, a remarkably clever narrative tour de force.

Consider Ambrose Bierce: he was, for his entire professional life, the second-best writer in America’s literary pantheon, behind Samuel Clemens. He probably knew that. He was a much more cerebral writer than Clemens, experimenting with fiction’s structure and form, which made his work a more rewarding academic subject than Clemens’s, but less popular. Both wrote with a sense of humour, but where Clemens was straightforward, Bierce was darker and more cynical. At the end of his life, (Clemens having already died) Bierce went off to Mexico to lose himself quite literally in that country’s revolution: he disappeared, having last been seen in the state of Chihuahua, and no trace of him has ever been found.

That event, that mystery, is not at the heart of Old Gringo; it’s just the setting for the story, which revolves around the relationship between a naïve American woman and a general in Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army. The American woman, played by Jane Fonda, is Harriet Winslow, a spinster who has been living, with her mother, on the pension provided to dependents of soldiers who died in the Spanish-American war. Her father isn’t actually dead, though; he just met a woman in Cuba and decided to stay there, but his “widow” and daughter continue drawing the pension and visiting an empty grave to sell the ruse. Harriet has a moment of self-actualization, however, and decides to take hold of her life and step outside her comfort zone. She takes a job as governess to a wealthy Mexican family, and soon finds herself in the city of Chihuahua. Ambrose Bierce, played by Gregory Peck, just happens to be at the same hotel, and is on his way to the same hacienda. Arriving at the same time is the revolutionary army, led by General Tomás Arroyo, played by Jimmy Smits. The family Harriet was supposed to work for has already fled, and she gets caught up in the battle for the hacienda. After that, there are two story lines: one involves Harriet’s romantic relationship with General Arroyo, and the other involves Bierce’s quest for "a pretty good way to depart this life." There is enough violence and sex in the film to keep it from being a total eye-roller, but it’s essentially a confused diatribe about truth and justice and the relative merits of the American and Mexican cultures. There’s only one automobile in the movie, so that doesn’t add anything.

You would think that with Jane Fonda and Gregory Peck in the cast, there’d be some good acting. Sadly, no: Fonda was fit enough at 50 to not seem an odd pairing for the 30-ish Smits, but her undeniable acting skills got left behind when she went off to film. Gregory Peck, one of the greatest actors in the post-war history of American film, seems oddly uninterested in portraying his famous character as anything other than an older Atticus Finch. That leaves Smits to carry the film. He seems capable of doing that, but unfortunately for him (and us) the script puts only fills his mouth with clichéed revolutionary speeches, and his character is too much defined by his origin story.

The penultimate film of this first part of the Second Annual Havasu Film Festival is the 1989 movie Valmont, starring Colin Firth and Annette Benning. Set in pre-revolutionary France, this is an adaptation of sorts of the 1782 epistolary novel Les liaisons dangereuses, and imagines the lurid manipulations of two hedonistic rivals, the Count of Valmont and the Marquise of Mertreuil. Let me save you the trouble of watching this dull period piece: he wins their bet, she won’t pay up, he dies. There, now, you have no reason to bother with this utterly disappointing and slow-moving drivel, unless you’re just obsessed with Hollywood's take on fashions of the Ancien Régime. Like this brief description of the film, it assumes you already know who these people are and what they’re about. You haven’t missed a thing, and there are no cars in the movie at all, it being the 1700s.

And finally, there is the third installment of Robert Rodriguez’s Mexican trilogy: Once Upon a Time in Mexico, in which Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek star again as El Mariachi and his girlfriend. Hayek has very little to do in the film, and really only appears at the beginning and the end; the rest of it consists of more satirical violence, as El Mariachi gets caught up in a ludicrous assassination plot. It’s amusing in a blood-soaked way, but if there’s a story worthy of a trilogy of feature films is there, it seems to have ended in the second movie, Desperado (see above); this one seems only to have been made because Johnny Depp wanted to play a CIA agent who gets his eyes ripped out but still never misses when he shoots, and because there was a buck to be made.

Big State, Small State, Red State, Blue State

 It wasn't all that long ago, in historical terms, that thirteen sparsely-populated and newly independent states huddled along the north Atlantic shore of North America. They were all governed in the British traditions, having long been -- proudly, for the most part -- British colonies. Despite their large geographic size in an era when the fastest travel was at the pace of a galloping horse or a large sailing ship, they weren't terribly important to the British Empire, let alone to the wider world. The sugar-growing islands of the Caribbean were where the future seemed to be. These rebellious former colonies were nothing, really, but a market for British goods at the start of the industrial revolution, and maybe they could provide some foodstuffs and wood for ships. 

 The new states were jealous of their sovereignty. There was a certain amount of half-hearted cooperation among them, but even as the Treaty of Paris was being celebrated in the few New World streets, strains were growing between the various states that could easily have led to the dissolution of the malformed new nation. Some of the leading figures of the day, men that we still revere (despite their lack of foresight in having been rich, educated, articulate and white and, for the most part, slave-holders), saw well enough into the future, and appreciated the importance of unity among the States, to -- long story short -- create the Constitution that has been, since that era, our foundation as a nation.

 The creation of the Constitution necessarily required compromises, many compromises, to get our government off the ground. One of those compromises, called the Great Compromise, found a way to balance the interests of large and small states. It gave us two legislative houses: one representing The People and one representing The States. The small states (small in population) would never have joined the union without the sweetener of equal representation in the Senate, where every state, no matter how large or how small, gets two senators. 

 Those small states are mostly still small, and they've been joined by other states with small populations: Alaska, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Idaho, Montana, Maine, Hawaii, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas ... and so on. All the smaller states benefit enough, by virtue of the Great Compromise, to satisfy themselves that they have some protection for their interests when in conflict with the larger states. Without that added degree of protection, there would have been no United States of America, and the wise leaders of the larger states in 1787 understood that.

 And there is one other aspect of the Great Compromise, one that is relevant here: the Electoral College. When a president of the United States is elected, it's the College that elects him (or, probably someday soon, her). The College is made up of delegations chosen by the several sovereign states, fifty of them now; delegations equal in number to the total representation of a state in the two houses of congress. So a large state like Texas, where I live, gets at present 40 electoral votes; California, the state with the largest population, gets 54. At the other extreme, a handful of small states (plus the District of Colombia) each get 3 electoral votes. It is another way in which small states are protected in a small way from the tyranny of the majority. A bit of lagniappe to encourage the small states' accession without really hurting the larger states.

 Now, though, some 200+ years down the road from Philadelphia, adherents of one political party want to do away with the Electoral College, because in a closely divided country such as we have now (not for the first time), they find that it's possible for the people of those small states, the ones that got the little sweetener of slightly increased representation in the Electoral College, can put a candidate over the finishing line even when that candidate gets fewer votes overall. It happened in 2016, giving us a president who will, I don't doubt, go down in history as the worst we have ever had. It happened in 2000, when George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore, but won the Electoral College vote. It happened in 1876 and again in 1888. (In 1824, the winner was chosen by Congress when nobody won the Electoral College vote.) 

 The Democratic Party wants to do away with the Electoral College as undemocratic. Well, in a sense, it is: a Wyomingite's presidential vote counts for just a tiny bit more than my Texas vote does in the same race. I'm not terribly worried about that, as a voter, because (a) it's a minuscule difference, and (b) there's an upside. The upside is that, in order to win an election, a party has to make its message appeal to all parts of the country. As the Democrats saw in 2016, even when running a capable but somewhat disliked candidate against possibly the most moronic and incompetent candidate ever to glide down a golden escalator, they couldn't win the Electoral College, even with a sizeable majority of the popular vote, because their message didn't resonate in the vast heartland of this country. They won the big states on the East and West coasts, and other states in those areas, but they lost the South (of course) and the Intermountain West and the Midwest because not enough of those voters favoured the sort of message the Democrats were putting out; they preferred the ludicrous lies and platitudes of the insurgent party. Many of those people still do, but not as many. 

 Electoral College or no, the Democratic Party as it's presently constituted holds a tremendous advantage in national races for the presidency, the senate, and the house. If its adherents could temper their rhetoric to national sensibilities, instead of only talking about things of interest to voters in the big cities of the country, they would have permanent majorities in Congress and every president from here on out. They'd be unbeatable. 

 And they should talk about their record, too. They probably won't win most of the Southern states (and y'all know why) in my lifetime, but if they could show people that it's been the Democratic administrations that have slowed the national debt (and even, once upon a time, a generation ago, reduced it); it's under Democratic administrations that the economy has done best since the 1970s; and now, finally, it's under a Democratic administration that bridges are being fixed, utilities upgraded, airports rehabilitated, and roads repaired. (How many "Infrastructure Weeks" did Donald Trump have, when it was all over? I lost count.) 

 The things important to all those counties coloured red in the top map are a little bit different from the things important to the blue counties ... but not by all that much. Most of their interests coincide. The Democrats, if they can hone their message, will win a lot of those red counties and red states if they stick to talking about what's doable. 

 And what's doable does not include getting rid of the Electoral College. It would require the assent of three-quarters of the states, meaning just thirteen (small) states can prevent it. They might get New Mexico to go along, and they might get New Hampshire and Vermont to give up their electoral edge. But that leaves more than 20 small states, more than enough to prevent ratification of that constitutional amendment. So they should just drop it, and try not to sound so damned radical. They should leave the stupidity to their opponents, who do it so much better these days anyway.

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.

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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.