Condo Trip 2024: Knoxville & Lake Lure 1

Part One: The Trip Up

Friday, May 10

 Strong storms passed through Texas just before we left on this trip: tornadoes and flooding and torrential rain. East Texas got over two feet of rain in a short time, and these storms continued to dump water across the southeastern part of the country. But my calculations were that we would be behind the bad weather, and further and further back each day, and it seems I was right. Not a drop of rain so far, and after the first day of clouds, we've had gorgeous spring weather. 

 Carly went to the kennel early on Friday, and as usual was thrilled to get her paper collar. If we could bring her on these condo trips, I'd gladly leave the Jag behind and drive the Subaru. And in fact, now that I'm so much fatter than before, despite still being only 49 years old, I'm close to the point of giving my little convertible to a car museum anyway. (If I thought any of my heirs were the least bit interested in it, I'd give it to them, but they're not. It's not their style.)

 So we were off. We stuck to I-10 all the way through Houston, listening to The Ink Black Heart, the sixth book in J.K. Rowling's "Cormoran Strike" series of mysteries. Like her Harry Potter series, each book is longer than the one before. This one -- the first we've listened to rather than reading -- is 33 hours long, so we won't finish it until the return trip. We enjoy the series: the regular characters are well-developed and likable, the plots are complex without being impenetrable, the language is precise and the tone is just slightly erudite. They're written for people who paid attention in school.

 East of Houston, we stopped for lunch in a Vietnamese noodle house called Vietnamese Noodle House. It was simple and downscale but the food was good, plentiful and cheap. Service was so-so and the restaurant itself was utterly unprepossessing, but I'd go back if I'm ever looking for lunch around there. (I won't be.) I'd planned, at that stage of the trip, to take the old highway as far as Beaumont, but Google Maps showed some kind of blockage ahead on that route, so back to I-10 we went. (That stretch of I-10 between Houston and Beaumont still holds the title of Dullest Freeway in the US, as far as I'm concerned.) We got off the interstate just east of Lake Charles and headed up through Alexandria to Natchez, where we spent the first night in a reasonably priced hotel that claims to be a 3-star place but really only gets two. We got our room key and found a parking spot nearby, then opened the room to find somebody else's luggage and shopping all over the room. The desk clerk blamed housekeeping, and I'm not giving a lot of thought to how it could be their fault. The replacement room was in the same general area, so it was no trouble to unload the car from where it was. 

 Then we headed Under the Hill. That's the part of Natchez, right along the riverbank at the bottom of the bluff, where the riverboats used to dock. Well, they still do, and there was actually one in the port, a stern-wheeler whose name I didn't catch. Lights were on in some of the rooms on board and you could tell that they were elegantly appointed. Makes me want to try a river cruise, but I would like to do that somewhere with less humidity and fewer mosquitos.

sunset on the Mississippi at Natchez

 Anyway: Natchez Under the Hill, years ago, was what we would call a red-light district: whorehouses, and saloons, mostly, plus warehouses and flophouses. Now, of course, it's all gentrified. Not a big area, but big enough for a few nice bars and restaurants, it's the center of night life for upscale Natchez. I hadn't been down there in about 40 years, so I was curious to see it again. We had a very pleasant dinner at a sports pub called The Camp, then went back to our hotel, where we were slightly relieved to find our own belongings undisturbed. 

Saturday, May 11

 In the morning I had a cup of very bad coffee, most of which I threw away because of the bugs swarming around me while I tried to drink it, then we drove up the highway to Port Gibson, to see a goldfingered church steeple and grab some breakfast. Found the steeple, but turns out there are no restaurants in Port Gibson. (McDonald's doesn't count.) So we dove into our ice chest and had hard-boiled eggs and apples for breakfast while lamenting the primitive resources available in rural Mississippi. 

 After a drive up the Natchez Trace we got off to go see the Mississippi Petrified Forest, a privately-owned attraction that, from the descriptions I found on line, smacked of tattiness. Yet it turned out to be quite a nice little diversion: about a half-hour's fairly easy walk through low forested hills with lots and lots of 30-million-year-old petrified logs lying around. The signage was good, making the natural forces at work easy to understand, and there was plenty of (living) flora and fauna to interest us on our slow progress through the park. At six bucks each (senior rate; regular adult tickets are $7) it felt like a real bargain.

 I had some trouble getting Google Maps to take me along the route I wanted, and we ended up passing through Jackson first on freeway, then on a six-lane divided highway. We stopped for lunch somewhere along the road there, in a new-ish cafe in a strip center, where the service was excellent, the menu was very short and the prices were reasonable. We each ordered salads, but when the servers carried the daily special fried chicken plates by for the folks at the next table, I knew I'd made a mistake. I'm still suffering. The salad was okay but, Man! did that fried chicken look good! I suspect it will backfire on me at some point in this trip.

 After that, we made a stop in a podunk little town called Shubuta (or Shubula; sources disagree) to drink some red water out of their "famous" red water artesian well. Shubuta (or Shubula) isn't actually a town, it's more a community that used to have a police force (we saw the car) and now is a convenience store, a bunch of abandoned businesses, and this artesian well. Iron-laced water bubbles up out of the ground into a 30-gallon pot, then flows into a small concrete coy pond, then drains into the ground, forming a nice breeding ground for Mississippi's state bird, the Mosquito. 

 The water was not as tasty as the iron-laced water we used to get from the pump at my grandparents' farm in Pumpkin Center sixty years ago. And not as much fun, because you don't have to pump it yourself.

 So that was as much of a roadside attraction as I could find to justify taking the back roads across Mississippi and Alabama. From there we drove over to Monroeville, Alabama, the "literary capital" of that state, so called because both Harper Lee and Truman Capote were born there. There is, it appeared, nothing to see after business hours, because the Old Court House, which we were assured would look just like the courtroom set constructed for the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird shuts down at 5pm. We didn't really care. We had dinner in the Court Cafe -- I had an excellent shrimp po-boy and fries, and we picked up scones for the next day's breakfast -- and drove up the road to Montgomery, where our hotel was.

Sunday, May 12

 Last time we went through Montgomery we stopped at the Peace and Justice Memorial, a very moving place, and then went to the Legacy Museum; but we got there too late to see the whole thing. So our plan was to stay the night in Montgomery, then finish viewing the museum Sunday morning. That's exactly what we did; we got there just after it opened at 9AM, We were there until about noon, and still kind of rushed the last part of it.

too on-the-nose

 Since last year's visit, the organization behind both facilities has added a third campus, this one a sculpture garden along the Alabama River, a few blocks away. We decided to go there before getting lunch, and honestly it was kind of disappointing. We expected art but got three-dimensional preaching. But we were both very hungry by then, so maybe it's better than I'm giving it credit for. (Not.) After waiting for a long slow-moving train to unblock the crossing, we got to the spot we'd picked for lunch. It being Mothers' Day, we wanted a place that wouldn't attract families taking mom out to eat after church, and we picked right: NYC Gyros, a tiny little storefront that felt like stepping through a wormhole into Brooklyn. Excellent middle-eastern fare, unexpectedly cheap, with a small dose of Noo Yawk sass from the owner. I'd give it four and a half jalapeños if I still did restaurant reviews.

 We drove top-up to Auburn, where we wasted half an hour seeing the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art. There was no fine art there, just a few small galleries of postmodern race-sensitive crap. I'm sure it's very popular with the white-guilt woke arts community, but it's nothing I'd look twice at. Well, there was one sculpture, a wall-mounted piece with an old sailing ship model stuck into a lobster trap. If it had had a title like "Slave Ship" I'd have thought it was an excellent metaphorical representation of how 250 years of the slave trade, and its later consequences, still traps all of American society; but no, it was called something that related to a protégé of the sculptor, and so was meaningless to any large purpose.

 It was too early for dinner when we passed the Whistlin' Pig Cafe, which is reputed to have the best Brunswick Stew in all of Georgia ... why that should be a thing, I don't know ... but it's OK; it's closed on Sundays anyway. We drove up the mountain to see Franklin Delano Roosevelt's favourite picnic spot, right behind the CCC-built headquarters building for FDR State Park. (He used to come to that spot when he was at Warm Springs, which is just a few miles further east from there.) It was, as you might expect what with the presidential imprimatur and all, a nice view, but I didn't consider it photo-worthy, as I already have way too many photographs of indistinguishable broad forested valleys dotted with the occasional unidentifiable building in the distance. 

 For reasons I no longer remember, I'd decided to bypass Warm Springs, so we got on the freeway and headed north, hoping to bypass Atlanta traffic congestion completely while Mothers' Day was still in force. We didn't entirely succeed at this, as apparently one of the big things to do in that area on Mothers' Day is go watch the Braves play wearing pink gear. We also had to go right past Harts Field, the world's busiest airport, so there was a stretch of traffic to deal with. But all in all it wasn't that bad. We got out to the northwest suburbs while it was still broad daylight, and headed for Morgan Falls Overlook Park, which turns out to be a popular city park with a playground stuffed full of little kids, more than I've seen in one place since I was one myself. Unfortunately it has no waterfalls, and thus no overlook thereof. There used to be a waterfall, but it's now under the reservoir formed by a dam erected by the local power company on the Chattahoochee River. Well, I got some exercise while making this determination.

 We spent the night in Roswell, not quite beyond the reach of the Atlanta Metropolitan area, after having a late supper at a very good place called North River Tavern. It seemed about to close when we arrived, but by the time we left it was pretty well hopping, except that everyone was out on the patio. We were the only customers sitting inside, I think. I had a side salad and we split an order of hot dogs. (I don't know why I've been craving hot dogs lately, unless it's because I keep passing the Dog Father restaurant on San Pedro and wondering how it can have stayed in business for so many years.) My side salad ($2.95) was more like a chef's salad, and I could barely eat my hot dog afterwards. The dogs (two in the order) came with fries, which were, dare I say it? I dare: perfect. They were perfect. Crinkle cut, perfectly fried, and not too much salt. 

Monday, May 13

The cabbage patch

 In the morning we found our perfect travel weather had come to an end. It was drizzling, and it drizzled all day. And my carefully planned excursions for the day ended up out the window for the most part. Horsetrough Falls, supposedly in the town of Helen, turn out to be somewhere else, somewhere up in the mountains northwest of the town. (The town itself, by the way, is widely known for having remade itself in the image of an Alpine village. It looked farcical.) In searching for Horsetrough ("Continue straight," the Google Maps lady says, at a T-intersection.) we passed a sign directing us to another waterfall that was supposed to be about 20 miles away. When we couldn't find Horsetrough, we decided to go there. It's on federal lands, so free for us with our lifetime senior passes; we found this out after paying $5 for a Georgia State Parks daily parking pass. I need five dollars worth of vengeance against the State of Georgia. (When I think of Marjorie Taylor Greene and what she's doing to this country, that five bucks goes way up.) The Gourd Place (museum and studio) is only open by appointment, which we did not have. And Babyland General Hospital, the creepiest place on earth, smacked too much of cultishness. It looks like a plantation house, with extraordinary landscaping. Somebody made a pile of money on Cabbage Patch dolls.

 (Which reminds me -- the MTG reference, not the cabbage patch: in three days' driving across the Deep South we've seen exactly one Trump sign. I take it as a hopeful indication that, this close to a presidential election, the people who avidly supported the Great Orange Child in the past seem reluctant to let their neighbours know. May God bless and save the United States.)

Anna Ruby Falls

 We hiked up to the falls. Half a mile, not too steep but a long way up. Took us not quite half an hour going up, a little longer going down (because the tarmac was a little damp and my shoes don't have the best grip; I should have thought to change into sneakers for the hike.) Worth every gasping step. Anna Ruby Falls is actually two waterfalls, side by side, as two creeks (each of which has as much water in it as the San Antonio River) come together. One is about a 50-foot drop; the other is easily twice as high. They have a nice arrangement of viewing platforms built so you can get a good look at this natural wonder.

 Well, that was a really nice interlude, with more exercise than I've gotten since my heart attack last Christmas. I was relieved to make it to the top, and I was relieved to see that they had frequent benches available all the way up (though I only needed them twice, if I recall correctly.)

 After that, we stopped in at the Northeast Georgia Folk Pottery Museum, which has a nice, albeit small, exhibit showing the history of pottery in the area, which has been going on for about 200 years. In the earliest days, pottery was a basic necessity. "If a man couldn't put up 50 or 60 gallons of syrup" (the only sweetener available back then) "his family wasn't gonna make it through the winter." Later on, as glass storage jars and factory-made pottery became available, and new products like granulated sugar and molasses made it into the hills, pottery became more decorative, less of a necessity, and relatively cheaper.

 On the other side of the building is a series of art galleries. I walked into the first room and found eight things I wanted to buy. I stopped looking. That makes nine artisan works on this trip that I regret not having bought. Of course, the decisive question in my mind has become, Where would I put it? And there, I have me. I have no place left in my house to display a vase or a pot or a small wall hanging. I live in too much clutter. (I will, at this point, refrain from specific critiques of the habits of other members of the household in connection with available flat surfaces at home.) (Yes, Carly is something of a slob.)

wooden Model T model

 Then we went to the Miles Through Time Car Museum, in Clarkesville. This museum is run by the guy who maintains the Automotive Museum Guide, an essential part of my trip planning now that I'm running low on new counties to visit. (By the way, I visited my planned four new Georgia counties today.) It's located in the back part of an antique mall that his wife operates. The cars are arranged chronologically, and the exhibits include auto-adjacent topics like the development of service stations and auto repair shops; toy cars; and model cars, including unbelievable full-sized hand-made wooden models. I'll say this right now: this museum easily has the best explanatory signage of any I've visited so far (about 40, maybe?). I spent so much time reading things. Just as a fer-instance: I didn't know, and I bet you didn't either, that the Coca-Cola company tried to get the US Treasury to mint a seven-and-a-half-cent coin, so it could raise its prices above a nickel a bottle without requiring customers to use more than one coin for a purchase (this, at a time when five cents was real money), and that, when the Treasury declined to do so, for a brief time the company made its own seven-and-a-half-cent tokens, which were a flop. (It also tried a scheme where a small number of empty bottles were loaded into vending machines, so that some unlucky customers would have to spend ten cents for a nice cold Coke, thus raising the average revenue per serving to 5.62 cents. Wow. Is it any wonder business in this country needs to be regulated?)

 It was too late in the day to visit Tallulah Gorge State Park, which from the descriptions I've read is a must-see sort of stop; but it shuts down at 5pm sharp. One wonders why. So we didn't get to use our $5 Georgia State Parks parking pass, and I still want vengeance for that.

Tuesday, May 14

 First thing this morning after breakfast (at a popular cafe called The Rusty Bike, where I decided I didn't have to eat the entire breakfast burrito) we drove up the road to the one attraction on the trip that Sherry has actually gotten excited about seeing: the Foxfire Museum, in the tiny town of Mountain City. I'm sure all the world of a certain age remembers the Foxfire magazine that recorded the history and lifeways of the Appalachian Mountain settlers and their descendants; it was put together by a bunch of school kids in the Rabun County area of Georgia, kids who were concerned that these ancient ways were being lost to modernity. The magazine's articles were collected in a series of best-selling books; the royalties from the books enabled the group to buy some land, relocate a bunch of Appalachian buildings -- cabins, barns, mills, etc. -- and those buildings now comprise the Foxfire Museum, a sort of Living History project where people can come and see how to grind corn or make buckets or do smithing and whatever.

 Of course, early on a rainy Tuesday morning there weren't any volunteers there to man the various buildings and studios, so we just walked slowly up the hill, the only people there at that time of day, looking in each building (if it was unlocked), then back down the hill. It took us not quite an hour. Sherry enjoyed it pretty thoroughly; I was nonplussed, as (1) I'd never been a fan of the Foxfire stuff as a kid in the 1970s when this was all popular, and (2) after a year and a half living in West Virginia, where time moves much more slowly, so a year and a half counts as twenty-five years of normal life, I'd seen all the ramshackle cabins and 'shiner stills and axe handles I care to see. I've been in enough log cabins, barns and sheds, most of them much older that those at Foxfire, and most of them still in regular use, and cluttered with people and things, and seen enough of the lifeways of poverty-stricken Appalachians. And I've been to enough Living History museums, from Louisbourg to Sturbridge to Acadian Village, to keep me satisfied for the remainder of my days.

Bridal Veil Falls

 Following that, we crossed into North Carolina and went by Bridal Veil Falls, which is right next to the highway. As soon as we came 'round the curve and saw the falls, we realized we'd been there before. There's a roadway passing under the falls themselves, and I have a picture of me driving my old blue Jag convertible through it. The road under the falls is closed to traffic now, I hope only temporarily, so we just got a pic with the car in the distance. It's not the same.

 From there, it was up to the airport at Asheville to collect Nancy and Jeff. We are now ensconced in an Asheville hotel for the night. We had dinner at a nice restaurant a couple of miles down the road and will get an early start tomorrow, driving in a roundabout way to Knoxville, where we'll spend three nights before heading to our condo week east of Asheville. Tomorrow will start Part 2 of this blog post. 

And by the way, as usual all my pictures from this trip are available for viewing in my Google Photos albums, "2024-06 Lake Lure Trip". All of my pictures, I believe, are captioned, so you don't have to just guess at what you're looking at. In some applications, the captions show at the bottom of the photo; otherwise, when you view the pictures in Google Photos, you'll see a little "Information" icon at the top right -- an "i" in a circle. Click on that to read the captions.

Streaming Experience

 We cut the cable at our house a year and a half ago. We had talked about it for months, and tried to look into streaming services and all the things associated with the new-ish tech involved; but like most things of a technical nature, the combination of obscurantist jargon and arcane pricing practices made it difficult to evaluate streaming with any confidence. Plus there was another inhibiting factor: I didn't find any commentary from ordinary non-techie users that described streaming as an experience, in comparison to cable. After a year and a half of streaming (and about 25 years of cable), I think maybe I can rectify that.

The immediate impetus that got us to change was cost. In mid-2022 we were paying about $250 a month for cable, internet and a landline, plus $100 a month for 4-G cellphone service. At that point, our cable bill had been going up steadily in drips and drabs for ... well, forever. By October, it was up to $282 a month, and I suddenly felt like Popeye. ("That's all I can stands, I can't stands no more.") We turned off the cable. We also changed our cellphone plan to a 5-G program because it offered free premium streaming services (Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+). We had to buy new smartphones, $700 for a pair of Motorola phones loaded with Android; but they will last us for years and are worth every penny.

So our cable bill dropped from $280 to $95 a month, while our phone bill increased from $100 to $175, for a net savings of $110 a month. I felt good about that. (In the year and a half since then, those bills have crept up by about $30. I feel less good.) We also added one premium streaming service, Peacock Premium, for the Premier League soccer matches that are important to us; we got it for $5 a month and it immediately went up 20%, to $6. (On the other hand, we no longer get USA Network, a cable-only channel where many matches we want are shown.)

 To summarize the cost:

services based on cable TV: $380

services based on streaming TV: $300

So what's the streaming experience like? Well, first we had to have another router added, to get a strong enough signal in that room. That was frustrating but immaterial for present purposes. (It also cost us nothing.) Then we had to get a digital antenna to receive local broadcast channels that had been included with the cable package. It does not work well, but honestly, except for some programs on Public TV (which we can't get with the antenna we have) the content of broadcast TV isn't worth the added cost of a better antenna. 

 There are three aspects of use that I find significant: 

• recording shows; 
• finding shows to watch; and 
• actually watching. 

 When we had cable, we had a DVR that would record several programs at once. We used that all the time, and it seems to have made our TV watching easier and more enjoyable. If there's a way to record "live" streaming programs, I haven't found it, but with a few exceptions, we don't need to record them. Just about everything of interest to us is available on demand. Finding a program can be tricky, and once found it's not as convenient to watch, but we're not limited to what the DVR drive can hold. So that's pretty much a wash.

 Finding shows is generally much more difficult with streaming. Just by chance, we have a Samsung TV, and when, after 2 or 3 years of watching it, we attached it to the internet (with our privacy settings carefully chosen and re-checked from time to time) we discovered that it can access something like 500 channels of mostly drivel, but some of it is in our fields of interest, and we watch that crap most of the time. We have the Peacock Premium service, and the service in the Disney Bundle; there are also a number of free streaming apps -- Pluto, Plex, Tubi ... I can't remember all the names. They all contain various old TV series, free movies, and the same sort of crap that makes up most of your average 350-channel cable lineup. We occasionally will watch soccer matches on ESPN+, but after sampling what's on Disney+ for a couple of months, I don't think I've even opened that app in over a year. If you're a real Star Wars fan, or have small children, you'll probably feel differently about it, but to me it's pretty uninteresting. Hulu might be good if you could sort the wheat from the chaff quickly, but you can't.

 The problem with all these things is finding anything. If you don't already know where a program is, there's a "global search" function, but it doesn't work very well. Despite its name, it's not comprehensive; it seems to be intended to promote streaming services we don't have and don't want, like Apple TV and Netflix; and it's very hard to use, so generally we don't bother. 

 So we've settled in to our favourite channels, and hardly look at anything else. I flip through a dozen or so news channels* and channels devoted to a single long-running program: the Top Gear channel; the America's Test Kitchen channel; BBC Earth; Modern Marvels; and so on. These channels run the same programs over and over, but since the subject matter is of interest, I'm willing to check it out and maybe stick with it long enough to see how they make their jambalaya or get that roast to brown just right, or see why a ship sank or a bridge collapsed, or explore how scientists are learning that plants hear sounds. (Top Gear is an English skit-comedy show about cars, though it's very rarely funny. I like some of the cars, and the scenery.)

 Each streaming app has its own guide function. They're all a little bit different, but they all share two attributes. One, they're clunky to use, and two, they all give minimal but inaccurate descriptive information. If you already know what a show is, that doesn't matter; but if you're trying to decide if you might want to watch something you're not familiar with, the only way to know is to try it and see. In my case, the answer is almost always No, but the App will keep pushing the program to me anyway -- "Made you look!" -- and will recommend other crap of equal disinterest on the strength of my having sampled the first crap show.

 (In a similar vein, each app uses the buttons on my remote differently, so I end up having to start over a lot before I can settle in to watch a show.)

 The third aspect, actually watching TV, is one that makes me less and less satisfied with streaming as time goes by. With cable, I could change quickly from one channel to another. This, combined with digital video recording, made it possible for me to go months without actually watching a single commercial. When one came up on the channel I was watching, I'd use the two or three minute interval to surf around other channels I frequented, and since I was seldom really invested in a show, often I'd find something more interesting to me than what I'd been watching. It'd drive my wife crazy, though, so to keep peace I'd often just mute the TV and read until the commercials ended.

 You can't surf channels with streaming. Most of the apps prevent you skipping the commercials at all, so all I can do is leave the room or, more often, mute the TV and read emails on my phone. Luckily, many streaming channels count down how long is left before the programming returns. But if you're watching something on, say, Hulu and a commercial comes on, you can't switch to another app, you just have to sit through that time, watching as life ebbs away to no good purpose. 

 On my Samsung TV, I can switch channels. But whereas a new cable channel comes up after a minimal delay -- a second, two at the most -- streaming channels seem to take FOREVER to start up. Usually it's only in reality maybe 3 or 4 seconds, but too often it's longer, up to 15 or even 20 seconds. I don't usually wait that long, but switch to yet another channel and make my way back later on. Honestly, the content is so uncompelling that it doesn't really matter. (And switching to a channel accessed by the digital antenna is even more painfully slow; plus the picture quality is often abysmal.)

 And there are so many commercial breaks on streaming channels. They advertise "fewer commercials than cable," but if that's true it's because there's so much unsold commercial time allocated. (They also have relatively few different commercials, so you end up seeing the same damn thing over and over and over, no matter what channel you're watching.) You frequently end up staring at a screen with what amounts to a screen-saver on it, and it just goes on and on. You would think that the channels' bosses would recognise that by skipping the commercial breaks where there are no ads sold, they could build viewership. They would have to adjust the starting times for each program on the basically-worthless programming guide, but that's the job of a moment. But they'd rather just stick to their planned ad breaks, even thought they've nothing to show. I find it frustrating.

 The upshot is, I'm seriously thinking about going back to cable. Meanwhile, though, I'm watching a lot less TV overall.

TL,DR:

Streaming is no better than cable; cable is no better than streaming. It's all crap.

 * The news channels are particularly bad about commercial breaks. CNN's stream, for example, frequently cuts off mid-sentence and goes to a "we'll be right back" screen-saver, or changes in medias res from one report to the middle of another before the first is finished.

Cheerio! Pip Pip! And All That Sort of Rot!

 The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

starring Henry Cavill, Eiza Gonbzalez, Alan Ritchson, Henry Golding and Alex Pettyfer

directed by Guy Ritchie 

There are no surprises in this movie. All the Good Guys live; all the Bad Guys die. Heroes' shots never miss, while one wonders why villains even bother with guns. The mission is a success and Britain, as is widely known anyway, survives to conquer the Nazi menace with the somewhat important assistance of the US of A, arriving in the nick of time like the cavalry in a 50's western.

 

The point of this movie, if it needs one beyond mere entertainment, is to reinforce the traditional British self-image of devil-may-care aplomb in the face of danger: the Scarlet Pimpernel versus Napoleonic France, brought forward a century and a half or so. The Nazis are dominating Europe? I say! We shall need an impromptu team operating in complete secrecy; shall we say seven people? And I know just who we need. What's that? One is in enemy hands? Hmmm, deucedly awkward, eh what. Well, not a problem; we'll collect him on the way to our destination, and leave alive not a single one of the roughly 200 Germans guarding him. In fact, long as we're there, we may as well blow up the entire facility. Smashing idea, old chap; do, let's! Whisky?

 

The mission, we are told, was an actual one that took place just before the United States got involved in the war. (World War II, in case you haven't figured that out already.) Classified information about this event was released a few years ago, and a book was written (interestingly, two years before the declassification), rights were bought, and the messy business of making a movie chuddered into motion.

 

The film would have us believe that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was a neophyte in office, likely to be destroyed politically by obtuse machinations of defeatist Royal Navy types; actually the man had been a major political figure for decades, and Prime Minister for over a year, by the time the story took place. But then, feature films aren't usually where one goes for a lesson in reality, any more than a Trump rally. The story is the supremely important thing, and it must be entertaining: a ripping yarn. Maybe it'll be kind of like what really happened, but Jeez, don't go getting all Sheldon about it!  Anyway, this movie-version Winnie C orders an off-the-books operation à la Mission: Impossible; Churchill did love that show by all accounts, even before it existed.*

 

The Special Op is to take out a U-boat supply operation in Fernando Po, at that time a Spanish colony and thus technically neutral in the War. Naturally, the best person for the job -- really the only person -- happens to be incarcerated for insubordination. I'm not sure if Ritchie intends it as a parody or an homage, but either way, it's fun to watch. You can picture the scene, played for laughs, wherein this perfect special operative is enticed into taking on the task without the actual words being spoken. All veddy British, don't you know: A hopeless task, against insurmountable odds, and nothing at the end but certain death? Rather! Whisky, old boy?**

If you're going to see this movie expecting character development or intense drama, stay home and stream something. If you just want to be entertained (or if you wonder how the British see themselves), I recommend this movie. It is entertaining, and the plot, while a little convoluted, is fairly easy enough to follow. Ritchie is not sidetracked by P.C. concerns any more than he is with rigid historical accuracy, he just tells his feathery-light story with as much gusto as will fit on the screen. And by the way, even the night-time scenes can actually be seen clearly. I was grateful for that. 

My only other complaint is that the soundtrack was overly loud, relentless, and not at all inspired.

* In fact, it was stories about offbeat Allied derring-do in the War that gave rise to my own interest in the subject. Without Churchill's love of such intrigue, and his willingness to authorize it, I probably would never have bothered with this movie.

** c.f., Gimli in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: "Certainty of death? Small chance of success? What are we waiting for?"

Tulsa? Can it Really Be?

All the pictures from this trip can be seen online by clicking on this link.

The Trip Up 

Wednesday, October 25

 This is the fourth time I've planned to go to Tulsa. The first time, last year, I ended up skipping it because of the timing of things. I was coming up from San Antonio on the way to Michigan, & the mechanics of the drive meant that I would have gotten to Tulsa less than an hour before everything I was interested in closed, and nothing opened early the next day. So I figured it'd be best to leave it for another time.

 That 'nother time was supposed to be last June, when I was wandering around with my friend Roland. We went through Little Rock and the Ozarks and up to St. Louis, then back down through the Ozarks with a plan to drive the Talihena Scenic Route before heading up to Tulsa for a couple of days. Well, let's just say that, after a good long trip, neither of us was interested in extending it when it was a hundred degrees every day. So we went home instead, by the most direct route. Strike two.

 Then I made plans to do Tulsa and Fort Worth during my August-September travel window, when I had a five-week gap available to go somewhere. The weather was extremely uncooperative with that plan, so I shelved it with little reluctance. I mean, it was f'ing hot back then, and not just in Texas and Oklahoma. (That plan to visit Tulsa and Fort Worth was a fallback; initially I was going to spend a couple of weeks in Quebec during that window, but there were all these wildfires going in Canada, and after checking air-quality reports every day, I finally decided that plan was out. I would have been more reluctant to abandon it had it not been a five-day drive up, and a five-day drive back, and wicked hot.)

 So now, here I am, just back from the Huntsman Trip, and finally on my way to Tulsa. I would have started out Monday, but I had an issue with the car that I decided (late last Friday) I could not deal with myself, so the car was in for a repair to the rear window regulator, a steel cable with a cheap piece of plastic on it that apparently is going to break every 3 or 4 years. Anyway, got it back first thing this morning -- my mechanic had quoted me a cost of $4,000 a few months back, but that was because Jaguar charges $3,000 for the replacement parts. Turns out they only sell the entire assembly, including window glass (didn't need it), regulator mounting panel (didn't need it), regulator motor (didn't need it) and regulator. I bought an OEM regulator on line for $21, and took it in for my mechanic to install when I realized I couldn't do all that stuff myself. (There were 20 steps to get to the regulator, and 22 to put it all back together, and I don't even know what some of the words mean in the instructions. So I let them do it.)

 Because I have an appointment back home next week, I dropped the Fort Worth part of the trip; I'll do that some other time. I'm sure it'll be a maudlin trip down memory lane anyway. But because there are so many things on my List of Things to Do in Tulsa, I added an extra day to my stay there. 

 The trip started today. Because of the car-repair timing I got on the road about an hour and a half later than I'd planned. There was a huge line of storms moving into my route from west Texas, but I decided to go anyway. The rain caught me around Hamilton, Texas, west of Waco, and slowed me down pretty badly. I haven't seen rain like that outside of Louisiana in ... well, my entire life, as far as I can remember. It was biblical. But I made it to Hico for lunch at the Koffee Kup, which has been The Best Place for decades, though I hadn't been there in the last 20 years. I had the best cheeseburger ($3.29) and excellent steak fries ($3) and a slice of Doctor's Office Pie ($5.29, and don't ask what's in it; go have some yourself). I strongly recommend the place. When I was done the rain had stopped and I headed off.

 The only problem I encountered otherwise on Wednesday was that, south of Dallas, my phone lost the GPS signal, dumping me in downtown Dallas with no idea how to get out. Dallas is a maze to me, even though I used to live there. I finally thought to re-boot my phone, and it found the GPS signal for a while, then lost it again. I re-booted it again & the problem has not recurred. (Well, it did, but the phone quickly re-acquired the signal that time.)

 I had hoped to get to Broken Bow on Wednesday, but only got to Idalou ... which is only 12 miles from Broken Bow, so I guess that's not something worth complaining about. And the hotel I found turned out to be a great deal: extremely clean, very cheap, with very good linens and very quiet.

 I've been listening to an audiobook called 150 Glimpses of the Beatles. It's reflections from various people of the group's early years, and it's very interesting to me, who vaguely remembers Beatlemania mostly from old clips on TV. Unfortunately it's read by three people, and whenever they read quotes from anybody, they do voices. They do passable imitations of the Fab Four, whose voices are familiar to everyone of my generation, I'm sure, and they do passable voices for British celebrities and politicians (as far as I can tell). But their American accents are just horrible. In their estimation, everyone from fangirls in Denver to Baptist preachers in Florida has a Noo Yawk accent; they all sound like Brando in On the Waterfront. Very irksome. But still an enjoyable book, a mix of history and trivia. Brings back memories.

Thursday, October 26

I slept through the night last night for the first time in years. Don't know why, but I did. And felt more refreshed today than I have in an age. Wunnerful.

It was pouring rain again when I left, about 6:30, while it was still dark. I stopped at a gas station/restaurant/car museum called Gasquatch, which I'd been to a few months ago. All muscle cars, so nothing to get excited about. Had coffee and a breakfast sandwich mainly just to kill time, hoping that dawn would come and I could see. It didn't, at least not soon enough. When I got back on the road it was so hard to see that I actually pulled over and got out to make sure I had two working headlights. (I did.) I puttered along into Broken Bow (12 miles away, if you'll recall) where I stopped for another cup of coffee just to kill some more time. I was a little more successful that second time. 

While I was waiting for the sun to come up I opened Google Maps and set it to take me to the eastern end of the Talimena National Scenic Route. Then I set out. The road going up was very pretty: winding, recently resurfaced, lightly travelled, with alternating light rain and fog. After about an hour and a half I arrived ... at the western end of the drive. So I turned off Google Maps, got out the road atlas I was given for Christmas, and headed east across the ridges. Despite the occasional fog, it was a pretty drive, with some nice views of the valleys on either side. Then I headed north to check out Mike Fuller's Car & Gas Museum in Inola.

Mike Fuller's Museum

 It proved to be, in essence, an old garage building filled with about half the man's collection of old cars (mostly from the '20s and '30s, but a few from the '50s), along with hundreds of glass finials from old-style gas pumps, gas station signs, and toy cars. The cars are in various states of repair; he has restored a couple, but most of them are in the condition they were in when he acquired them. I spent probably two hours looking over the collection, and then nearly another hour sitting outside chewing the fat and getting scratched by his very friendly, very chubby dog Nellie.

the Correll Museum's car collection

 From there, I headed just down the road a piece to the Correll Museum in Catoosa,  a suburb of Tulsa and pretty much the next town along from Inola. I of course went only for the cars, of which there are only about a dozen, but also found myself fascinated by the displays in the first building, chiefly local geological samples and toys. Then, as long as I was in Catoosa, I figured I might as well go by and see what the town is most famous for: the Blue Whale of Catoosa. Fabulous.

 Then I drove into Tulsa proper and found my hotel. 

 When I was looking for a place to stay in Tulsa -- a town I knew nothing whatsoever about -- I thought that I would stay in a nice hotel downtown. I can afford it, I thought. And I found a nice hotel downtown, which was more or less reasonably priced and part of the Wyndham group, so I'd get Rewards points, which actually does make booking that group of hotels more attractive. But I have to say it's getting less and less attractive with the passing years. Now, it happens that the downtown hotel I found didn't have a room available for the three nights I planned to be here, so I started looking further out. And when I had to choose between a room 6 miles from downtown for $117 a night, or a room 5 miles from downtown for $76 a night, I decided that, if I couldn't be downtown, I might as well save $120. I thought, Super 8? It's a good enough chain. It'll be fine.

 It's not fine. It is barely adequate. The motel itself is passable: a little on the tatty side. The bathroom counter, mirror and shower are made for short people. The room's lighting is inadequate. The towels are left over from a Civil War army hospital. The switch that controls the only light in the room also controls the switch where I had my computer plugged in. I did not know that. So when I woke up the next morning I found my computer had drained its battery substantially. 

 Worse is the neighbourhood this hotel is in. There was a homeless guy in the parking lot when I arrived, trying to affix the front of his shopping basket to a skateboard. There are people who appear to be homeless wandering the streets throughout the area. And of course there's a lot of noise from the freeway at the front of the hotel. (It gets better at night, thankfully.) (Also from the 20-something idiot girl pounding on the room next door and threatening to break the window if they didn't open up.) This is not exactly a common experience with Super 8, but it is becoming increasingly common. Which means I'm less & less interested in Super 8 motels, and in Wyndham. (I also had problems with their mobile website for most of this year, but that seems now to be fixed. Still, it has a place in the calculus of preferences. Likewise my experiences with both La Quinta and Super 8 in Amarillo, going to Colorado and returning every year.) I think when I use up my Rewards points I'll switch loyalty to another chain; maybe Marriott? (I've already found that the Best Western in Deming, New Mexico, is a better deal than the La Quinta there, so now I have a Best Western loyalty account.)

 Enough of that. Nobody but me is interested (though Wyndham should be) so I'll move on to the Main Course of this trip.

Tulsa Itself

Day one: Friday, October 27

 I lucked out this morning, and found a good breakfast place half a block from my hotel. I knew rain and colder temperatures were expected, and I walked as far as the corner before I noticed just how close and just how threatening the clouds were, so I walked back to the hotel and loaded up the car for the day's explorations (i.e., I got my city map) and drove over to the restaurant. Good coffee, one slice of wheat toast and one egg over easy. Not many people there, but everybody seemed to know everybody else, which made me feel very much the outsider. No matter; I drank my coffee, ate my breakfast and left, first for a branch of Chase Bank, then to the Philbrook Museum, Tulsa's local museum of fine art. 

hand-carved

 The museum is located in a former private mansion with extensive gardens in the nicest part of town. Reminds me a lot of the McNay, surrounded by Terrell Hills and Alamo Heights: big, expensive houses built by the Pillars of Society. Only the Philbrook house was much nicer than Lady McNay's place. The museum has added on extensively, with kind of half-assed attempts to match the style, but the additions still end up looking like Postmodern Corporate Committee Choice. Too bad

 Anyway. Naturally, being in Oklahoma, you'd expect that this museum's collection is fairly heavy on the Native American artists; and it is. I saw works from Lakota, Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo, Blackfeet, even Chemahuevi artists in abundance. But there's only one small room with perhaps a dozen pieces by artists from Oklahoma tribes. That surprised me.

 There were a number of pieces that caught me up in them in the three hours I was there. One thing I noticed in particular is how ugly the baby Jesus is portrayed in early-Renaissance paintings. In some He looks like a nude Fred Mertz, in others He just looks morbidly obese, and with a tiny head. I thought about taking pictures to illustrate it, but apparently I forgot.

 I did, though, take pictures of many works, which (again) can be seen in my online photo album for this trip. But three in particular interest me enough to present here.

1. Fanon Mask by Joanne Petit-Frère. This is a head made out of (synthetic) hair formed into a face and mounted on the lower part of a stone bust remnant. According to the accompanying placard, it has something to do with Covid 19, so I'll let you draw your own conclusions as to what the artist is saying. I mention it here just because I found it fascinating: initially startling and repulsive, then merely disturbing, then (I flatter myself) meaningful and even ... well, not entirely ugly.

2. Two Generations, by Rose Kuper. According to the painting's placard, "two women appear to be dreaming." That's not what I see when I look at it. I see a young woman staring wistfully out the window at a life she cannot access, while next to her, her grandmother prays. To me the painting shows the frustrations of youth and the frustrating complacency of age. 

3. A Day at the Beach, by Martha Walter. This painting is remarkable to me only because it was painted in 1930 or so, and yet clearly shows the image of the Starship Enterprise in the sky above the beach. I can't explain it. 

 There were a number of other beautiful things at the museum, but those three, I thought, were a little out of the ordinary. 

Tulsa skyline, 1906 & 1928

 One of the things Tulsa is known for is Art Deco architecture. The city experienced its greatest boom time during the height of the Deco era, and as a consequence many of the major buildings are exemplars of that style. I found a listing on line for the Tulsa Art Deco Museum, so naturally I wanted to go, as I'm a fan of that style of architecture. The museum, formerly located downtown in one of those Deco buildings, has relocated to a shopfront on 11th Street (Historic Route 66), where it consists of one room, and a tiny room at that, in one of America's more interesting and eclectic gift shop. The Deco stuff on display is mostly mundane, and no effort is made to protect it from curious hands, yet it seems to be in good condition. The museum artifacts, however, have to share space with inflatable dinosaurs, fridge magnets, Lego Star Wars kits, Disney princess dolls and oddities like an inflatable tiara ("for formal emergencies"; I very nearly bought one as a gag gift). The shop sells everything from complex 3-D puzzles and elegantly bound classic novels to t-shirts, taffy-by-the-pound and Christmas decorations. While I was disappointed in the Deco Museum, I take advantage of the opportunity to start my Christmas shopping. (Spoiler alert: you're all getting stuffed animals or resin boxes in the shape of Anubis.) (Just kidding.)

 By the time I finished lunch today (at Tzatziki's Mediterranean Cafe on 15th Street: good but not great) I felt like I was coming down with something. It was in the 70s when I got up this morning, but dropped soon into the 50s and is going down to the 40s tonight. I prepared for the weather as best I could, with a long-sleeved T-shirt, jeans and a windbreaker, and since I was indoors substantially all day, I thought I was ready. But now, at 10pm as I write this, I'm pretty sure I'm going to feel like crap tomorrow. Fortunately I've done almost all the main things on my list of things to do; what remains is a small car museum west of Tulsa, and the aforementioned Deco buildings downtown, which are basically point-and-shoot occasions. Consequently I have decided (just at this moment, in fact) that I'm going to check out of this crappy hotel tomorrow morning instead of the next day, stop and look at the downtown buildings, go see the cars, and then start for home. I will skip the Bob Dylan Center, I think, as I'm not all that interested in it (mainly I'm curious as to what the Hell it's doing in Tulsa, Oklahoma); and I'll probably skip the Woody Guthrie place in his home town (the name of which escapes me at the moment) for the same reason.

 That was an aside: stream-of-consciousness typing. I don't want to forget to mention that I also went to the Jewish art museum and the Blue Dome District. These were both on my list.

wooden vessels by Donna Matles

 The Jewish art museum was interesting in a provincial way. There was the expected Holocaust display, which I found (having seen others in several cities) oddly sanitized. This one was arranged to show the life of European Jews in chronological context as their place in society descended from vital elements of their various communities to hated outsider to victims of unfathomable cruelty. There was an attempt to relate the shoah to modern hate movements (the KKK, white nationalism) but I found all those presentations failed to arouse much in the way of anger or revulsion in me. Maybe I'm just too enured to it; maybe I've seen it all too often already. 

 Otherwise, the museum was dedicated to the local scene, or modern pop culture. There was a section on Synagogues in Oklahoma; there were explanations geared either towards children or utterly parochial non-Jews about Jewish holidays and a little about Jewish (biblical) history: how to play with a dreidel. What order the Channukah candles are lit. What Rosh Hashannah is. Interesting, maybe even enlightening, but essentially mundane.

 On the other hand, there were two things of particular interest to me in the Jewish art museum. One was a small display of stunningly beautiful woodcraft by a now-deceased local artist named Donna Matles; the other was a huge stained-glass synagogue window built about a hundred years ago by the Tiffany Workshop. It was of major interest to me because, unlike every other such window I've ever seen on display anywhere, this one was mounted in such a way that I could see the back of it, and so now I understand how it was done. Not that I will now go home and build stained-glass windows in the style of Tiffany, but at least now I feel like I could do it if I wanted to. I like that feeling.

Tulsa skyline at night, including the Blue Dome

 Finally, tonight, I went down to see what the Blue Dome District is. It's like St Mary's Strip back home: a bunch of clubs and bars and restaurants catering to young people. I had dinner at the Dilly Diner (I don't know why, but I recognized the name from somewhere) -- excellent pulled pork nachos -- and saw the Blue Dome, which is unimpressive, and went back to the hotel. It was still early and I'm damned if I wanted to be out there late on Hallowe'en weekend. Especially the way I'm feeling.

 Day Two: Saturday, October 28

 Definitely a sinus cold. Oh, well. I checked out of my sleazy hotel and had breakfast down the street (they got my order wrong -- ham instead of bacon in my omelet -- but I ate it anyway), then went to see some of the Art Deco buildings downtown The South Boston Avenue United Methodist Church was easily the most beautiful; the others were kind of meh. (And of course there was the Tulsa Marathon to contend with; those damn marathons seem to just follow me around the country.) Following that, I went to the supposed location for the Greenwood Memorial, a little storefront by the baseball stadium, but it was vacant. Then to the Center of the Universe, a spot near the train station. I got out of the car and wandered around but couldn't figure out what was supposed to be special about it. It was just a few rows of bricks in a circle around a bit of broken concrete, on a bridge over the train tracks. I tried yelling, to see if maybe it had special acoustics, but if it did only a dog can hear it. It was cold and drizzly and so I didn't investigate further. Nor did I bother to take a picture: it was that not special.

 From there I headed out of town to Sapulpa, to see the Heart of Route 66 Auto Museum. Not huge, but some nice cars, and I took lots of pictures. Of course I like the museum: they had both a 1955 Jaguar XK-140 and a 1971 Jaguar E-Type. What more could a body want? There were a couple of dozen other nice cars, but too many of the displayed vehicles were fancy modifications or other one-off models, like a "Maserati" built by a local guy in the 1950s from parts of a bunch of other marques, and a mid-1950s Ford Custom with a fancy paint job. And a lot of muscle cars, which, I'm sorry, seen 'em enough.

 There would appear to be some problem on Interstate 35, because when I asked Google Maps for directions home, first it told me there might be flooding in Dallas, then it gave me a route that takes me down into Fort Worth, around the northwest side, and out I-30 west to pick up 281. Later on, it changed the route to avoid I-35 altogether, sending me west at Ardmore, Oklahoma, and then south. I actually preferred that route anyway, and spent the day on just the kind of roads I like to travel. But I didn't sleep well last night, and by 4pm I was barely able to stay awake. I stopped at a convenience store for a break, thinking I'd close my eyes for a few minutes -- that usually solves the problem -- but instead I decided to just get a room for the night in the next town, Bowie, and that's where I am now, finishing up this blog post. I'm about five hours from home, and it looks now that I-35 is the fastest route to get there. But 281 is the most eco-friendly route, and only takes a few minutes longer, and it will take me by the Koffee Kup in Hico once again. Mmm, pie! That is worth the extra time!

Postscript:

I finished the Beatles audiobook on the drive from Bowie to Hico on Sunday. The very last "chapter" consisted of a single quote from some 1967 article by someone who was not a fan, to the effect that no one in their right mind could think that, in 50 years, the Beatles' music would be a regular part of life. I think an extra layer of irony is added by the fact that, in the next week, the Beatles will have yet another new Number 1 hit.