10/26/1999

"Every day is a winding road/I get a little bit closer to feeling fine." (Sheryl Crow)

It's now two days after returning from my two-week cross country trip. As I sit here eating stale Cap'n Crunch out of the box (no milk or normal food in the house), I am trying to think of all of the places that I've visited in the last two weeks, and my mind is fuzzing over. Maybe it's the sugar high from the Crunch.

Well, I made my annual pilgrimage to Los Angeles at the end of September, and had the usual grand time. I o.d.'d on Coffee Bean Ultimates and the Fish Grill, and saw about a million movies. Then I hooked up with a friend who had driven her car cross-country from NY and wanted to drive it back. We may not be Thelma and Louise, but we do know how to motor.

10/10/1999 "Life springs eternal/on a gaudy neon street" (Sheryl Crow) On Sunday, we drove to Las Vegas. I'm not much of a gambler, but I did enjoy the huge doses of glitz that Vegas had to offer. We went to the Star Trek exhibit in one of the hotels and took pictures with Quark and some Klingon guy. My favorite hotels to gape at were the Venetian and the Bellagio.

10/11/1999 "Try to catch the deluge in a paper cup" (Crowded House) On to the Hoover Dam. I thought I would be bored, but I enjoyed the whole dam thing immensely. On the way out to the Grand Canyon, we stopped by Ocean Spray's Cranberry World. Really.

10/12/1999 "What sight so lured him thro' he fields he knew As where earth's green stole into heaven's own hue..."(Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Far-Far-Away") What can I say about the Grand Canyon that hasn't already been said? That is one majestic hole in the ground. Pictures and descriptions don't do it justice. We didn't have the time to do more than hike around the rim, but I would definitely like to return and do some serious hiking and camping.

10/13/1999 "I'm yo' Huckleberry." (Doc Holliday) We continued our drive eastward toward New Mexico, and on a lark, we stopped at Tombstone, Arizona. I had just rented the movie (Tombstone) so I was pretty into it. We saw a live re-enactment of the famous OK Corral gunfight at the Helldorado, and the filming of a commercial for AARP. It was about 103 degrees. I loved it. We stayed overnight in El Paso, TX.

10/14/1999 "And my heaven will be a big heaven" (Peter Gabriel) On Thursday we drove through the Guadeloupe Mountains (beautiful) to Carlsbad, New Mexico. We hiked over two trails through the amazing Carlsbad Caverns. We learned more than we needed to know about speliotherms and stalagmites, stalactites and of course, bats. I thought the "Rock of Ages" looked like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. We drove on the rest of the day to Abilene, Texas (an armpit of a town) where we bunked for the night. We did see a pretty Texan sunset as we drove through miles and miles of absolutely nothing. Texas is really big and really flat, and the Texan sky is just huge. I counted the cars on the road that were pickups until it became easier to count the cars on the road that weren't pickups.

10/15/1999 "Shiny happy people" (REM) Dallas was a little bit too sparkling and new for my taste. I found myself constantly and unfairly comparing it to New York City, which is like comparing jalepenos to apples. I did like the West End section, but it has nothing on NY's Greenwich Village. We rode up Reunion Tower; ho-hum, yawn. The Dallas "historical" section consists of the Grassy Knoll area and a bunch of JFK assassination related sites. So much for city history. The Jewish community in North Dallas, near Addison, where we spent Shabbos, was nothing short of wonderful. As a New Yorker, it was kinda nice to get a taste of warm Suthern Jewish hospitality. I can do without tabasco sauce in my cholent though. Dallas, or at least the idea of Dallas, used to represent many things to me, and I'm glad I got it out of my system. I don't think I'll be going back.

10/17/1999 "I was born in a small town" (John Mellencamp) Sunday was our first yucky weather day. It poured most of the morning. We drove through Hope, Arkansas, which has the distinction of being the birthplace of Bill Clinton (a very meager distinction), and Little Rock, which was a very pretty and clean town, but was completely closed for Sunday. I've never been to a town that was just, well, closed. We stopped for a while to catch the end of a kosher food festival at a synagogue there (would you believe it?). We passed the night in West Memphis, Arkansas, a town which basically exists so people will have a cheap place to stay outside Memphis.

10/18/1999 "Put on my blue suede shoes/and I boarded the plane/Touched down in the land of the Delta Blues/in the middle of the pouring rain" (Marc Cohn) Memphis is a great city. I loved seeing Graceland and I got a little bit of a music education at Sun Studios. Graceland itself is like a giant snapshot of the 1970's, frozen in 3D. As an estate, it is not that incredible; I have friends with pools twice the size of the one there. But as a tribute to Elvis, it is phenomenal. I dropped lots of cash in the five (or was it six?) souvenir shops, on junk that I'm sure I will someday throw out, but what a challenge I had to search for the cheesiest souvenir. I don't think anyone in Brooklyn will be able to top my Elvis salt and pepper shakers, no sirree bob. We had dinner at "Cravings" (yum) and then headed onwards to Nashville.

10/19/1999 "All mimsy were the borogroves/and the mome raths outgrabe" (Lewis Carroll) The first thing that struck me about Nashville was how incredibly NICE and FRIENDLY the natives are. The second thing was that the drawls were so thick (much thicker than a Texan drawl is) that I could barely understand a word they were saying. I tried to buy a vintage Monte Warden album in a local music store, and it was like trying to negotiate in a foreign language. We took tours of the old and new Grand Ole Opry houses, which were a bit less exciting than I thought they would be. The Opryland Hotel was a real surprise; I never dreamed that it would be so huge or self-contained. The tremendous indoor gardens and greenhouses were edenic. (Is "edenic" a word? Hmm. Is now.) I tried on about a billion cowboy hats. We continued eastward and spent the night in Knoxville.

10/20/1999 "I don't recall when the summer turned to fall/or when the sky was turned to stone" (Peter Himmelman) Additional miserable weather day greeted us in Smoky Mountains National Park, which was a shame, because it is truly a beautiful place. The fall foliage was outstandingly rich. I've driven through New England in autumn, but the colors of these leaves were really striking. On one of our hikes, I even did a little leaf collecting, which I haven't done since, oh, fourth grade. On the way to the park, we drove through Gatlinsburg and Pigeon Forge, which seem to exist solely to be tourist traps. I have never seen an entire town composed of souvenir shops and hotels before…how many shot glasses can a person buy? We did stumble upon a real country crafts fair. I love that stuff. Our next stop was Atlanta, and I'd like to say that we drove straight there, but instead, we got on a horrible roller coaster of a road, Route 129/19, which was miles and miles of a curly noodle of a highway through poorly lit hick towns. It was miserable and scary. This was our first really wrong turn, and the horrible weather didn't help any. I was happy to finally make it to Atlanta.

10/21-22/1999 "Some sweet day when blossoms fall And all the world's a song I'll go back to Georgia"( Hoagy Carmichael) We did real touristy stuff in Atlanta. We took the formal studio tour of CNN, which was highly worthwhile, and got tickets to be on CNN's Talkback Live show on Friday. We toured the World of Coca Cola, where we got a little ambitious in their tasting room (everything was kosher). My favorite was the Barq's Red Cream Soda. We did overdo it though, and by the time we got into the international sodas, I was quite nauseous. We headed over to the Martin Luther King gravesite and museum, which was surprisingly empty. The museum is pretty close to the baseball stadium, but we didn't see the lines of people that were supposedly camping out to get World Series tickets for that Saturday night. On Thursday afternoon, we began to get a little concerned about where we were going to spend Shabbos. We stopped into the Judaica store in Toco Hills to ask about a kosher B & B that we had heard about, and instead, we got personal invitations for Shabbos. The Atlanta Jewish community is truly wonderful, and we got even more of a taste of Suthern Jewish hospitality. No tabasco in the cholent, but we did have ribs on Friday night, which made for a great Shabbos meal, and chocolate chip challah the next day for lunch.

10/23-24/1999 "Life's like a road that you travel on/When there's one day here and the next day gone" (Tom Cochrane) Almost all of Sunday and Monday were spent driving through Richmond, VA and up I-95 on the East Coast so that we could be back to New York by Monday afternoon. We stopped in North Carolina briefly to photograph the World's Largest Chair, but otherwise the crawl up was uneventful.

All in all, our mishaps included getting just one parking ticket, no speeding tickets (THAT was a miracle), and locking ourselves out of the car in the Grand Canyon. I have learned that Texas is big, that I hate carrying a cellular phone, and that every exit on every highway in the United States of America has at least two Waffle Houses. There is some intangible quality about doing The Roadtrip that makes me feel very young and very strong. The USA is awesome and beautiful and weird and as heterogeneous as it can be; I highly recommend driving across it if you have the time. Bring maps and a laptop and pretzels and a warm sweatshirt and good music and of course, sunscreen.

It's always nice to come home. Yes, even to Brooklyn.

-sq