Pandemic Wandering, Day 4

Okay! So. Off to wander. My first stop, after breakfast, was at Cummins Falls State Park, about an hour and a half out of Nashville. In order to get to the Falls themselves, and the swimmin' hole, you have to hike through The Gorge. And for that, you need a permit, $6.57. And there are a limited number of such permits given out each day. And today's permits were already sold out.

Well, that's okay, I guess; I didn't so much want to go swimming as to just see the falls. They are reportedly among the prettiest falls in the state. So there's an overlook that you can hike to without a permit, so I did that.

It's about a half mile on a mostly easy trail; a few steep spots but not bad. Very few people along the way. When I got to the overlook, there was a man and his grandson (or granddaughter; it was kind of hard to tell) in the little wedge-shaped area from which you can actually see the falls. The kid was crying because (s)he wanted to go down to the falls. You know that particularly irksome whiney cry that kids have when they're not really crying but just trying to make you think they're crying? First bad thing of the day, since I don't count not being able to get a permit. I really felt sorry for the grandfather, because you know that if he'd known to get a permit on line, he would have, and now he was defeated and diminished as a grandfather for his lack of tech savvy. I often feel defeated like that myself, though seldom diminished, and certainly never as a grandfather.

So they finally leave and I get into the wedge and drag out my big ol' digital SLR camera, the one that I spent all day yesterday taking pictures of cars with. Add a neutral-density filter to the front of the lens and aim for the falls. Nothing happens. Fuss with various settings, still nothing. Finally notice that the low battery warning is flashing. Should still have had enough juice for pictures without flash, but I drag out the other battery and change it. By now I am surrounded by a small crowd of people who have never heard of Social Distancing, and once again I am the only person with a mask. I came this close to pulling my mask down and faking a coughing fit in their direction, just to make a point.

Anyway, I got my picture.

After hiking back to the car, I started off for the New Counties, and finally got to some wonderfully challenging back roads. Twenty-mile-per-hour curves (feel those G's!), up one side of a ridge and down the other, then immediately onto another ridge. It was great. Hit a little rain that lasted about an hour, but still a nice drive. Got into Kentucky. Wasted about an hour trying to locate something called the Creelsboro Arch, also known locally as the Rock House. Found Creelsboro with no trouble, right where it was supposed to be. Followed the directions I had: one mile down this road, two miles down that road, then 6 miles down the other road. No arch. No one around to ask. Consulted a different web site, which put the arch about 4 miles further down the last road, so went there. Still no arch. Consulted another web site, which gave me the GPS co-ordinates for the arch. Plugged that in, and it put the arch about 12 miles in the opposite direction as the crow flies ... on the other side of a miles-long lake. Okay, gave up on finding the Creelsboro Arch, which wasn't all that tempting a formation anyway, it was just something to see that was supposedly along the way. So instead I continued on to my next planned stop, the West Pinnacle of Berea.

Berea College, in Berea, Kentucky, has a Forestry School that owns a forest a few miles east of the town. The forest includes half a dozen mountains and is open to the public for hiking from dawn to dusk, almost every day. I got to the huge parking area around 4pm and started up the trail. It was an easy half-mile walk to a point where there's a map of the trails and some information about the forest, including the sign that a solo hiker like me most likes to see:

Hikers Welcome

I decided to risk it. I was actually pretty comfortable about it, because there were lots and lots of people on the trail, going in both directions. (And again, only one wearing a mask: me.) After about three quarters of a mile of fairly steeply rising trail, I came to another junction. One trail went to the right, one went straight ahead, and the West Pinnacle trail went off to the left.

It started off as three-quarters of a mile of perfectly level track, absolutely deserted. I saw not a single person on the West Pinnacle trail, and except for the bear issue, I didn't mind that at all. I could stop to listen to the sounds of the forest: a woodpecker somewhere down the hill; an owl hooting not too far up the hill. Birds chirping all over, no wind to disturb the trees and mask their sound. Then the trail switched to a quarter-mile of nearly vertical track, and at one point I think I missed the trail, but found it again a little farther along. (Maybe I had chosen a path that used to be the trail?) I arrived pretty exhausted at the end, which has a pile of limestone that I couldn't find a way to climb, but circumnavigated twice. Took some pictures and started back, losing the trail again, then finding it again. There are several places where there seem to be several routes, and for all I know they all go to the same places, but it was disconcerting to think I might be sort of lost.

By the time I got back to the car it was getting on towards evening. I checked on line to see if I could locate lodging in any of the upcoming towns I was heading toward, but it seems the largest town I could expect to see in the next couple of hours was Beattyville, population 1206 and no motel. So I decided to stay in Berea. And so I didn't make it as far as Ohio today, as I'd thought I might. Gosh darn it.

(On the bright side, my room tonight is only costing me $43, including tax, and it's definitely good enough.)

And, once again, here's another link to the pictures from this trip.

Pandemic Wandering, Day 3

Saturday, in Nashville

The real reason I made this trip was to go to Lane's Motor Museum. I won't rehash the saga of my last trip to Nashville to see it; anyone who knows me has already heard it twice, even if they don't remember it. Today, though, I got there.

I also got to the Parthenon, the only other Major Sight Worth Seeing in Nashville (in my estimation). It did not disappoint.

pardon their landscaping dust

In 1896, Tennessee had its centennial as a state. A year later (money being scarce, it took a while to get enough together) they put on a celebration, a sort of World's Fair, and as part of that, they built a replica of the Parthenon as it would have looked before the ravages of war and time had their effect. It was meant to be temporary, and was built out of cardboard and glue. When the time came to tear it down (as they did with all the other buildings of the Centennial Celebration), the city of Nashville refused to let that happen. The building had wormed its way into the civic heart. So instead of tearing it down, they rebuilt it, this time out of concrete cleverly formulated to mimic the golden colour of the original. It's used as an art museum.

As a building, it's a glory. It doesn't have the dramatic setting of the original, up on its hill, but it has all the majesty. It is an excellent demonstration of what was so great about ancient Greek architecture. As an art museum, it's less impressive. There's a modest collection, mostly of landscapes donated by some rich guy a century ago, and it hosts other small travelling exhibits; small, because there's only one room on the one floor to exhibit in. The exhibition on show today was a particularly good example of how horribly bad modern art can be when an art-school graduate gets a bit of a name in toney art circles.

There is, though, a second floor, and when you ascend the stairs to it, you are astounded. It's a single large high-ceilinged room, a re-creation of the Temple of Athena as it would have been 2500 years ago in Athens, right down to the gaudy gigantic gilded statue of Athena. It is magnificent.

The statue of Nike in Athena's hand is 6'4" tall

That took up a much bigger chunk of my morning than I had anticipated.

Then came the Lane Motor Museum, the thing that drew me back to Nashville in the first place. I go to a lot of car museums. I love looking at the stylings of cars and how they've changed over the decades. The earliest cars were unadorned machines, but it didn't take long for appearances to become important in selling those machines, and by 1920, automotive design had developed into a Thing. Back then, many cars were sold as chassis and motor, and the purchaser hired a coachwork company to put a body on it. Manufacturers noticed, and soon they were offering bodies that, they hoped, would attract buyers to their cars. By the end of the Great Depression and the start of World War II, coachbuilders were either out of business or subsumed into manufacturing companies. (Think "Body by Fisher.") Very few have survived independently to the current era.

No, not a Thunderbird;
an Audi

And styling tastes vary greatly from company to company, and from country to country. That's why this particular museum was such a draw for me: it specialises in exhibiting European cars. (Others I've seen like that are the Tampa Automobile Museum and the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard, California.) Besides getting to see the different paths that foreign designers took, I also enjoy seeing the convergences between their tastes and American stylists' tastes. Right now, for example, you can look at any new car lot and see how American automotive designs have taken cues from designers in Germany and Japan, Italy and England; before, designers in those places took cues from Detroit.

And, of course, some of those foreign designs look just a little wacky to me.

1951 Hoffman (Germany)

1958 Tatra (Czechoslovakia)

1950 Lloyd (Germany)
vinyl skin over plywood

1991 Nissan (Japan)

As do some of the American designs I've seen.

1950 Martin Stationette (USA)

Those are fun to look at, but it's really for the exemplars of beauty that I go to car museums, the marriage of elegance and technological innovation. Foreign car stylists solve those marital problems in different ways from their American counterparts, and I like seeing how they do it.

And here, once again, is a link to the photo album for this trip. I apologise for the quality of the 150 or so car pictures I took today, but the building housing the collection has lots of windows and so lots of glare. You can take some comfort in knowing that I've deleted the worst of them.

Tomorrow, I head off to start counting counties, in eastern Tennessee and Kentucky; and I may even get to Ohio, but I doubt it.

2020 Pandemic Wandering, Day 2

Friday, June 12, Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee

The actual trace, in 2008

So I drove the entire length of the Natchez Trace Parkway. You may not know this -- I only figured it out the first time I was on the Parkway -- but the Natchez Trace Parkway and the Natchez Trace are two very different things. The Natchez Trace is the web of buffalo migratory paths and the footpaths Native Americans developed, first to follow the buffalo, and then in their trading with other tribes through what is now Mississippi; it was later improved as a Post Road in the early 19th Century, but the development of the steam-powered river boat put an end to that use.

The Parkway is just a well-maintained country road that roughly parallels the Trace, built originally as a back-to-work project of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. There are few major towns along it -- only Jackson and Tupelo, Mississippi and Florence, Alabama -- and commercial traffic is prohibited. In the first 100 miles I drove out of Natchez, I saw another car about every nine miles. Things picked up after that, as I approached Jackson. The road is two lanes the entire length of 444 miles, and the speed limit is 50 almost the whole way. (In places it drops to 40.) It's a pleasant drive, with almost no challenge to it, and very little drama.


Putting two and two together, when planning the drive I figured nine hours, plus stops. Google Maps confirmed that estimate, giving me a time of eight and a half hours. I must've made a lot more stops than I thought, as it took me from 7:30 in the morning until 7:30 at night to make the drive. At the outset, I did make a number of stops: there are a lot of signs along the route that say things like "Historical Site, 1/2 mile," but I quickly realized they were all of the "Something used to be here" variety, so I bypassed them when I figured that out. (There are also a lot of places where you can hike portions of the actual Trace; those are of the "Come

Come Experience Misery

Experience Pre-Industrial Misery" sort, and I chose to pass on the offer.) I made a stop for a meagre lunch at Kosciusko, Mississippi (a lousy convenience-store fish sandwich) where I met another couple from San Antonio (but they live waaaay out in Ultra-Loopland, so it's not like we would ever get together). They were cruising the Parkway on a tricycle, so we had that to talk about, plus the wife is from France, so there was that.

Jackson Falls

I may have been able to make the drive on a single tank of gas, but decided that it would be cutting it uncomfortably close, so I did get off and drive 3 miles down another highway (and back) for gas in Alabama. And once I got to Tennessee there were a couple of waterfalls to check out: the first was a short walk for not much to see; the second, Jackson Falls, was a pretty steep climb down and an equally steep climb back up, but at least the falls were worth the effort. Plus I met a transplanted New Orleanian, a nice guy who invited me to join him and another Orleanian living in Nashville for dinner Saturday night. (I didn't go. I'm writing this blog instead.)

Meanwhile, I've learned two new things. Well, okay, one new thing, plus I've had one thing I already knew confirmed.

The new thing is that the hair on the top of my head has thinned to the point where I now get sunburned driving with the top down. I wear a visor (and lots of suntan lotion) when I travel, and it's never been a problem before. Now, it is, so I will have to start a search for a hat or cap that doesn't get sucked off when the car is in motion. That could be a problem, with the shape of my head. (Maybe I could get a bill cap and cut out the back part of the crown...?)

The thing I've had confirmed is that I prefer being cheap. The hotels I chose in Natchez and Nashville are the type that certain friends who've travelled with me in the past would have preferred. Not the Four Seasons by any stretch, but nicer than I usually go for; 3-star places. Since rates are low just now, what with the corona virus keeping people home, I decided to go with things my friends would prefer. It ain't me, though. I paid $87 plus tax for a room in Natchez; I could have gotten one that would have been good enough for me for less than $60. I miss the thirty bucks. This room in Nashville is about the same cost, but on top of that, there's a parking charge of $20/night that really gripes my ass. (I thought I specified "free parking" when I searched for the room on Expedia or whatever site I booked through. I may be wrong. In any case, I won't make that mistake again.) I could have gotten a perfectly decent room with free parking at a La Quinta -- several in town -- and saved more than $80.

So from now on, two stars is enough for me when I'm travelling alone. Hell, one is sufficient in most places, but I find those often aren't much cheaper than 2-star motels. (Of course, I end up in a lot of 1-star or no-star motels, because that's all a lot of small towns offer.) All I want is a conveniently-located clean room with free parking and internet (another tick mark against the place in Natchez).

And, again, here's a link to the picture album for this trip.

2020 Pandemic Wandering, Day One

I wrote this Thursday night, but couldn't publish it then because the Internet at the fancy-schmancy hotel I used was not acceptably secure. Sorry for the delay.
 
First, a rant:

We are in the middle of a serious pandemic, which surely everyone in the country knows. Unfortunately, people seem to not understand the most basic fact about this pandemic disease, which is that is spreads from one person to another through the air we breathe.

Travelling alone in a car, I feel pretty safe from infection. Stopping at a gas station seems safe enough, as I can generally do my business there entirely away from other people. Even when I go into a convenience store (because of course the card reader at the pump wasn’t working) the clerk is behind a plexiglas shield. OK, safe enough there. But when I went to a Subway shop for lunch, I saw 8 people in line, none of them wearing a mask. Even worse, the three “sandwich artists” behind the counter weren’t wearing masks. 

Those are the people who, more than anyone else, should wear masks. The are the primary vectors for the disease. They are potentially exposed to the virus by every single person who steps up to place an order, and they will pass that exposure along to every subsequent person they talk to. 

I went somewhere else for lunch. Subway sandwiches are pretty good, and I like knowing what I’m getting, nutritionally speaking, but they are not literally to die for.

OK, so that’s off my chest now.

DAY 1: Thursday, June 11, San Antonio to Natchez

The drive over was uneventful. Top down all the way, and for those who are homebound in this health emergency, I can report that intercity traffic along I-10 is only slightly less than in normal times. Certainly every over-the-road truck is out there, and traffic between Katy and Houston was heavy enough that I opted to take the Katy Tollway, where mine was one of three cars I saw using it before the tollway ended at Loop 610. And for those who know me, the fact that I was willing to pay the extra dollar to use the tollway along there should be proof enough that traffic in the mainlanes was heavy.

I got to my hotel in Natchez about 6pm. There was no one at the desk, so while I waited for the clerk to return I made some calculations and decided that I could grab a quick dinner and get to Windsor Ruins in time to take some sunset pictures there. I had planned to stop there in the morning — it’s just a few miles off the Natchez Trace Parkway, and about 40 miles from my hotel. 

So I drove up there. A nice drive: once I passed the city’s airport, there was almost no traffic at all and the sun was low enough in the sky to the west that it produced no glare and little heat. I got to the ruins, down a pleasant country lane, and was the only person there.

Windsor Ruins

Windsor Ruins are the remains of a huge plantation mansion built just before the Civil War. It survived that cataslysm largely unscathed, only to burn down in a fire 25 years later. All that remains is the Corinthian collonade that surrounded the house. I was expecting it to be as mystically eerie as the reconstructed collonade from the US Capitol’s porch that stands in the National Arboretum in Wasshington DC (see below), but because these ruins are somewhat unstable, they are surrounded by a six-foot-high chain-link fence, so you cannot walk among the columns; and the fence is high enough that, for most of its circumference, it’s very hard for even a tall person to get a good picture. I could just get my lens over the top rail if I stood on tiptoe, and not always then. (There’s also a place in back where some frustrated tourist or uncaring teenager has cut the fence open.) Still, I think I got some decent pictures (including, I hope, a couple of nice shots with the car in them. Sadly, I won’t know until tomorrow, because this fancy hotel I chose to stay in (because rates are cheap right now, what with the pandemic) has an unsecured wireless internet with an unrecognised certificate, and so Firefox, my browser of choice, will not allow me to connect to it. So I will have to wait until tomorrow to upload my pictures and have a look at them, at which time I will cut and paste this narrative from my notepad to my blog.

The collonade at the Nat'l Arboretum, in DC

 








And here's a link to the pictures from this trip.