The Saga Continues: Day 3

It feels like ages since that last travel post; so hard, after ten days or so, to go back and recollect what all we've done. But here goes:

After a restful night (I assume; actually, I can't even remember where we stayed, except that it was in southwestern Nebraska, in a town called McCook), we were up and off, first to an excellent and inexpensive breakfast in a little cafe in a depressed little farming community called Bartley, to eavesdrop on the local kafe klatchers as they traded reminiscences about the pranks they pulled when they were in high school; then to the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima.

This shrine was built by a priest who had been a prisoner of war, and who swore he would build the shrine if he survived the German camp. He did, and he built it. It is mundane in many ways, but lifted above the mundane by the presence of beautiful gardening all around, and an excellent bronze of Rachel. What her connection is to the B.V.M. I couldn't say, except that both were women and both figured in the Bible. That seems sufficient for the good Catholics of Arapahoe, Nebraska, and I'm disinclined to grouse about it any more than I've just done.

Heading east from there, we came to the small burg of Superior, just above the Kansas line, where the draw is an entire building at the Nuckolls County Museum dedicated to the work of a single man: one Marvin Marquart, a bachelor farmer who, lacking the distractions imposed on us more worldly men, carved, assembled, and painted over three thousand model airplanes in the space of about fifty years. Some hang from the acoustical-tile cieling, but most are displayed crowded together in glass cases, wingtip to wingtip, arranged by nationality. While Mr Marquart's painting skills were rough at the outset, they got much better, although his hands apparently started to shake with age and the detail suffered slightly toward the end. Still, it is a most impressive display, and as a life's work it is far, far more than most of us can point to. It makes me glad for television and the Internet, and at the same time sad for those same things in my own life. (It also makes me very glad to have married, especially someone who likes soccer.) (And that reminds me: my special someone, playing forward for a new team, scored a goal yesterday. Congratulations, and I hope it's just the first of many.)

After that it was straight in to Kansas City, as the two odd sights I'd picked out along the way ended up not seeming worth getting off the highway for. This impression seems justified, in hindsight, as it pertains to one site, but I wish now that I had stopped to see the other. Fortunately, there are still counties in nearby southern Nebraska that I haven't been to yet, and it'll be just a short side-trip to visit Belleville, Kansas.



That got us in to Kansas City; we spent the weekend there, having dinner with friends at Accurso's Italian Restaurant, and visiting the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, one of the most impressive public collections I've seen, and watching, at perhaps the least inviting sports bar in the entire world, Barcelona beat Manchester United in the UEFA Champions League final. Boooo! Hisss!

overpriced ceiling

It being Memorial Day weekend, we stayed through Sunday to attend the annual concert and fireworks show at the Liberty Memorial. After a short tour of the city between home and show, we got there early enough to get a reasonably good parking place and a reasonably good spot on the lawn, where we were eventually joined by sixty-six thousand of our closest friends in the town. Ahead of the show, David and I toured the refurbished Union Station, which is now part Amtrak-station, part entertainment venue. I heard that the price tag for the restoration was $250,000,000, which smacks of snouts in the public trough and leads me to think we should be able to require absolute transparency for public works, or the right to sue for recovery of excess costs -- and sue not only the beneficiaries of the unrighteous public largesse, but the political creatures that made it happen.

Anyway. So the Air Force sent a band to perform a warm-up act, and then the KC Symphony took the stage, with a couple of overfed specialty acts. I was expecting a concert of familiar patriotic tunes, but what I got instead was a medley of familiar patriotic tunes interspersed with new music of a purportedly patriotic flavour, not perhaps coincidentally written or arranged by the performers, who get royalties for music that likely would never otherwise be performed. I won't go so far as to say it was bad music; just that it was not as good, not as entertaining, as a rousing string of Sousa marches would have been. And I'm wondering what rock I was sleeping under while Amazing Grace became an appropriate tribute to our fallen warriors.

One other thing I noted: at the start of the show, the audience rose, as requested, for the playing of the Star Spangled Banner. Later in the show, the audience rose, unrequested, and as one, for the playing of God Bless America.

The concert ended on a definite high, with a marvelous performance of Tchaikovskiy's 1812 Overture, complete with the requisite actual cannons, followed by, at last, the Sousa march I craved; in this case, The Stars and Stripes Forever. And by one of the better fireworks shows I've seen.

Amerigreek Steak House

Log Cabin
201 North Main Street
Galena, Illinois

Galena, Illinois, is a gentrified overgrown one-street country town. Some time ago, it was rediscovered by the artsy-fartsy crowd and gussied up to look like what it looked like in its prime, nearly 200 years ago. Except, of course, without the horse droppings, cigar smoke, noise and poverty of the American frontier. Another Disney version of history, ready for the tourists who like to be abed by ten.

There's a stretch of that one street (Main Street) that has a restaurant in almost every space, it seems. They probably open and close with a regularity that would make sand dunes seem stable, but a few of them seem to have managed to stick around. We took the unanimous recommendation of our hotel staff and slid into the Log Cabin for dinner on a Friday night. Run by a Greek family, it did not so much feature Greek foods or styles as offer them here and there: feta cheese in the house dressing, a couple of appetizers, a couple of dishes. All dark wood and banquettes, the interior made a pleasant change from the slightly-humid, bug-infested evening outdoors. (Box elder bugs are swarming just now; they're harmless, but irritating like gnats.)

We started with a round from the bar, all of which were well-prepared. That would have put us in a good mood for dinner if the service hadn't been so ... uh ... expeditious. Considering that the dinner rush was long over by the time we sat down (but closing time was still a good way off), there was no reason for hurrying us through the courses; yet they did. Our salads arrived only seconds after our drinks; the main platters arrived immediately after. Our before-dinner drinks ended up being after-dinner drinks, and there are few drinks that can perform both roles with any kind of aplomb. 

What's that mean?

Fortunately for our moods, the salads were quite good, large bowls of fresh lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and all the other appropriate rabbit-food items. The dressings tasted home-made (house, with feta cheese, and creamy Italian). The coleslaw chosen by one of our group was even better: sweet, creamy, lusciously delicious. If I ever return to this restaurant, that will be my salad of choice.

For main dishes we had a plate of fried shrimp, one of pork ribs, and one of steak. The pork ribs were easily the best of the three, with a sweet barbecue sauce that brought out the flavour of the perfectly cooked meat. I don't ordinarily do messy food — watermelon, buffalo wings, and barbecue (and long pasta is on my "caution" list) — but I would make an exception for these delicious ribs.

Ranking next in the hierarchy was the shrimp. Present in quantity commensurate with their price, they were breaded in a wheat batter and fried quickly, tempura-style, resulting in very light, very tasty shrimp.

The weak spot of the meal was the New York strip steak. Thick and large but hardly tender meat, with minimal ribboning of fat through it, it was grilled a little beyond the medium-rare I ordered, and it had been rubbed with unusual seasonings — possibly Greek seasonings? — that I found gave it a slightly unpleasant aroma, and the drippings from the meat concentrated the flavour of those spices in a way that I didn't like. I thought the steak was a little overpriced at $26, but not enough to get worked up about. The less-than-perfect quality of the meat was more the issue.

(And while I'm talking about price, let me say this: I wanted to order prime rib, but was irked by the fact that that dish is offered at one price ("our everyday price," ironically, since it applies only three days out of seven) on weekends and another, lower, price the rest of the week. There is no acceptable excuse for that kind of institutionalized price-gouging.)

The accoutrements of the meal were good: good, soft bread; baked potatoes offered with melted cheese, sour cream, and plenty of butter; and a relish tray of a sort that I have not seen in ages, containing raw radishes, celery, carrots and green onion to munch on. There's a tradition that should enjoy a resurgence.

There were some service issues: we asked for utensils twice (there were only two sets on a table set for four), and finally had to swipe some from another table; our waitress was ready to walk away after only one of us had ordered a drink, and had to be stopped so the rest of us could place our orders; we had to ask twice for some of the dressings for our potatoes; and despite the unrelaxed speed at which things were brought from the kitchen, empty plates were slow to make their way back, and we had to resort to piling things on the next table in order to have room to eat. Listing the flaws like that may make them seem more important than they seemed at the time. In fact all they did was keep the service at the Log Cabin from being rated above average, because otherwise the server was pleasant and engaging, knowledgeable, and attentive to our needs. Taken altogether, I would say simply that the service here was uneven, nothing worse.