On the End of the Road

Which, admittedly, happened ages ago, but I've been lazy busy.

 Day 13 (Dallas, Little Rock, Memphis (technically Southaven, MS)):

We got up around 11:00, drove to Little Rock, Arkansas, where we some more of my traveling companion's relatives.

Afterward, we pushed on to Memphis, then dipped a bit into Mississippi to South Haven, where we promptly checked into our hotel and did nothing else of interest except catch up on Game of Thrones and Wakfu.  Now we get to wait for new episodes.  Hooray?

 

Day 14 (Memphis):   

We visited the Stax Museum in Memphis, the old home of Stax Records and a huge landmark in the history of American music.  However, as we hit the museum, I got an important email, and raced through the museum to deal with it.  For about two hours, I made frantic calls, sent emails, and generally creeped around in the lobby of the Stax Museum while my comrade in road-tripping perused the collection.

At 4:00pm, my traveling companion walked out of the museum I had finished in 10 minutes.  I was playing Angry Birds, having exhausted all productive things to do.

Went back to the hotel, rested for a bit.

We visited a friend of my traveling companion, with whom we talked shop (40k, WoW, D&D, etc) and visited a BBQ place where they served Barbecue Chicken Nachos (which are about as delicious as they sound).

We left his house for the famous Beale St around 9:30, hoping to see some live music.  There was some kind of motorcycle convention going on, and Beale St was hopping.  We saw some great live music, including a bit by “The Plantation All-Stars.”  We also saw a guy playing electric guitar with his tongue.  That was pretty impressive.

 

Day 15 (Memphis, St. Louis, Joliet):   

It's pretty obvious given the scale of the map, but this was a BIG driving day for us (and not much else).  We got up around 10:00, out of the room and on the road to St Louis by 11(ish).  Okay, probably more like 12:00ish.

We stopped in St. Louis around 4 to see the Gateway Arch, which is one of the more interesting features of the city.  It was rather huge, even by the standards of things we’ve seen on this trip.

We checked out the (free) museum underneath, but decided not to ride to the top, since it would take too long to get up and back.

We then departed for Chicago, stopping in Joliet (about an hour outside of the city) because we figured that it would be cheaper.  After being recommended a local motel by a Best Western attendant (to her credit, she was happy to suggest places that actually fell within our traveling budget).

Day 16 (Chicago):  

Woke up early-ish, but kept hitting snooze.

We got to the Chicago Art Institute at around 12:00pm, and then accidentally and promptly split up.

I lingered for ages in the Ancient Art wing, which had a lot of amazing stuff from European and Asian countries.

Items of interest:

Some badass Katars.

One of many awesome Tomb Guardian statues:

An awesome lock.

An interesting exhibit on cross-cultural comparisons of Woodblock printing (Japanese and European religious works).

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The massive Impressionist wing, mostly (for me) to see that one Seurat painting.  You know the one.  With the dots.  And the people.
(It's this one)

 A “Medieval Art/Arms and Armor” exhibit, which was good, but I was a bit let down by the size of the exhibit, especially as compared to the rooms upon rooms upon rooms of French Impressionism.

Some interesting modern and less interesting post-modern stuff.

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Headed over to the giant bean, also called the Cloud Gate, in Millenium Park.  During our failed efforts to find the giant, reflective metal bean, we found a giant fountain,

Some cool gardens, and some other cool crap, before finally Googling the massive chrome legume:

It made for some weird photos.

We also discovered that there is a thriving beach in Chicago, at least when the weather is nice, which we got a great view of while plowing through traffic to visit Wrigley Field for exactly long enough to snap this photo from the road.

After the long day of sightseeing, we stopped by our hotel to check in and relax a bit, then headed in to Second City, an improve club.

The show was quite good.  They did an excellent job getting some seeds from the audience at the beginning (faking technical difficulties to converse with a few audience members, planting a cast member in the audience at the start, googling people mid-show), and then did perhaps an even better job working those tidbits in later.  Running themes in the show included fate, Barack Obama, and bestiality.

We got back to the hotel around 2:00pm, went to sleep.

Day 17 (Chicago, Cleveland):

I got up “early” (9:00am) to do a load of laundry, because I was about out of socks.

We left the hotel around noon to visit Oak Park, which contains Frank Lloyd Wright’s house and studio. This was also of particular interest to me, because my dad grew up in this area, and so I was able to see the street he lived on as a kid, as well as his high school. The local wrestling team was doing a shirtless car wash.  Good thinking, actually.  I’m surprised you don’t see more of those.  We didn't get any pictures, though.

Afterwards, we left Chicago for Cleveland (not Cleaveland, apparently, which is what happens when you let fighters with greataxes take greatcleave).

Also, a sign.

We decided not to f*ck with the "fines and penalties orc."  At least not without a bigger party.

We found a Motel 6 about an hour outside of the city, and that's where we stayed.  That strategy worked pretty well for us in general, actually, come to think.

 

Day 18 (Cleveland, Scenic Lakeside Driving, Niagra Falls):

We woke up a bit later than planned (10:00ish), cleaned up, and headed to the only particularly interesting thing in Cleveland: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The Hall of Fame is broken down into three sections.  The first a museum, containing innumerable historical artifacts from the roots of rock and roll to modern pieces, including a metric asston of guitars and (most interesting to me, at least) a lot of original manuscripts of song lyrics, often with edits left in.  It’s really cool to see the writer’s thought processes, and while the costumes and such are neat, these tiny little scraps of what was going on in the writer’s head as it went on are fascinating to the English major in me.

The museum is immense.  We were in there from 12:00pm (right after scarfing down some hotdogs from a street vendor) until about 4:30pm.

In contrast, the Hall of Fame itself is actually quite small.  A theatre looping a montage of performances, plus a small hallway with the names engraved in glass and backlit.  Eric Clapton is in there three times, and interestingly, they do not use the same signature for each separate entry.  Then they have a small exhibit on all of the inductees from the most recent year (including Alice Cooper, Neil Diamond, and some other people with whom I was vaguely familiar and a few I wasn’t).

The last part is a rotating exhibit, currently on the Women of Rock, which goes from Aretha Franklin to Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.  So yes, I got to see Swift’s first guitar and Gaga’s outfit from Poker Face (or one of them, anyway).  I guess my sisters will be jealous or something.

After finishing up the museum (and another hotdog – absorbing culture makes me hungry, I guess), we hit the road, hopping on good old I-90, but then cutting over to Ohio 5 to drive alongside Lake Eyrie(sp) for a while. 

Eventually, we got sick of looking at lakeside houses (there were a few nice views, too) cut back to 90 to complete the drive to Niagra (passing through Buffalo on the way).

We got in to Niagra Falls around 10, just in time to see the Falls (which are lit up at night) and a Fireworks show they have every Sunday and Tuesday.

After the fireworks, we grabbed some cheap and slightly overcooked Chinese food from the “Gateway to the Falls” food court, and then went motel-shopping (read: driving around lost until we found a cheap place to stay).

We lucked out, though, and found a place pretty quickly.

Day 19 (Niagra Falls, Boston):   

 

We started our day fairly early (for us), and drove down to a casino with free parking before heading on to see to the falls, first looking from the American side, then the Canadian side, then the under-side (the tour beneath the falls).  We passed on the boat tour, Maid of the Mists – the view from right next to the falls on the ground was good enough.

The falls are really pretty spectacular.  For me, at least, they're not as awe-inspiring as the Grand Canyon or as disorientingly beautiful as Monument Valley, but they're still very impressive.  Especially the view from below, which is hard to capture on film without a waterproof camera (and even then, much of the experience is lost because it is wrapped up in the sound and touch).

When we finished up at the falls, we got on the road back to Boston.  

A few hours and some caffeine later, after almost three weeks on the road, we finally got home!

-Stormshrug

*Sensing a pattern?

P.S.: Non-"Boring Real Life" posts coming at some point in the future.  Probably.

On Playing Catch-Up

(Or: the part of the trip for which I have few photos):

Days 10-12 (San Antonio, Dallas)

Map:

Day 10:

Drove from Carlsbad to San Antonio.  I was starting to feel moderately better at this point, but it was a long drive.  We got in relatively late, hopped from motel to motel  price-comparing until we found a place for 45 with one bed and AC.  The bulletproof glass behind which the attendant was seated didn’t inspire confidence, nor did the “NO HOURLY RATES” sign, but you take what you can get, and it seemed far enough from the tougher parts of town we had driven through.  We then headed back to the urban center of San Antonio, and went to a Pat O’Brien’s, a bar based on a New Orleans speakeasy built by an Irishman, and later copied in San Antonio. 

The river running through the city is interesting – it’s very isolated from the rest of the city, because it’s on a lower level (down by the river).  The food was decent, but we were both very tired at this point.  We headed back to the motel, watched a few episodes of Wakfu, and then went to sleep.

Day 11:

We woke up as early as we could (10:30am), and went to the Alamo, to satisfy my history major traveling partner’s desire to see historically important places where lots of people killed each other.

The site was actually quite well preserved, and had a lot of historical artifacts.  The barracks had been converted into a museum, and we were able to see that, but the church itself had a line longer than the whole park to get in, and so we decided to make our way.

After grabbing lunch at a place called Iron Cactus down on the river, we started our drive to Dallas.  The riverside area was (mercifully) less crowded at noon than it had been the night before.

Also saw this as we exited the city.  Sadly (or perhaps, thankfully) it was not open at noon.

Several dozen road games later, we got in, and met up with my traveling partner’s cousins, who were kind enough to put us up for the next two nights.  We hit up a(nother) Mexican restaurant, then bar, and I tried some sangria, which was mediocre, and then played Apples to Apples while one cousin’s fiancé got increasingly drunk and dug himself deeper and deeper into a hole of pre-marital couch-exiling.

After going up to the roof for a while, we headed back and hit the sack for the night.

Day 12:

Got up around 11:30, grabbed some lunch at a place called Ozona, and then watched some stand-up comedy and movies.  Ordered pizza.  Watched more movies.  Did nothing I couldn't have done elsewhere, but it was nice to relax and helped me get over my cold.

-Stormshrug

On the Bat Cave

Day 9 (Carlsbad Caverns)

At the time I wrote this entry, I was suffering from the worst of my cold.  As such, it is a bit more terse (as in, "what is a Subject?") than my usual writing style, but I decided to preserve it for the sake of posterity:

Slept miserably, due to the worsening sore throat.  Walked to the nearby convenience store at 3:00am, but only encountered a bemused police officer filling up his gas tank, who told me it opened at 5.  Went back to the room, watched anime and read comics until 5:30, when tiredness finally overtook the pain in my throat. 

Slept until 9.  Took shower, felt tolerably more human.

We left the Stagecoach Inn in Carlsbad and headed to Carlsbad Caverns around 11.  We explored the caverns for the next two hours.  The walk down was about a mile and a quarter, though you only descend 800 ft under the surface of the earth.  I perked up as we went, drugs helping to make up for the part of my miserable condition caused by the cold, though not by the lack of sleep.  Fortunately, though the hike was advertised as being “strenuous,” it was paved the whole way down, with guardrails and everything.

 

These caverns are MASSIVE.  It’s hard to explain unless you’re inside, but as my travelling partner put it, he expected to run across a treasure room at any point during our visit.  I, for one, was expecting something more akin to a horde of orcs.  They’d certainly fit, and they could play multiple simultaneous games of football inside to boot.

They’re also filled with a multitude of amazing geological formations.

We stopped at the café in the cavern for lunch, and then did the other half of the self-guided cavern tour before returning in the elevator, which hit the surface in just barely enough time for the attendant to bring a joke to a close with an awful “eleVader” pun.

We then drove back to the hotel and I took a badly-needed nap (the drugs, the hike, and the food synergizing rather nicely for once).  We grabbed dinner on the way back out to the caverns, where we planned to watch the bats depart the cavern at dusk.  You're not allowed to photograph the bats in flight (the subsonic camera noises bother them, apparently), but here's the stage just before showtime:

Worryingly, when we arrived at the cavern mouth, the ranger on duty (“Rick,” or so he claimed) said that it was fairly likely there would be no bats that night.  The lack of rain for the last few months meant no plant growth, which meant no insects, which mean that the migratory Mexican Freetailed Bats who frequent the caves during the summer might have gotten with the migratory part a bit early in search of better food supplies.  The lack of bats as the sun dipped below the horizon almost lead me to premature disappointment.  But then the bat-signal went off (no, regrettably, it was just a static-y buzz, not a giant bat-emblem blazing in the sky)!  Ranger Rick warned us that it might be a false positive.

As we confirmed a few minutes later, however, there were some bats in the cave, and although it was not the overwhelming 400,000 that leave the cave each night during the height of summer, there were still a great many exuberant scraps of shadow that came flitting out of the cave’s mouth at dusk.  We watched the bats until the light went out, and then made our way back to the hotel.

-Stormshrug

On Grays

Day 8 (May 26):  Santa Fe/Tent Rocks/Roswell/Carlsbad

Map for the Day:

Woke up with sore throat.  Sh*t.

Went to Trader Joe’s but ended up at Albertson’s.  Bought wine and card.  Sort of anti-climatic after all the work we did the day before.

Visited Tent Rocks, a very odd volcanic rock formation about 45 minutes from Santa Fe.  Very much worth the visit, and a nice hike to boot.

Sore throat got worse.  Sh*t.

Started our drive:

Drove to Roswell.  Nothing there, really, but we got a picture of the UFO research museum, just for fun.  There were a ton of hotels, though, so clearly it gets busy occasionally.

Sore throat got worse.  Sh*t.

Got to Carlsbad.  Checked into cheap motel in slightly sketchy part of town.  Blagged for several hours, watched some Wakfu.

Sore throat got worse.  Sh*t.

Went to sleep.  Didn't really sleep, but unfortunately, the convenience store that we had used earlier was closed, and so I couldn't get any drugs to ameliorate the problem.  Used anime as a substitute, but with limited effect due to the crappy wireless making streaming very difficult.

-Stormshrug

On the Dry Country

Day 7 (May 25): Santa Fe, Valles Caldera

Since we were on extremely comfortable beds, and my traveling partner was still sick, we slept a bit late, and then headed to meet our host at his studio-gallery.  From there, he took us on a whirlwind tour of the best art galleries in Santa Fe – we saw some amazing pottery, leatherwork, paintings, a great deal of Native American (mostly Navajo) artwork (jewelry, beadwork, metalwork, painting, ceramics, sand-painting) and a Chuck Jones (of Looney Toons) gallery.  Although we were already looking for a bottle of wine for our hosts, after their hospitality and the amazing tour, we came to the determination that we would need to get a NICE bottle of wine for our hosts.  Thus began a fruitless search.

 

We had lunch at a great local Mexican place (not pictured), where their specialty was a fried-dough pocket called a Sopapilla (filled with either meat or honey/cinnamon sugar).

Failed to find a wine shop in town.

We visited the Loretto Chapel, and I dropped 3 dollars to see its famous unsupported spiral staircase – an  impressive work of artifice and innovation.  It also has a story attached to it, about the mysterious carpenter who supposedly appeared to create it after the prayers of the local nuns, and vanished without being paid for his work.  The place is mostly a tourist trap at the moment, but it's still interesting.

Failed to find a wine shop on our second pass through town.

We then visited a relative of my traveling partner, a veteran of World War II who was involved in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, and who lives in the area with his wife.  He told us stories about his wartime experiences, and his wife shared a great deal of information about her collection of Native American artwork (particularly from one famous, now deceased potter, whose photo was on her mantle and had apparently presented her work to several presidents, including Eisenhower).

Failed to find a wine shop on our third pass through down.

After this meeting, we drove up to Valles Caldera, and briefly argued over whether or not a space this huge COULD BE the Caldera.  A road sign finally swung the vote at 2:1 in favor of it being the Caldera.  Imagine this whole space just exploding one day.  All 17-odd miles of it.  Actually, you should probably try not to imagine it.

Failed to find a wine shop on the way back to the house.  Found some good views, though.

Headed out for a late dinner, and in search of a wine shop in the hopes of showing our most generous hosts a small token of our gratitude.

Had dinner at a place called “Cowgirl” – the barbecue beef sandwich was excellent, as was the bread pudding.  My traveling partner’s Yak Burger was undercooked, but apparently pretty tasty otherwise.

Drove to a nearby Trader Joe's, which had wine.  Unfortunately, the flaw in our plan was that it was 10:30pm.  We vowed to return the next morning.

-Stormshrug