Driving to the Smokies

 First Day (Tuesday, April 4)

  So we dropped Carly off at her new kennel. She was so thrilled to get a paper collar, like one of those hospital bracelets every patient gets. That was the high point of the day. Which, when all we're doing is driving across Texas and Louisiana on the freeway, isn't a bad thing. We had breakfast at Panchito's on McCullough and lunch at an IHOP along the freeway east of Houston. I checked Google Maps and figured that we could make Pascagoula at a reasonable hour, so I tried to book a hotel there; the Wyndham website kept telling me there were no hotels available. I figured I'd try again later.

  By the time we stopped at the rest area in the Atchafalaya Basin, it had become clear that Pascagoula was a tad optimistic. At that point, the traffic through Baton Rouge, which normally makes Austin seem rural in comparison, was at a dead stop, both before the bridge and approaching the 10/12 Split, so I modified my expectations and tried for Hammond. Still couldn't get the web site to work, so had to call and make a reservation on the phone, which took way too long (20 minutes) but got it done. The customer service rep I spoke to put me on hold so he could confirm the reservation, but he couldn't get a response either, so he just sent me the confirmation email and that was that. Now we're at the hotel, which is less than a quarter full, so not a problem.

  One other high point for today: there's now a Don's Seafood Restaurant located in Hammond, not far from out hotel. When I lived in Lafayette, 40 years ago, that was the place to go for top-quality seafood. It has not changed. I had an outstanding plate of catfish topped with crawfish étoufée, while Sherry had stuffed catfish. Both were excellent, though if I'm being honest -- rigourously honest, you know -- hers was the better of the two. 

  And one other happy note: Trump was arraigned today. I caught a glimpse of it on a TV screen somewhere along the way. It's way past time for that.

Second Day (Wednesday, April 5)

  Well, this was a pretty good day: drove across the tail of Mississippi and up the interstate to Montgomery, Alabama, where we finally got to go to the Lynching Museum. I forget what it's really called, but it consists of two facilities, the memorial that I've been to twice before, both on days when it's closed, and a museum a few blocks away, in downtown. 

  The memorial is an awesome place. It reminds me of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin for its simplicity of design. Steel blocks inscribed with the names of lynching victims and dates hang from the ceiling of a very large rectangular building. Duplicates of the blocks are laid out in the courtyard, arranged alphabetically by state and county, so visitors can see who is known to have been lynched in a particular place. (I found that one lynching victim from Bexar County, Texas, has been identified: one Alexander Washington, killed on October 11, 1886.)*

  It was near closing time when we got to the museum (after a long, trying search for somewhere open for lunch at 3:00 in the afternoon), so we kind of had to hurry through that. It's just as well: the exhibits it contains are pretty damn overwhelming in their portrayal of slavery, Jim Crow, and modern American use of the criminal justice system as a tool of oppression. (I would have disagreed with that to some extent, had not certain people in power in the Federal government in my lifetime made belated but still-horrifying admissions from time to time; think Nixon, think Trump.)

  We drove on into the evening, and are now lodged in another Days Inn, this one in Gadsden, Alabama. There's a state park with a 90-foot waterfall, ten minutes up the road, so we plan to visit there in the morning before heading up toward Cloudland Canyon State Park in Georgia, which we may or may not visit, depending on the weather. 

  Oh, and! Next to our hotel is a convenience store/liquor store which sells moonshine from a distillery in Gatlinburg, where we will be passing. I looked it up on line to add to our trip plans, and found there's also one, with a tasting room, a short distance from our hotel in Pigeon Forge. One more thing to do while were there, and that one doesn't depend on the weather. Mmmm... I can almost taste it now.

Third Day (Thursday, April 6)

  A day of ups and downs. First thing this morning, we drove up to a place called Noccalula Falls Park, just above Gadsden, where there's a 90-foot-high waterfall, and a trail that goes along the creek, behind the falls, and back down the other side of the creek to a suspension bridge, then back up to the access trail. I was never so unprepared for a hike in my life. 

Noccalula Falls

  First, the trail appeared to be a level, broad well-tended path, so I wore my boat shoes. Uh-uh. Once you get down to the creekside, it's a rocky up-and-down slog, not terribly difficult, but difficult in boat shoes. By the time I realized that, I was fully committed.

  Second, it appears I'm not entirely acclimated to my new eyeglass lenses, and I found that, at a few important moments, the ground was not quite where it seemed to me to be. I have a couple of new scrapes and light bruises as a result.

  Third, I was excited to be able to use my new hiking poles, which I got for Christmas. Sherry grabbed them out of the back of the car and carried them off for me. When we got to the climb down to the creek, I set the length on one, then started to set the length on the other, only to discover that I had neglected to cut the zip-tie that held the two poles together in the store. You know, those things are impossible to destroy without a sharp blade. I happened to have a pair of good scissors in the car, but by the time I realized the need, it was too far to go back to the car. So I just used one, but had to hold both handles in my hand, which was more than a little inconvenient. (Soon as I got back to the car, the scissors came out.)

  And fourth, we didn't expect a half-mile trail to require a four-mile hike of about two and a half hours, and we had no water with us. In the end, we decided that we would not walk through under the falls, as it looked too slippery and sloping; instead we went back the way we'd come; and rather than going all the way back to the suspension bridge and up, we took a short cut through the Day-Use Park ("Stop! Do Not Enter Without Park Wristband!" F**k that.) We found that, in order to reach our car from there, we'd have to walk all the way to the far end of the Day-Use Park, about half a mile, and then about another half-mile along the highway to the parking lot we were in. Or we could just go under the chain-link fence separating the two parks, which was only fastened at the top. Sherry caught her hoodie on the fence -- she's a lousy criminal -- while I rolled under with no trouble (except having to use my hiking poles to stand up).

  I don't normally do things like that, but it felt really good to be so brazen. Like escaping from prison, but in broad daylight.

  Noccalula, by the way, is the name of an "Indian Princess" who supposedly jumped to her death rather than marry outside her tribe. Romeo and Juliet with a miscegenative twist. This is Alabama, after all.

*It turns out that this lynching actually took place in Atascosa County; the town where it happened, Somerset, was later moved to Bexar County.

Here's a link to all the pictures from this trip. 

Click on "Newer Post," below, to continue reading about this voyage.

Low Expectations

This was written on April 3, but won't be published until later for security reasons.

 Some time back, my wife and I were talking about places we'd been that we would particularly like to go back to some day. There are a lot, for her and for me, but one in particular we agreed on, enthusiastically: Great Smoky Mountains National Park, in Tennessee and North Carolina. So it was with that in mind that, having been forced by a poorly-designed mobile website to call Wyndham Rewards on the phone from a Wendy's parking lot in Kansas, and having been subjected to a pointless (though they don't know it) pitch for their Wyndham Resorts program (a sort of time-sharing venture), I accepted an offer for a 3-night stay in their facility in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, near that national park. They threw in a $200 gift card as a sweetener when I resisted the first offer. That won't begin to cover the expense of getting to eastern Tennessee, but it helps. Sure, we'll have to sit through another hour-and-a-half presentation on the joys of timeshare ownership, but we can do that.

So a few weeks later I selected a time for the trip, after consultation with my wife about her schedule. At that point, neither of us had any definite travel plans, so the choice came down to the timing of her local team's soccer matches, and Easter was the best time for her to be away. 

Well. The trip is nearly upon us: we leave in the morning. My diligent-albeit-meaningless travel plans have already been pushed back a day because of an unforeseen family situation. so the trip over will be three days instead of four (though we might take an extra day coming back). And of course my excitement at the thought of driving around the southern Appalachian Mountains in my little convertible has been quashed by the realities of weather (highs in the 50s and strong chance of thunderstorms are really not "convertible weather"), so we'll be puttering across country in my aging, but still reliable Subaru Forester. (I say reliable: the stereo's Bluetooth has died for a second time, so we'll be limited to music and radio, no audio books. That's a real blow, but I'm damned if I'm going to get that fixed again.)

Really, the biggest things about this coming trip are (1) the dog and (2) other plans.

When both of us go somewhere, we like to take our dog with us. That means we go to places where she'll be welcome: primarily our family outposts in Colorado and Arizona, but also occasionally to other places. But more often, it means only one of us goes, and the other stays home with the dog. My wife goes to see her sister, and I stay home with the dog. I go on a wander, and she stays home with the dog. She goes to a tournament, and I stay home with the dog. It works for us. (At least, it works for me; I assume it works for her. Seems to, anyway.) But our sweet little dog is not welcome at Wyndham Resorts (another reason we won't be buying into it, as if we needed another reason), and so she's going to the boarding kennel for a while. I hate that.

And then there are the other plans. Like I said, when we picked these dates we had no other travel plans except a vague notion that at a certain point in mid-to-late April my wife would be out in Arizona for a couple of weeks with her sister. They do it every year. Nothing else was planned for the entirety of 2023, at least until a vague point in October when another regular trip comes 'round. It seemed like a safe bet to put this trip on the calendar for Easter.

beautiful scenery, tarted up

I'll make this the short verion: we do not have time for this trip. We do not want to go. We wish we had not committed to do so. There is no time in 2023 when we would want to be in Tennessee for a long weekend. And that will be true for every year into the foreseeable future. We will still enjoy the National Park, if it doesn't rain too much, but the truth is these resorts are not in places, as a rule, that interest us or suit the sort of travel we like to do. We have no interest in the commercial tourist attractions of Pigeon Forge or Gatlinburg; they don't include anything of interest to either of us. It's like another Branson, Missouri: beautiful scenery, tarted up. 

(I did stay in a Wyndham Resort in New Orleans a couple of months ago, and it was very nice, but it's just a regular hotel with a good price and a good location; there was nothing "resort-ish" about it, that I could see.)

Also, I watched part of John Oliver's recent commentary on time-shares, which I recommend to anyone considering ever buying into one.

The Havasu Film Festival

 One of the ways I've entertained myself, having been left to my own devices in this family-oriented desert getaway spot, is by taking advantage of my newly-acquired borrowing privileges from the Mohave County Library to take out DVDs to watch. As there were no other people's tastes and preferences to consider, I could get whatever I wanted. As it's a public library, there was no porn available. Fortunately I have internet of a sort, through a hot-spot device that is nearly as slow as my cellphone, and no particular need or desire for porn. So, there being only one vote in the electorate, controlled by me, I was limited only by the fact that I have no idea what most of the movies available are about, and I didn't want to take the time that would have been needed to look each title up on Rotten Tomatoes. I played my hunches, confident that if I ended up with crap, I didn't have to watch it all the way through, and could go back to the library every day except Sunday for another try.

 At this point, I've played nine of the ten DVDs. The last I was saving to watch tonight with my wife when she got back from St George; but she's decided to stay over an extra day to do some hiking with her teammates. So I guess I'll be watching it alone. But first, I will indulge my own desire to pontificate on matters of taste and art, and slake your undoubted need, dear Reader, to know my humble opinions, given as they always are as if from On High.

 The absolute worst of the nine films is Reindeer Games, starring Ben Affleck. This is the story of a felon released from prison who impersonates his suddenly-dead cellmate so that he can sleep with that guy's pen-pal girlfriend. He doesn't realize that she and her gang of ill-bred friends have hatched a plot to use the dead cellmate's insider knowledge of a casino to rob the place. He gets beat up but good and goes along with the plan to keep from joining his erstwhile cellmate in the Great Beyond. This film was so dull that I only watched about thirty minutes of it before deciding that life was too short to sit through so bad a movie. On a scale of 1 to 5 jalapeños, this film gets none.

 Next lowest on the entertainment scale is a meritless farce called Super Troopers. This waste of a grown-up's time was put together by a deservedly not-well-known comedy troupe called Broke Lizard: five guys, none of whom, it seems, has matured much past puberty, though they have enough schooling to be able to churn out a script of sorts. (It appears, though, that there are enough pubescent boys* buying DVDs to justify the creation of a Super Troopers 2 video, which I will not be looking for on my library shelves any time soon.) Suffice it to say the movie consists of fart jokes and childish pranks draped around a loosely-conceived plot made mostly of holes, so that the semi-tractors at the center of the low-jinks can be driven through them. I laughed once, more from surprise than amusement. There's a pretty girl, the one character with a measurable quantity of brains, to give the film enough of a hint of sexuality to draw in the masturbation-centered crowd that is this film's intended audience; and a shot of a fat guy in full-frontal nudity to turn them all off. If I had half a jalapeño to award this film I'd be reluctant to do so.

*And not just pubescent boys, it turns out.

 Continuing from bottom to top of the entertainment scale, I come to Scarface, a film that illustrates director Brian De Palma's well-known obsession with screen violence. This is one of the few films in this festival that I had actually heard of, though I'd always thought it was about Al Capone. It's not. It's a remake of a 1932 film based on a 1929 novel that was loosely based on Capone, but this blood-soaked three-hour jaunt is about Tony Montana, a Cuban immigrant who comes over on the Mariel Boat Lift during the Carter administration, and makes his way to the top of Miami's burgeoning drug-dealing trade. Al Pacino is not at his best as the murderous coke-addled Montana, and Michelle Pfeiffer must have had nothing much going on in her life when she accepted the role of Elvira, the bored housewife of the drug dealer who gives Montana his first criminal job after he comes to the US. There isn't much to the Elvira character, and Pfeiffer delivers what there is and nothing more. On the other hand, Elvira does at least survive the end of the film, which literally no one else can say. I'll give it two jalapeños, mostly for the cars. At least De Palma had the decency not to shoot up the 60s-vintage white Bentley (which was so embarrassed about being in the film that it insisted on being disguised as a Rolls-Royce), which is the only other star to survive to the closing credits.

 Next are two mediocre films, one a disappointment, the other a pleasant surprise. The disappointment was Running With Scissors, a memoir about a teenaged boy coming of age in a truly warped household. His mother, a delusional poet played by Annette Bening, gives him away to her psychologist, who believes that thirteen-year-olds are mature enough to be considered adults. (This, it seems, was a real person. The character's name is changed but the real person actually believed that, and practiced in New England until being stripped of his licensure.) The boy's father, played by Alec Baldwin, has finally had enough of her irrational behaviour and left; he gives not a shit about the kid. Since the boy is already well along the mother's path by the time of the divorce, I can't really blame him. Naturally, the kid goes through hell and comes out looking like a 21st-Century New York version of normal; it helps that the script is taken from that character's In-Real-Life memory. For some reason -- could I have put faith in the blurbs on the DVD case? -- I expected more of this film. I didn't get it, so will grudgingly give it only three jalapeños; and some of that is just because it's so much shorter than Scarface.

 The other mediocre film was the pleasant surprise, Puerto Ricans in Paris. It stars Luís Guzman and Edgar García as a couple of New York police detectives with some success at sniffing out fashion fraud. The movie begins with an entertaining sequence that ends in the arrest of some guys selling knock-off Louis Vuitton bags. They get hired for a private job on the side, in Paris. They use their vacation time to go to the City of Light and stumble their way through the beau monde of fashion, failing to find their criminal until the last minute, when Garcia's character makes a mental leap (foreshadowed by the film's opening scenes) and saves the day. I expected mindless fluff; I got that, plus some well-designed cinematography, a few funny lines and even a smattering of character development; and Rosie Perez, playing the wife of García's character, is less irritating than usual. This film meets expectations where it was not expected to, if that makes any sense. Three jalapeños, and maybe a little bit more.

 Getting up there on the overall-quality scale is Rumor Has It, a 2005 rom-com starring Jennifer Aniston and ... I don't know; was there anybody else in that movie? There must have been.... (Aniston has that effect on me: if I had one of those lists that got Ross in so much trouble when he met Isabella Rossellini at Central Perk, it would just list Jennifer Aniston four times, plus Sandra Bullock, because she's kind of local. She lives in Austin, so I could actually meet her, theoretically.) Oh, yeah: Mark Ruffalo, back when he was playing romantic leads with all the nuance of a supermarket birthday cake, and Shirley Maclaine, who, having forgotten more than most actors ever know, still knows more than most of them about how to deliver a performance. Kevin Costner is in it, too. The movie takes the premise that The Graduate was based on real people in Pasadena, and those real people are the family of Aniston's character, who for some reason sets out to find out about it. The premise isn't entirely ludicrous; for all I know it may even be true (or, as they say in Hollywood, based on real events.) The characters aren't all made of cardboard, and the love-story aspect of the script isn't entirely slapped up. Plus there's just the one shot of Jennifer Aniston's side boob (or her double's; don't tell me if it is, I need to believe it's actually Jennifer Aniston) that reminds me of what it's like to be young. All in all it's a fun little movie, and I'll give it three and a half jalapeños, even without the side boob.

Next up is The Sum of All Fears. Yes, it's a stock Tom Clancy-type story of spies and military derring-do and heroism and Apple Pie and all, but it's a good story and a well-made movie, with a reasonably tight script that kept me guessing, good performances from the principals (Morgan Freeman and Ben Affleck) as well as the rest of the cast, and just a whole lot of action. The movie holds interest from beginning to end, and I was intrigued enough by it to even watch those gushing "bonus" interviews on the DVD about how the special effects were done. (You know: how the boss had such vision and the peons who did the actual work had such talent and the entire crew was just so imaginative. These interviews always sound like Donald Trump introducing his next victim to the country, only more sincere-sounding.) I give it four jalapeños.

I checked out A Simple Favor, mostly because I like Anna Kendrick and the title seemed vaguely familiar. In this black comedy, Kendrick's character, an oh-so-happy homemaker and mother who finds purpose in giving helpful hints in a chirpy vlog, gets wrapped up in the lives of her neighbours, a crazy woman and her husband. It's a fun story, with enough twists in the plot to keep you entertained, even if you can see them coming. She's dead, or is she? Will the good guys win? Who, exactly, are the good guys? It also stars Blake Lively, who I thought was a man but who very clearly isn't. This movie also gets four jalapeños from me.

 

 Finally, the best of the lot. No surprise: it's A River Runs Through It, with Brad Pitt, Craig Sheffer, and Tom Skerritt. I checked out this film because we had been talking about it a few days before, and all I could remember about it was that it involved fishing and Robert Redford. (He directed it.) It's a gorgeous movie, visually. The story is tragic but not unexpected, and the acting is believable, even if the script gets a little too on the nose at times. Even the child actors deliver quality performances (and one of them went on to be kind of famous, as did that Pitt guy). Nobody dies on screen in this period piece, which is more a human drama than any of the exciting action pictures I usually see in theaters (because movie choices there always involve at least two voters). Think The Waltons, but out West. The film isn't as overwhelmingly beautiful as I remembered it being from when it was new in theaters, but it's still a sumptuously told tale of real life in America at any point in our history. I give it four and a half jalapeños.