This is the first post of a series; you should read 'em in order, I think.
All the pictures for this and subsequent posts relating to this trip can be seen here.
I'm five days into this trip and this is the first opportunity I've had to sit down and write about it. Kind of ironic: when I was planning the trip, it was to begin last Sunday, and was to have included a five-hour detour just to go to McPherson County, Nebraska. In the event, it began a day early, and I no longer needed to go to McPherson County by then. (I had gone through there a few weeks before, after meeting my sister in Valentine, Nebraska; it was only a 20 minute detour on that trip instead of five hours.)
So you would think I'd have plenty of time. Even more so because so many of the places I'd included for sightseeing stops got left out: we got there too late; they were closed that day; we opted for a different route, we decided not to bother.... There are always a lot of things like that, it's part of our devil-may-care attitude about travel plans. But every evening we arrive at a hotel in Wherever, America, and if I'm lucky I just have time to upload the day's pictures (assuming there are any) and maybe do something with them. Until now, I haven't had time or energy to write.
The theme of the trip so far, until today at least, has been Summer Heat. It's been absolutely draining, and so I"ve been less reticent than usual to drive with the top up, even on small roads. (At freeway speeds, with trucks and cars passing all the time, you can't hear an audiobook with the top down anyway.)
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| Yes, it's a tourist attraction |
We've only been on freeways for mostly short stretches so far: a few miles in Wichita Falls; that dull bit from OKC to the Kansas State Line; up I-135 from Wichita to Salina, Kansas; a dozen accidental miles around Kearney, Nebraska, and the stretch from the Middle of Nowhere to Austin, Minnesota; that last bit made necessary by the presence of a splotch of gold paint on the freeway that found its way into my list of sights to see. (Be patient, I'll get to it.)
The kennel where our dog Carly vacations opens at 9AM on Saturdays. I don't know why, but I'd originally planned to take her to the kennel, then spend the rest of Saturday packing and, I don't know, watching the first weekend of the Premier League season? And we would leave on Sunday. But an unexpected burst of common sense smacked me upside the head in the preceding week, and we decided to just go ahead and leave on Saturday. I had done some careful, albeit meaningless planning regarding what is open when -- I know it's meaningless when I do it, but I still do it every trip -- and all that planning was completely out the window because we had an extra day's drive, nearly, right at the outset. We didn't care, because we knew how meaningless my plans always are. I just like to plan things.
Saturday, August 16
I figured on grabbing a quick breakfast and coffee somewhere along the way out of town. There was no place readily accessible for a quick breakfast. The first place we stopped is out of business; beyond that are only reprehensible fast-food outlets encased in urban sprawl. In the end I settled for a "taco" from a familiar mom-&-pop ice house in Spring Branch, which was better than expected but still not very good. It was sufficient, though, and almost as effective as a Snickers bar would have been. It got us to lunch at Marble Falls, at Real New Orleans, a restaurant opened at some point since 2005 by Katrina refugees. (For Texans, those people are the silver lining of that particular dark cloud.) I had their red beans and rice, which is seasoned better than my red beans and rice, but isn't as creamy and needs more rice in it. Sherry had crawfish étoufée, which is pretty good by any Louisiana standard. The service was excellent, and the prices were good. The only down-side is that someone had already asked to have the TV tuned to the pointy-ball match, so we didn't get to watch the real football that was on.
The first stop I'd planned was something called the Hanna Springs Sculpture Garden in Lampasas, Texas. This turned out to be quite a large city park, with dozens of sculptures created mostly by local and regional artists. Most of it is the kind of stuff you think, Well that's not too bad, or I hope they didn't over-pay for that; almost none of it acknowledges, much less adheres to, classical ideas of beauty and proportion, even in passing. Yet overall the garden is worth the time required to walk around it and view the works at a leisurely pace (though next time it'll be a much cooler day, I guarantee!). It also includes what appears to be one of the more successful butterfly gardens I've ever seen (or maybe it's just that time of year).
The next planned stop, we skipped. It was to have lunch and a slice of pie at the Koffee Kup Cafe in Hico. In my entire life, driving up and down US 281 from San Antonio to the rest of the world, I have NEVER not stopped at the Koffee Kup for pie. Until this trip. Something like seventy years of tradition out the window. Oh, well, that's what traditions are for, I guess, in this Modern Age of the New Commodus. (I guess maybe Real New Orleans is the new traditional stop, except they don't have thirty kinds of pie.) And the stop after that, at the so-called National Vietnam War Museum, didn't happen because it closes at 1PM on most days. But we did stop at the Home of Crazy in Mineral Wells.
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| the whole town's raison d'être |
When I was much younger, I used to pass through Mineral Wells, Texas all the time on the way to Possum Kingdom and points west. (Mostly just to Possum Kingdom; there wasn't much of interest to me in the
terra incognita farther west, back then.) In all that time I never heard of Crazy Water, but in preparing for this trip I found a reference to it somewhere, and so we stopped and got some. It's the mineral water for which the town was named some hundred and twenty years ago. Who knew? We got two litres of the highest-concentration mineral water, and when we get to our condo in a few days we plan to put it to the medicinal test and just see if it does cure all ailments, as they used to claim. Fingers crossed. (I'd be happy if it alleviates one ailment.)
From there, we saw the World's Largest Shovel and the World's Smallest Skyscraper, both located in Wichita Falls, Texas. We tried to go see the Falls for which the town is named, but it was getting dark and they were a mile's hike in hot, buggy weather, so we decided to try that in the morning when it was cooler. Besides, the Falls are fake and everybody knows it. The real falls were destroyed ages ago, and the city only built "new" falls for the tourism value.
Dinner turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. Sherry found a place called the Hibiscus Cafe, operated by a Greek family. The food was excellent (4.5 jalapeños), the service exceptional (5 jalapeños), the ambience pleasant (4.5 jalapeños) and the value high (4 jalapeños). The menu, despite not being all that extensive, had a number of dishes unknown to us, so I'm almost ashamed to say I only had a Greek salad; but even that mundane dish was done with a certain exceptional aplomb. Sherry had a transcendent little dish called, demurely, chicken crepes, and then we shared a slice of bougatsa, a semolina cake that I had first heard of only a week or two before, so I took its presence on the menu as a Sign. It was wunnerful. From some of the reviews I've seen of the place since, I know I'm not alone in thinking this is the best Greek food available in Texas. It's certainly better than at any of the restaurants I've tried in San Antonio.
And on the down-side, we spent that first night at the Days Inn on Maurine Avenue. There's a Motel 6 around the corner where we should have gone instead: we'd have gotten the same quality room for about $20 less, and probably the desk clerk would have been a little more cheerful.
Sunday, August 17
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| The Falls |
So we got up and went to see the Falls in a light fog. Turns out you don't have to hike 20 minutes from Lucy Park, though you can; turns out you can see the Falls from the frontage road of the freeway leading into downtown, and that's what we did. They were pretty, in an artificial way, but we didn't spend too much time gawking at them.
Breakfast was a quick thing featuring kolaches and coffee at Tommy's Donuts and Fried Rice (!), and off we went on our excursion. We started a new audiobook called A Heart in Winter, a “savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana”. We'll never know.
The story begins with an Irish immigrant with a foul mouth telling about various things we couldn't understand: even with the top up (on the freeway that morning) we could barely hear the audiobook's reader, as he'd decided, apparently for artistic reasons, to read the whole book in a sort of stage whisper; and the only words we could clearly make out through his thick accent, presumably genuine, were of the four-letter variety. We got through maybe 20 or 30 minutes of this before we switched to something less literary: a "new" Hercule Poirot mystery, the first of five written since Agatha Christie's death. It was easy to understand in a moving car and did not use the word "fuck" a single time in eleven hours.
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| Cochise |
At Anadarko, Oklahoma, we visited the Hall of Fame for Famous American Indians. This features busts of Indian leaders of the past 450 years arranged in a park-like setting. Most of them are people I'd heard of, like
Sitting Bull, Cochise, Quanah Parker, Geronimo, Will Rogers, Sacagawea, Pocahontas, Satanta, Massasoit. I was also surprised at some of the omissions: there was no Crazy Horse, no Red Cloud, no Wovoka ... so obviously mere fame doesn't get you in. The membership of this hall of fame seems skewed toward the Plains Indians that now have reservations in Oklahoma. There are a few familiar names from the Eastern tribes: Pontiac, Tecumseh, Black Hawk. And one or two from tribes of the far West -- Shoshone, Nez Perce, and I think one Navajo. But mostly its made up of Native Americans whose fame arises from their tribes' conflict with European Americans. As if they have no history of their own, apart from the Whites.
Obviously, some of the busts are speculative: many of these people lived before photography was common, and we only have drawings or descriptions of them, but that's beside the point. Overall, the Hall of Fame was an interesting stop, though I will admit that the sun's position in the sky made it difficult to get decent photographs of many of the busts. Sherry did better with her picture of the bear guarding its cub from a pack of wolves.
The map I'd looked at (the paper map) showed a scenic route out of Anadarko that went about halfway to Oklahoma City; this turned out to be a drive through the Wichita Mountains, which truly is a very pretty drive, even if the name is aspirational. Even in the mounting heat it was an enjoyable drive, but it did dump us back onto the freeway.
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| The little chairs choke me up |
A Sunday in August is not the time to visit many of the favourite sights of OKC. The Bricktown Canal, the local knock-off version of the Paseo del Rio, is dead
and parking is still expensive. I'd guess that in the coming years it'll get tattier and tattier until the area's fancy hotels and overpriced restaurants complain. We skipped it entirely and went instead to the Federal Building Memorial in the middle of downtown.
That was a worthwhile thing to see, especially on a Sunday when few people were there. It's a moving and beautiful memorial.
We left the car there and, despite the heat, walked a few blocks for lunch to a Mediterranean place called Zamzam. It's located in a trendy gentrifying area called Automobile Alley (which used to be home to car dealerships and repair shops). The food was very good, although the service wasn't as good as they seem to think it is. We ordered chicken shawarma but got chicken kebab. We ate it anyway, thinking they did a kind of odd shawarma there. (We also ordered a kofta wrap, which was as it should have been, and was very good.) The young man who, for reasons unknown, took over our table for the later stages of our visit seemed exceedingly nervous, like we were going to say something to make him cry. (We didn't, of course, but it wouldn't have taken much.) And, of course, as is always the case in trendy neighbourhoods, it was overpriced. At least it was air conditioned.
We swung by the Beacon of Hope for a picture (there was nowhere to park, because of construction, so I kept the car running while Sherry jumped out and got a picture), then went to see the Round Barn and Pop's Soda Ranch on Route 66: a shop selling what seems like every kind of soda pop you can imagine. Hundreds of varieties, most of which we'd never heard of. We didn't buy any -- they were almost all in glass bottles, which is not something we wanted to try and transport cross-country in a small, tightly-packed car. We went on to Wichita. (I was so tired that we stopped at a truck-stop diner so I could take a nap in an air-conditioned setting. They had Boston cream pie, so it was worth the stop on every level.)
The overnight in Wichita was in a seedy-ish Motel 6 in a really seedy part of town. The kind of Motel 6 that gave the chain its awful reputation: half-assed maintenance and housekeeping, The pool was like a stagnant pond, green and slimy. There was a guy yelling to himself in the street out front of the motel when we arrived, and he was still there a couple of hours later when we got back from a really good dinner at Gabby's, a Peruvian restaurant, and a quick visit to the Keeper of the Plains, a sculpture at the confluence of two branches of the Arkansas River. (We also went looking for the Wichita Troll, but didn't find it that night.) What stamina the man had! He should have been a TV preacher.
Monday, August 18
In the morning, we went back to the Keeper of the Plains. This time, in the daylight, we found a large parking area and found that, had we been there ten minutes later the night before, we'd have seen the nightly light show that goes off at 9PM every night. And if we'd walked a hundred yards or so farther down the riverside path, we'd have found the Wichita Troll, which is really best seen at night. Sherry managed to get a couple of good pictures of it anyway, though I could barely see it through the grating over it. (It's underground.)
We found breakfast in yet another trendy area, this one called Old Town, a spread of old warehouses converted into clubs and restaurants and shops that cater to a much younger crowd than us. The restaurant we chose was called Egg Cetera, and was mostly good, though of course the coffee was barely drinkable (more the Starbucks type than the what we older folks prefer; I for one like my spoon to come out intact after a quick stir). The service was kind of pretentious and the prices were five-star though the food was only four-star. Avocado toast with two eggs for Sherry, chilaquiles con pollo en salsa verde for me, $43. (For comparison, I get the same dish in San Antonio, in larger quantity and higher quality, for about the same price as what this place charges.) No wonder young people can't afford to buy a house these days. Turns out it is the avocado toast and expensive coffee.
Having filled ourselves up, we trundled across town to the Chisholm Creek Nature Center, where we spent a pleasant hour or so wandering through native plants and watching the wildlife in the air and the water, until the heat grew unpleasant. Sherry managed to get her ten thousand steps this day.
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| boulders at Rock City |
We drove up the freeway to Newton for a quick stop at a place called Blue Sky. I wasn't willing to walk across the lawn to the sculpture -- it's tick season -- but Sherry was. Then we drove farther up the road to a place called Rock City, outside Minneapolis, Kansas, where glaciers dropped a profusion of really unusual sandstone boulders at the end of the last Ice Age. We spent maybe an hour and a half there, wandering around the weird rock formations.
We had decided to spend the night in Kearney, Nebraska, because when Sherry's sister Nancy and her daughter Ali went there some years ago, they were particularly impressed with the Archway, a building built across the Interstate near there. Sherry and I had been there before, but not in time to actually see it. We were determined to, this trip. So we drove the back roads of Kansas and up to Kearney -- there were two planned stops along the way that we bypassed, one because it was already closed, and the other because it was some miles down a gravel road and not that interesting to begin with. And dinner was a late lunch at a local barbecue restaurant next to a gas stop, We got to Kearney and checked into a better-variant Motel 6, a new one with a slightly quirky bath arrangement that only needed a cheerful clerk to make it a pretty good place to stay.
Tuesday, August 19
There's a cookbook publishing company in Kearney that has a bookstore selling all its products. That opens at 8AM, according to sources; the Archway doesn't open until nine. So the plan, if it can be called that, was to grab a quick breakfast, run by the bookstore, then be at the arch when it opened.
This intended arrangement of activities collapsed immediately on discovering that the bookstore isn't where it showed on my sources; it's miles to the east, out the highway along the railroad track. And the somewhat trendy breakfast spot we chose (Kitt's Kitchen, in another Old Town neighbourhood) doesn't do "quick." We were celebrating our 36th wedding anniversary all day, so we were more determined than usual to kind of chill. The coffee was as horrid to me as any Grande, and the $17 bagel with salmon and a schmeer was so far from the glorious lox-and-bagels of New York that I had to look in another direction, lest my tears oversalt the thing. The lemon-blueberry "buckle" (a type of muffin or big cupcake) that we split made up for most of the failings of the place.
Oh, well. We choked down another $40 breakfast and went to the Archway.
I knew the Archway crosses Interstate 80; that's kind of its signature attribute. And on the way into town Monday evening, I'd seen a sign pointing me toward the Archway. I remembered from our previous visit that it had its own exit from the freeway. So I thought I knew where it was. I got on I-80 and headed west ... for ten miles, to the next exit, by which time Sherry had looked it up on Google Maps and found that it was three miles east of Kearney. So, back we went, thirteen miles to the Archway.
Everything we'd heard or read about the Archway Museum says most people spend about 45 minutes there. Fine, we only had to get to Sioux City, Iowa that day, and frankly that destination was only because we figured there'd be no place to stay in the miniscule burgs we'd pass through on the way there. (It was to be a county-counting day.) We puttered through the gift shop, buying a souvenir fridge magnet that we don't have room for, and chit-chatting with the shop clerk for a while, then started up the escalator to the museum.
It's laid out on two floors, the first going south across the freeway and telling the story of the local area before the coming of the railroad. The floor above takes you north, back across the freeway, and tells the story of the area after the coming of the railroad and into the modern (automobile) age. It's kind of a hagiography of America, where all the people are honest and fair and adventurous and strong and know how to tie all kinds of knots and obey their parents. We spent two and a half hours, creeping slowly through all this, and enjoyed every minute of it. I tried my best not to argue with the audio presentation about the more obvious whitewashing of things, and mostly succeeded. A morning well spent.
From there we drove up to Loup City for lunch at a cafe chosen not for its quality but for the fact that it was the only one we could find. It was in the first of the destination counties for the day's driving, Sherman County, and that is all it has to recommend it. From there, we drove north through Valley and Garfield counties, the east. We'd decided to skip the chalk mine, since the prospect of spending time underground looking at soft rock didn't really interest either of us. I was more interested in visiting the Ashfall Fossil Bed, but that was down seven and a half miles of gravel road (each way) and maybe someday we'll come back in the Subaru? So we continued our drive, through Pierce and Cuming counties and voila! I'm done with Nebraska. We got into Sioux City, Iowa around dinner time and, it being, as I said, our anniversary, we went for a nice relaxing dinner at an almost-fancy Italian place in the central part of the city. It reminded me of Caparelli's, our neighbourood Italian place back home, because of the Dean Martin and Perry Como music on the PA system. (Caparelli's doesn't have that, but they do have Dean Martin and Perry Como likenesses painted on the walls along with a host of other familiar Italians and Italian-Americans. That's good enough for my memory.) I had scallops sardignole, which was very good, while Sherry had chicken alla oggi, nicely done in sauce over lots of vegetables. I even had a glass of wine to honour the special occasion (our anniversary, not finishing with Nebraska).
Our hotel that night was the Cottonwood Inn and Conference Center, back on the Nebraska side of the river. It turned out to be the best hotel deal we've found so far on this trip. It was only $47 plus tax ($54 total, I think) and very nicely appointed. The headboard on the beds was almost manorial, everything in the room worked right, there was plenty of lighting and outlets everywhere you might want one, nice absorbent towels in a bathroom that worked in predictable ways, like back in the days when plumbing was functional rather than decorative, and comfortable places to sit in the room. They even had actual ceramic mugs for your coffee in the morning. It was great. Too bad it's not in Deming or Amarillo, where we'd get to use it several times a year instead of just this once.
I took not one single picture in all of Nebraska. Not that it wasn't pretty in places, just that there was really nothing to take pictures of. It's not for everyone....
Wednesday, August 20
There were a number of sites to visit in Sioux City, Iowa. We didn't go to any of them. (The only one I regret not having remembered to go to was the Jolly Time Popcorn Museum, which we'd talked about checking out and were a little bit excited about. Too bad I didn't look at the list before we left town, to see what we were skipping, because I'm pretty sure we'd have gone for that first.) Instead we woke up and took a stroll along the banks of the Missouri River, in Riverside Park, and then went for breakfast in a little shop near the trattoria where we'd had dinner, a place called Brekky's that had a wonderful breakfast sandwich with some kind of delicious sauce, egg, cheese and sausage on foccacia. This is the kind of breakfast I like: tasty, artisanal, and inexpensive ($8 each), and with good ol' americano coffee. We really only went there because the converted railway car I'd planned on going to, Archie's Diner, turns out only to be open on Saturdays and Sundays. I think I was happier with Brekky's. From there we set out across Iowa, listening to an audiobook called Hollywood Homicide by Kellye Garrett, an amusing story about a former actress who stumbles into a criminal case because she needs the reward. "I don't think so, Boo."
The best thing about Wednesday was that the heat finally broke. We had the top down almost the whole day and it never got above 82 degrees; but I did get frustrated by the boring straight roads with stop signs every couple of miles. It reminded me of a trip across Indiana many years ago, the one where I decided that life was too short for that kind of travelling. I was also frustrated by road closures and construction not reflected on Google Maps, and by unpaved roads that show up as paved on the GPS app. Our only stop that day was at the Grotto of the Redemption, a Catholic shrine in West Bend that was honestly impressive. It's built mainly of quartz and coloured stones of all kinds. It's presented as the work of one dedicated German-born priest, but I don't think anyone lives long enough to do all that by himself. He must have had help, and not of the divine variety.
There was nowhere to eat lunch in the little towns we passed through in Iowa, so we dug into our ice chest for apples and carrots, and cruised up to Minnesota to see the Golden Stripe. See photo at top. It's actually a splash of gold paint on the surface of Interstate 90 just west of the Blue Earth exit, at the point where the country's longest road was finished in the 1970s, with a little celebration that did its best to evoke the importance of the completion of the transcontinental railroad a hundred years before. They keep the stripe painted, but you really can't see it from the rest area there. Maybe they should build a little platform a dozen steps high, so you can actually tell there's a golden stripe across the road.
A stone's throw from there is the Jolly Green Giant, of commercial fame, and next to that is a restaurant called the Farmer's Daughter that provided an early supper (or a really late lunch) while we decided where to spend the night. It was too late to get to the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota before it closed for the day, but we both are interested in seeing it, so we made a reservation in Austin and spent the night there. That's where I am now. And having finally caught up with my blogging for this trip, we can now go explore the history of shoulder pork and ham, then toodle across Wisconsin and be at Milwaukee Mitchell Airport in time for Nancy and Jeff's arrival on Friday. We have a whole day of, frankly, gorgeous weather to do that in, and the most interesting sight along the way is the Museum of Unremarkable Objects (seriously!). Luckily, the scenery in southern Wisconsin is very nice, as I recall, and the roads are inviting. I'm looking forward to a nice drive.
