Schedule:
In some ways this is a repeat of a 1997 trip we took, also to San Antonio for the World Science Fiction Convention. We are even leaving on the same date: August 16. But we are taking a slightly different route and hope to see different places.
This is also a much shorter log. I am not really sure why, though it may be partly that I am more tired at night than I was twenty years ago, and also that with netbooks, WiFi, and so on, there is more to do in the evenings. But it is also a feeling that there is not as much audience for my log as there used to be. People at work used to be interested, but we are retired. People on rec.travel used to be interested, but Usenet has withered, and there is so much competition on the Internet these days that no one log gets much attention.
Another reason may be that the last time we did a trip through the South we took 37 days, while this time is only 26 days.
[I hope to remember to move these notes to the end.]
On this trip, we took 2 GPSs as well as maps, and there were times we needed all of them. Our primary GPS:
The irony--or maybe the reason that one works when the other fails--is that we get updates for our primary, but not the seconday, whose maps are now probably five years old.
Packing: I have talked about packing before. Clearly we take a lot of electronics. But when we are in a car, we (well, I) tend to overpack. In this case, it was three-fold. First, I probably packed more food than was necessary, but I figured it was easier to pack all the open dried fruit, nuts, and crackers than to repack some into containers. We may yet eat this stuff, especially at the convention, where finding time for meals (and reasonably priced breakfasts) nearby may be problematic.
Second, I probably packed too many books. All the AAA guides were useful, but the three Texas/San Antonio history books and the two heavy Smithsonian Guides did not get much use. The Roadside History of Texas had to come, however. The "Roadside History Guides for the southwest states are a lot of fun, the "Geology" ones a bit less so.
And I also mis-judged clothing. I figured a skirt would be nice for dinner, but we usually go directly to dinner from sightseeing (or eat at lunchtime), the skirt looks bad with walking shoes, and walking shoes are a necessity for sightseeing. So I hardly wear the skirt at all--only on driving days.
Driving through Delaware we took the not-so-secret bypass around the infamous Delaware Turnpike toll plaza, Delaware charges $4 for a very short stretch of road, leading people to drive around it. If we could figure out how to drive around the bridge, we would do that too. Maybe back in the 1970s C. W. McCall could sing:
Well, we laid a strip for the Jersey shore
And prepared to cross the line
I could see the bridge was lined with bears
But I didn't have a dog-goned dime.
I says, "Big Ben, this here's the Rubber Duck.
We ain't a-gonna pay no toll."
Se we crashed the gate doing ninety-eight.
I says, "Let them truckers roll, 10-4."
The bridge had to be the Delaware Memorial Bridge, because that was the only bridge left that charged a dime toll then. (It's $4 now.)
Indeed, Delaware's economy seems to be entirely based on tolls and on having businesses incorporate there; they have no sales tax.
We were getting directions to the NSA Cryptological Museum from our GPS, but after it tried to send us down a road labeled in big letters "RESTRICTED", we pulled into a "farmer's market" hoping to get directions from local people. However, "farmer's markets" no longer have anything to do with local (or even non-local) farmers. This was entirely food carts. I have nothing against food carts, but they do not form a farmer's market. We did get a pulled pork sandwich for a quick lunch, and luckily our other GPS gave us a better route.
We did find the museum, which was actually pretty crowded, mostly with a troop of Girl Scouts, but also other visitors. Probably the most interesting piece of information I learned was that the Native American "Code Talkers" started in World War I, not World War II.
One of the exhibits was a Storage-Tek tape storage unit. I think we had one of those in the Bell Labs comp center in the 1990s.
They had a poster for the 1938 film Cipher Bureau.
When we got to Manassas, Virginia, we discovered that the room rate for the next night was double what we were paying. Apparently there was a Jimmy Buffet concert in town. I always thought that concerts came to the people, but apparently not.
Dinner was at Guapo's, a local chain, where we shared a burrito and a half rotisserie chicken.
Our plan was to drive a fairly long stretch on the Blue Ridge Parkway, but because we accidentally plugged the wrong destination into the GPS we thought we did not have enough time, so ended up on it for only an hour or so. However, this sort of worked out, because the weather was so cloudy and rainy that there were no good views along the Parkway after the first one.
The scenery--what we could see of it--was nice, but one problem is that driving from Manassas to Asheville, there is not really a good place to stop in between overnight. There are motels and such, but they all seem to be in the middle of nowhere rather than in a town.
We arrived in Asheville and checked in, then went to find dinner. The Corner Kitchen sounded good and was described as "$$", but when we got there and saw the menu, the entrees were between $25 and $35, which I would not describe as "$$". This was a bit more than we wanted to spend, and we ended up at a Hardee's, though a very fancy-looking one. Because Asheville was (and is) a fancy resort, it has rules about the architecture in the downtown area, and even chain restaurants that normally have their own style have to follow them.
The breakfast was better at this motel, but then again, the motel cost more.
The original plan was to spend the day in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but it was foggy, cloudy, and rainy. It turns out that it is usually foggy, cloudy, and rainy in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, because it is a rain forest. But while people do hike in such weather, we did not really want to, so we appreciated the scenery along the scenic drive through the Park from the southern edge to the northern one.
We stopped at one of the Visitor Centers and Mark bought a Senior Pass (or whatever it is called these days) for the National Park System. For $10 we are set for life--his life, anyway, and just for admission fees. Tours, parking, etc., are still extra. This is the first National Park we have been in since Mark turned 62 over a year ago, and though it does not charge admission, it does sell the Senior Passes. We wanted to buy one before they got discontinued, or more expensive.
After leaving the Park we saw a fairly bad accident, with an SUV on its side across the road. I cannot quite figure out how it got into that position. It reminded me of the sort of accident one would see on the mountain road in Vietnam.
Just north of the Park is Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. It reminded us of Wisconsin Dells--a totally kitschy tourist destination near a scenic and peaceful area. It was only on looking it up that I discovered that Pigeon Forge is the home of Dolly Parton and Dollywood. But it also has Bible museums, entertainment places with touristy musical shows (e.g. Hillbilly Heaven), amusement parks, and all sorts of souvenir shops. Bleh.
We continued on to Knoxville, home of the University of Tennessee and the Frank H. McClung Museum (which the GPS had difficulty directing us towards, trying to take us the wrong way around a one-way circle).
The Museum had a temporary exhibit on birds in art, and permanent exhibits on Tennessee history before the Europeans arrived. One of the cultures/periods is called Mississippian, which is confusing, because there is also an epoch(?) in the Carboniferous Period called Mississippian, but the latter was 350 million years ago, a bit before the Native American cultures arose.
They also had something called the Bat Creek Stone, "discovered" in 1889 and first thought to be Cherokee and later to be inscribed in Paleo-Hebrew and to prove that the Europeans had reached North America before Columbus. In 1991 it was challenged as a 19th century hoax, sort of like the various "runestones" found in Minnesota and other states with large Scandinavian populations, and further evidence of this was discovered in 2004.
An exhibit on human origins had some FAQs at the beginning, which seemed a bit defensive. For example, one FAQ asked, "Where does God fit into all this?"; the answer was that that was outside the realm of science. Another answer to the question "But isn't evolution just a theory?" explained what a theory was and mentioned among other examples the Theory of Gravity. since probably most people believe in gravity, the fact that it is still labeled a theory ought to make them consider that some theories are pretty strongly believed to be true.
They keep discovering new branches of the primate family tree. Denisova hominins was discovered in 2010 in Siberia, Australopithecus sediba in 2008, and Homo floresiensis ("hobbits") in 2003 in Indonesia.
The video on race and DNA mapping showed how almost everyone is a mixture of "races" (as we currently define them). However, the percentages they give for their samples would seem to indicate that "Native American" would have to go back to the Old World to achieve the percentages given to the precision given. That is, if someone's DNA is given as probably 13.2% Native American, you would have to go back considerably farther than great-grandparents to get that level of precision.
After the Museum, we decided to walk back to the main part of town and find lunch/dinner somewhere. This was apparently move-in weekend for the University, which meant everything was pretty much open. This was a little more than a half-mile away, but also included a couple of hills, so it was a bit more strenuous than it sounds.
We ate at Ephesus, a Turkish restaurant. Well, it was called a Mediterranean restaurant, which is the general term for restaurants that served gyros and other grilled meat dishes. (In Britain, they are doner kebab restaurants.) I think the owners are worried that calling the restaurant "Turkish" or "Lebanese" or whatever will 1) make people think it is something more exotic than gyros and kebab, or 2) have everyone's political opinions get in the way. Ephesus is in Turkey, and this one definitely was run by people from Turkey (because we asked), but there is a restaurant near us called Sahara which is actually Lebanese. (Hint: The Sahara is not in Lebanon. Then again, there is a Portuguese restaurant near us called The Mediterranean Chateau.)
After eating we returned to the car (and luckily were not rained on--it has been raining every day since we left home), and drove to Huntsville, AL. Everywhere we go there is kudzu. It is easy to identify; if it looks like someone has made a giant sheet of foliage and thrown it over all the trees, shrubs, utility poles, etc., by the side of the road, that's kudzu.
We drove to the Huntsville Rocket & Space Center in Huntsville. It looked very different than the last time we were there, partly because they built a new interstate highway right in front of it. They also added a second huge building (the Davidson Center) and removed the "moonwalk ride" when it broke and was deemed unrepairable. This was a harness with counterweights that made you feel as if you were walking in moon gravity.
The Center started with information about the Space Launch System (SLS): how it was the biggest, etc. But is that better than all the commercial ventures going on? (It turns out that it gives us the ability to lift more supplies further than the commercial ventures, and so is necessary for exploring Mars, the asteroids, and the outer planets.)
They had a model of Von Braun's office, which featured prominently on his desk the Retro-Hugo for Best Related Book, Conquest of the Moon, co-authored with Fred L. Whipple and Willy Ley. (Unfortunately, they did not label it in the key, and the plaque on it was turned away from people looking at it.)
The Black Hole exhibit not very informative, with too little explanation and too much humor.
They had an issue of Life magazine dated June 15, 1959. That was a Monday, but Mark remembers Life magazine as being dated on Fridays. He wrote in his Vietnam log:
There was a report of atrocities said to be taken from the January 19, 1970, issue of Life Magazine. One problem: that issue of Life Magazine never existed. Life Magazine I remember always came out and was dated on Friday. In any case that was certainly true in 1970. The idea was it was a magazine to linger over on the weekend. They have a cover of a different issue of Life in another room from 1964 and it has a date that was a Friday. January 19, 1970, was a Monday. [Postscript: I have found an ad for a used January 23, 1970, issue of Life magazine confirming that 1970 issues were dated on Fridays.]
There is definitely more signage needed--there was a V-2 in the newer building with no label on it at all. (The docent said that it was not labeled because it was controversial. Given how much stuff they had about Von Braun, I find this hard to believe.)
They also need to work on upkeep. The wind tunnel model was broken and several other exhibits appeared not to be working.
We took the Marshall Space Center tour, which covered more about the SLS program. We saw the Payload Operations Integration Center, which looked very different from 1960s mission control. For one thing, there were no banks of meters, dials, etc., just one computer screen per work station. For another, the room was not filled with white guys in white shirts and ties. The staff is Black, Asian, female, etc., with hardly any white shirts and ties.
The guide talked about how Curtis Hadfield tweeted from space, and referred to a giant phone bill when he got home. However, I believe that report of a $1.37 million Rogers phone bill was a satire.
The next stop was the historic test stands and buildings from the early rocket tests. Apparently when Von Braun requested money for test stands, it was turned down. So then he requested the same amount of money for "testing tools" and that was approved.
The tour took almost two hours, and we finished up the Davidson Center and a couple of exhibits in the other building when we got back. I realize that the Huntsville Center concentrates on the Atlas program(s), and does not attempt to cover other aspects. So I have to say that for people wanting a thorough history of spaceflight, the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas, is the clear leader.
We had dinner at Taqueria el Cazador, where we had bistec encebollado and tamales. (Last time we were in Huntsville we ate at a Korean restaurant. I am not sure what traditional Alabaman food would be, but we do not seem to find it.)
Apropos of the trip, NPR had a story about someone who rated all the Texas BBQ places. (By the way, I tend to use "BBQ", but it is also "barbecue", "barbeque", "bar-b-que", and probably other variations.)
We stayed at a Quality Inn in Huntsville, but it is perhaps better described as a low-Quality Inn. Nothing was actively bad, but the walls were thin, the electrical outlets very few, and the WiFi was very slow. (The latter is all too common--hotels say they have "high-speed Wifi", but it is only about 1 Mbps.) Mark is doing complete reviews of all the motels for TripAdvisor, so I will leave all the details to him.
Today was driving to Selma and Montgomery. We ate lunch at R&B Pit BBQ outside Selma, managing to get there before they closed at 2PM. Apparently during the week they do not stay open for dinner. We got the BBQ plate, which was pulled pork with your choice of sides; we got fries, potato salad, beans, and cole slaw. It is hard for us to judge BBQ, as we have none near us that are any good, but this tasted pretty good to me.
The houses along the road do not look like those inTo Kill a Mockingbird. Actually a lot of things are different from the classic image of Southern towns, but after watching 42, To Kill a Mockingbird, and other films about those times, I have to say that is a good thing.
One indication of change was on the outskirts of Selma: a billboard asking votes to re-elect the then-current mayor, who from his picture was clearly African-American. Fifty years ago hardly any African-Americans in Selma could vote; now they hold the top elective office.
(I know we still have a long way to go, but it is worth noting how far we have come.)
At the Selma Interpretive Center, we saw a film about the march from Selma to Montgomery and also met the first black mayor of Selma, James Perkins, Jr. We talked to him about the new voter ID laws and such. He said the problems they see are almost all from absentee ballots: dozens from the same address, or from vacant lots. When they register, voters give both a residence address and a mailing address, and that may exacerbate the problem. (This of course runs counter to claims I have heard that absentee ballots are fraud-proof because they are mailed to your address and cannot be forwarded.)
There was a lot about the aftermath of the march, including a lot about Johnson, who always seems to get the short end of the stick in that all that anyone remembers him for is Vietnam, and no one remembers the remarkable things he did domestically in terms of Medicare, Medicaid, civil rights, and anti-poverty programs.
We then drove around Selma to see (the outside of) a couple of the churches that served as focal points for the planning, since those were the only places people could meet without being dispersed by the police. Then we drove over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which is a "camelback" bridge such that the marchers on the first attempt to march could not see all the police on the other side until they crested the top.
There was not much along the route itself, other than another interpretive center about the march.
This was another driving day, from Montgomery to New Orleans. We stopped for lunch in Biloxi, MS, at Snapper's Seafood on the Gulf.
In New Orleans, we were not actually staying in New Orleans itself, but across some body of water in a town named Marrero. Conveniently, there was a Dollar Tree right across the parking lot from the motel, so we were able to pick up some snacks and soda there.
We started with a driving tour of the French Quarter, where we drove up and down all the streets to get an overview. Then we did a walking tour of it, as described in the AAA Tour Book. This was actually an e-book we loaded on our Kindle, which was kind of convenient, as it was not an extra book to carry, and it was searchable. On the other hand, the amount displayed at any one time is much less.
We spent about two hours on this, which in the heat and humidity was definitely enough.
After this we drove through the lower Ninth Ward to Chalmette Battlefield. The former was the area of New Orleans hardest hit by the Katrina flooding, and although the part along the main road through it has been rebuilt, streets a few blocks off to the side still show a lot of damage.
Chalmette Battlefield is where the Battle of New Orleans (in the War of 1812) took place. We had seen it on a previous trip, but it was also an excuse to drive through the lower Ninth Ward. It turns out that the Visitors Center was brand-new, having been built after Katrina. This was because the entire battlefield, Visitors Center, and everything else in the area was several feet under water from Katrina.
We drove out a bit further to a place named Charlie's (in the town of Violet), where we shared a bowl of (very good) gumbo and a Cajun sausage sandwich.
Then it was back to New Orleans and the Garden District, full of stately homes, but also rough narrow streets, usually with no left turns allowed, etc. We settled for a driving tour, however, since it was even hotter by this point.
On the way back we stopped at a Piggly Wiggly for some canned soda. I hadn't been in a Piggly Wiggly in years (possibly since 1964!).
Today we went to the National World War II Museum, which is part of the Smithsonian. (I guess now that the Mall area in Washington, D.C., is full the Smithsonian is putting branches in other cities--which probably also gives it a wider base of support for funding. This museum used to be the D-Day Museum, and there is still a disproportionate amount of space devoted to D-Day. It appears they expanded their scope before changing their name, though, since the section on the Pacific Theater talks about "D-Day" for each island (e.g., July 21, 1944, was D-Day for Guam, etc.). The European section was still almost entirely focused on D-Day.
In addition to walking around on our own, we took a docent tour which was fairly interesting. The docent emphasized that Higgins (the maker of Higgins boats) paid everyone the same, regardless of race or gender. Well, they paid everyone the same during the war. Whether they continued this policy after the war was not clear.
The docent also said that the claim that condoms were issued to the troops to protect their rifle barrels from sea spray and rain was false, because they were also issued plastic bags for the rifles. Maybe, but I suspect that as soon as they landed the plastic bags were abandoned as too big and bulky.
There was a section on Bletchley Park, and the docent told several stories about Alan Turing's quirkiness.
Remember the clickers in The Longest Day? Well, they were used just like that, but with one additional twist. When the troops first landed, a click needed to be answered with a double-click. But since the Germans would figure this out, at dawn the rules changed, and answering a click with a double-click would get you shot instead.
As usual, the museum pegs the start of World War II as September 1, 1939. Personally, I would place it in 1931, when Japan invaded China (Manchuria). In 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia (Italy wanted a return of the Roman Empire). But we have a very Eurocentric view. 1941 was really the turning point for the Axis, with the invasion of Russia and the attack on Pearl Harbor both signaling the beginning of their defeat.
A display on rationing and wartime "recycling" said that you could turn 2300 pairs of silk stockings into a parachute. I can understand how there might be enough silk in 2300 pairs of silk stockings for a parachute, but it is totally unclear how one converts the stockings into a parachute.
Not surprisingly, the museum took the entire day. Dinner was at Pho Tau Bay, which took 2 GPSs, a map, and guesswork to find. (It was one of those frontage/service road situations.)
Today was basically a long drive to Fort Worth, with a stop for lunch in Shreveport at a restaurant called Crawdaddy's. The scenery gradually changed from the bayous of Louisiana to the dry prairie of Texas. This and the drive from San Antonio to Little Rock were the two hardest days, with 558 and 582 miles respectively. It is not only a long distance between places in Texas, but it is a long distance from adjoining states as well. (It is true that we ended up traveling an 'X', and New Orleans to San Antonio, followed by Fort Worth to Little Rock, would have been easier, but not that much, and the schedule did not work out that way.)
Sunday mornings not much in the way of sights and museums are open, so it was a good time to relax and do laundry. A guest laundry room is yet another convenience one finds only in inexpensive motels, along with free parking, free Internet, free refrigerators, and free microwaves. We also stopped in a Walmart to pick up a couple of items.
The afternoon was spent at the Amon Carter Museum. This is an art museum which started with a focus on the art of the American West, but expanded to include all schools of American art. (I say "art of the American West" because "Western art" could mean European as opposed to Asian art.)
Again, we took the docent tour, which began with a discussion of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. These are the two premier painters of Western scenes, but have some major differences. Remington, for example, uses a limited palette, has horses as the only animals in his paintings, paints generic locations, and shows a completely masculine West. Russell uses a wider palette, has other animals, paints very specific locations, and has women in many of his paintings.
Russell's "Loops and Swift Horses Are Surer Than Lead" was used as an example. It purports to show a real incident, but there are major discrepancies. The painting shows six-shooters; there were none in the real incident. The actual incident had a smaller female (cinnamon) bear than the large bear Russell painted, and it also had a less picturesque background.
There was more on the tour about other items in the collection, of course, but I decided to concentrate on them rather than taking a lot of notes.
We were going to eat at Railhead Smokehouse near the museum, but it was closed on Sundays, so we went to El Asadero instead.
Cross Plains, Texas, is a very small town with really only one claim to fame: Robert E. Howard. And Howard was not even born in Cross Plains. But his aura draws people from all over the world to Cross Plains.
Which is saying something, because even after you get to Fort Worth, the closest city, it is another hundred miles of driving to get to Cross Plains, a town whose biggest store seems to be the Dollar General, and which boasts three restaurants if you count the Dairy Queen.
We opted for a picnic in the town park instead, which must be a popular spot for miles around, as it had rather more tables than such a small town would warrant. The trees were all well-shaded, making a picnic delightful.
After lunch we drove to the Robert E. Howard Museum. This is the house where he lived, and which has been restored and maintained by Project Pride, a local civic group. To visit it requires an appointment--not a big problem, but while the visitors come from all over the world, they do not come in large numbers, and so it does not pay to keep the museum open every day. The appointment method is much better all around than opening the museum only one or two arbitrary days a week, which could easily be days inconvenient for the visitors.
(We could have waited until we got to San Antonio and signed up for the bus trip to Cross Plains sponsored by the Worldcon, but that would have meant much more time on the road to get to Cross Plains. This was a doubly wise decision, because the air conditioning on the bus broke down on the return trip!)
As it was, we got a two-and-a-half hour tour/talk with Arlene Stephenson, who is extremely knowledgeable about Howard. The house itself is small, with just the entry/hall, Howard's mother's bedroom, the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, and Howard's bedroom/work area. (There is an additional room in back used as a small bookshop, but this was added later and is not of historic interest.)
One of the topics discussed was Howard's suicide. Though the most widely held belief is that Howard was a "mama's boy" who took his life on the spur of the moment because he couldn't bear life with her, evidence exists that this was not the case. Howard had purchased a cemetery plot for himself well before her final coma, and had often talked of suicide. One theory, in fact, is that her death did not drive him to suicide so much as release him from the responsibility of caring for her and so allowed him to do what he had been planning for a long time.
Arlene had not read Howard's fantasy works, but had read his boxing stories. This turns out to be representative: although science fiction fans think of Conan when they think or Howard, there are other people who know Howard only through his boxing stories, or through his Bear Creek stories, or through his poetry, or through some other specialized genre that Howard wrote. (Few people realize that Howard thought himself a poet, but his tombstone in Brownwood's Greenleaf Cemetery describes him as "Author and Poet".)
We heard a little bit about the various editions of Howard's work (and we heard more at Worldcon). Arlene was somewhat negative on the L. Sprague de Camp/Lin Carter editions of the 1960s and 1970s; at Worldcon members of the Robert E. Howard Foundation were less kind. The Del Rey editions of the early 2000s go back to Howard's original manuscripts and also offer earlier drafts and versions, and are considered the definitive editions. We bought two volumes of Conan in this edition, a small volume of Howard's poetry published by Project Pride, and a T-shirt illustrated with all Howard's major characters.
The Whole Wide World is a good biopic of Howard. The independent film Barbarian Days (shown at Worldcon) gives a view of Robert E. Howard fandom as seen at "Robert E. Howard Days" in Cross Plains.
After the museum we stopped into the library, which has a very large Howard collection, both of books which can be read and of manuscripts which are entrusted to a very few.
It is an example of how small and homey the town is that the rest room in the library has its spare toilet tissue rolls on a decorated wicker stand like you would find in someone's home.
We returned to Fort Worth and had a great Thai dinner at a place called Happy Bowl.
After that we went to the Kimbell Museum, which is partly under construction so parking was a bit tricky (though free). We got the audio tour, which was quite informative. The Kimball is a rather small museum, because they emphasize displaying the works in uncrowded surroundings in natural light. One side-effect is that there is usually only one work per artist displayed at any one time, but this also makes the museum more manageable for visitors.
This time we did eat at the Railhead Smokehouse (the Kimball is pretty much next door to the Amon Carter Museum). Though it came highly recommended, we were somewhat disappointed in it.
Again we had computer problems (this seems to be a regular thing on this trip, because the "high-speed WiFi" that the hotels promise is lower-speed and not always there. And if it is not working in the evening, the response is usually that the person who knows how to fix it will not be in until the next morning.
We also have too much stuff to keep track of. I know I complain about limited luggage space when we fly, but the relatively unlimited space in the car makes its own set of problems. Particularly prone to getting lost are maps and tour books, which started out all organized in a tote bag in the trunk, but then the ones we need on a given date go into the door pocket, while the ones for the next day need to be available, so they end up in the car ... somewhere ... probably on the back seat ... or maybe in the blue tote bag behind the driver's seat ... no, wait, they are probably tucked into the food box.
On the way down to San Antonio, we stopped in Austin for lunch at Aster's Ethiopian Restaurant. This was a very unpretentious place, with a lunch buffet, so we got to have more different dishes than usual. Of course, steam tables do not produce the best quality food, but the enjeera is great no matter how it is served, and Ethiopian food is always a welcome change.
We also popped into a Dollar Tree to pick up some odds and ends (twine, gum, etc.). The GPS makes this really easy--just ask it for the nearest Dollar Tree and Bob's your uncle (well, once you figure out the various exist and service roads).
We arrived in San Antonio, unloaded the car at the hotel, and then parked in the municipal garage next door to the hotel garage. As noted below, this saved us close to $100.
These five days were LoneStarCon 3, the World Science Fiction Convention, which I am reporting on separately. That report is available at
We retrieved the car from the garage next door to the hotel ($63 versus $150 for the hotel garage), loaded up our stuff and headed for Little Rock. We had acquired a lot of books in Cross Plains and at the convention, but we had also gotten rid of a small duffel's worth of books that we brought to put out as freebies, so space was less of a problem than it might have been. For that matter, we could have stacked them under the cooler and food boxes and bags in the back seat, but one does not want to pile things too high.
In general, packing things one intends to get rid of on a trip is a good way to guarantee space for acquisitions. Rather than throw out an old T-shirt at home, get one more wearing out of it and discard it on a trip. The same is even more true for bulkier items.
Our motel in Little Rock was within walking distance of the William J. Clinton Library (which I think it is its official name), so we walked over there. (This was not an accident; I just wish we could find such convenient motels everywhere. In some sense, it hardly mattered, as the Library had an enormous free parking lot, but it was still nice to be able to walk rather than to have to drive.)
All the Presidential libraries we had visited before this seemed to have been arranged on a chronological framework. The creators of the WJC Library made a conscious effort to do something different, and so built it around a thematic framework. There were a series of alcoves off the main "spine", one dealing with civil rights, one with international relations, one with the economy, and so on. And, yes, they even covered the impeachment, though from a somewhat slanted point of view, it being described as a power struggle between the Republicans and the Democrats. This is somewhat standard in Presidential libraries/museums--all that is controversial is either ignored or heavily edited at the beginning, when all the principals--including the ex-President--are still around. It was true in the Nixon Library and it was true here. But as time passes, the exhibits get updated; now that both Richard and Pay Nixon are dead, the Nixon Library has added a Watergate Gallery.
When we were last in Little Rock (1997), we drove by Little Rock Central High School, one of the major sites of the Civil Rights Movement. There was nothing there in the way of an information center, but now there is an entire Visitors Center across the street from it. This was the 60th anniversary of the integration of the school and in addition to a group of students there was a reporter from the local paper taking pictures and interviewing people. He took our picture and names, but not surprisingly the newspaper the next day decided to go with local students instead.
Dinner was ribs at the Whole Hog Cafe.
Today we drove to Nashville. On the way we stopped at Parker's Crossroads Battlefield, the site of one of the lesser-known battles of the Civil War. All the battlefields have something of interest, of course, but in addition, it is good to do something that involves getting out of the car and walking around (even in the heat!).
Dinner was at Kebab Gyros.
This was a "vacation from vacation" day. We started with McKay's, a humongous used bookstore which we did not even know about until we saw it from the interstate the night before. It was hard to miss--it was the size of a small aircraft hangar.
While we were looking at the DVDs (all used bookstores seem to have expanded to include DVDs), we got to talking to someone else browsing them. This person said it was important to stick with DVDs, because Blu-rays keep track of what you watch and transmit that information to a giant facility in Utah, where everyone has a room dedicated to him or her that stores all this and other information. (They must be doll-house-sized rooms.)
We got a couple of books about Sherlock Holmes, a couple of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, a book about war movies, and some other odds and ends, but the best find was a Mexican book about werewolves in cinema.
Then we went to Costco and picked up some snack food, including the dried mangoes Mark likes the best, which are the mixture of green and yellow mangoes. Unfortunately, we cannot get these in New Jersey--Costco has only the dried yellow mangoes there. We also got freeze-dried Mandarin oranges, which were great. But again, there are not available in New Jersey.
Lunch was at a Cracker Barrel. We rounded out the day by seeing Elysium at a movie theater near Opryland.
Things are different here--everyone leaves their cars unlocked and there seem to be a zillion distilleries.
We stopped at Lost River Cave in Lexington, KY, as much to break up the drive as anything else. We also got some exercise, as it is about a half-mile walk from the parking lot to the entrance, and another walk along the river past a blue hole to the dock, where we boarded boats that took us inside the cave. The roof is quite low at points, and if the river were any higher, there were places where the boat might not have been able to get under the roof.
The cave has had many uses, the most unusual being several decades' use as a night club!
We also walked along one of the nature trails. On days that are mostly driving, we try to get some walking/hiking in, just to have some exercise.
Dinner was at Gumbo Ya-Ya.
Our big stop of the day was the Frazier Museum in Louisville, KY. It is known primarily for its world-class arms exhibit, but when we were there they also had a special exhibit on "Mythic Creatures", which was also a must-see.
The first section was "Sea Monsters". "Creatures of the Deep" included the colossal squid--the largest animal without a backbone. The giant squid also has the largest eyes of any animal. Fictional monsters included the kraken. There was a reproduction of the "Lykosthenes, Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicon" ("Book of Sea Life") from 1557.
A reproduction of the famous she-wolf statue from Rome was labeled, "Romulus & Remus fratres germani, eo loco, ubi expositi & reperti erant, atossa a Lupa enutriti, Romam urbem condunt."
In the Age of Exploration, they noted, "an author might present a newly discovered animal on the same page as a mythic creature." Several facsimile books demonstrated this. Various objects mistaken for mythic creatures include decayed basking sharks, deformed blacksnake, and masses of floating seaweed.
Japanese kappa used to drown children, now they are cute and friendly. "Kappa no kawa nagare" ("even a kappa can drown").
The Pokemon Aipom looks like an ahuizotl.
Why do all aquaria play Saint-Saen's "Carnival of the Animals"?
"Becoming Mermaids" had a wide variety of examples.
There was Lasirén, a Caribbean mermaid and the subject of Vodou ceremonies. There was Mami Wata (Mamba Muntu). There was even Sedna, an Inuit meramid--not an area where one expects mermaids--and hwo created whales, seals from fingers.
In fact, there were many non-European mermaid legends: the Kraken, Mishipashoo/Mishepishu (Amerind), and Yawkyawk (Australian). All of these developed as a legend before stories of European mermaids arrived. I suppose this is another example of convergent evolution.
One possible source of the legend of mermaids is the Sirens of Homer. John Smith, Columbus, Pliny, and Henry Hudson all reported seeing (or believing in) mermaids. But fakes abound, the most famous being the "Feejee Mermaid." There were even fake mermaid photos after the 26 December 2004 tsunami. Paleontologist Bob Slaughter makes artworks that are fossils of mythical creatures, including mermaids, as does artist Takeshi Yamada.
Mermaids are painted on the walls of lottery parlors. But now mermaids dress in modern, foreign clothing, wear a watch, have long straight hair, a mirror, and a comb, and hold a snake.
"Creatures of the Earth" had an "alebrije" (a brightly-painted sculpture of a fantastical creature). There was also information about the (in)famous chupacabra, for which the first major wave of reports occurred in 1980s and 1990s Puerto Rico.
Mixed in were real creatures, such as Gigantopithecus blacki (extinct giant apes). But there were plenty of imaginary "apemen": almas, chemosits, orangs pendek, yetis, yerens, the wild man of Borneo (orangutans?), hibagons, yowies, sasquatches, skunk apes, and mapinguari, among others.
A griffin has the head, torso, and talons of an eagle, and the body of a lion. Protoceratops were similar to griffins
Legends of giants may have come from the early discovery of bones from mammoths, giant sloths, etc. The Tingis/Tangier Anteus skeleton was probably from an elephant. Similarly, the legend of the cyclops may be from an elephant skull with the hole for its trunk. (The plural, by the way, is cyclopes.) The display also had the interesting trivia that blacksmiths wore a patch over one eye to prevent from being blinded in both if sparks or fire flew up.
"Unicorns West and East" began by defining a unicorn as being white and having a horn, a goat's beard and hooves, a horse's body, and a lion's tail. The horn has magical properties.
In the Bible the Hebrew word "re'em" was translated as "unicorn", but really means "wild ox". (For an example, consider Numbers 23:22: "God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn.")
Marco Polo saw a Sumatran rhino, and thought it was a unicorn. Similarly, the narwhal horn was often passed off as a unicorn horn. The qilin is the Chinese unicorn; the kirin is Japanese. These have flesh-covered horns, deer bodies, a scaly coat, and an ox tail.
In the "Creatures of the Sky" section, they had the roc (Aepyornis and Garuda), and as described by Ibn Battuta. They also had Pegasus, both the Greek and Egyptian sphinxes, Quetzalcoatl, and Garudas and Nagas (both Hindu and Buddhist). Interestingly, the conflict of bird versus snake seems to be worldwide.
"Mythic Mortals" included the tengu and the phoenix.
In the section "Dragons" they talked about the differences between European and Asian dragons. They also had an illustration of the Klagenfurt dragon (statue), which we saw on our Eastern Europe trip in 1991.
Dinner was with Nic Brown of the B-Movie Podcast. People used to have pen pals--now they have Internet pals, people they are friends with without ever having met.
Our plan today was to drive homeward by way of Coalwood, West Virginia. This involved driving over mountainous, winding roads (of the sort one finds on the road from Sedona to Flagstaff, but with the rocks mostly covered with trees). As a result, we covered less distance, at least horizontally.
But on our way to Coalwood, we saw a sign that said "Matewan" pointed to a road off to the right. Checking the map, we discovered that Matewan was only about five miles away, so we immediately added it to the plan.
In the little museum in Matewan the visitors' book asks about the reason for your visit, and the choices are "Hatfield & McCoys", "ATV Trails", "Tug River", and "Other". Apparently the idea that people might come there out of an interest in mining history and labor history has not completely registered with them. They did have the film Matewan running in the one-room museum, and both a section there and an audio presentation at the site of the Matewan Massacre. Given that the Matewan Massacre was the deadliest gun battle in the United States, I am surprised there was not more.
After Matewan we proceeded to Coalwood with the help of our paper map and road signs, since our GPS had never heard of it. There is a fair amount new in the town (well, newer than the late 1950s), but many of the original buildings are still there, though in a very decrepit state. The Olga Machine Shop is there, with all its windows broken. Some of the original housing is there, but it too is abandoned.
When we crossed the county line, there was a sign under the county sign saying "Home of the Rocket Boys". When we entered Coalwood, there was a sign under the town limits sign saying "Home of the Rocket Boys". And there was a big non-government sign at the main intersection in town saying "Home of the Rocket Boys". Even the explanatory signs for the "Coal Heritage Trail" had a section on the "Rocket Boys", though most of them were dedicated to the coal-mining industry. Strangely--or perhaps not so strangely--Matewan is not on the "Coal Heritage Trail". I suppose that West Virginia wants to play down the labor troubles. (I am not sure if the promotion of the Hatfield & McCoys is an official West Virginia thing, or it is just that Matewan is capitalizing on something dramatic a lot of people have heard of which does not have political repercussions.)
It has occurred to me, and I may have said it elsewhere, that a lot is made of how fortunate Homer Hickham, Jr., was to have Miss Riley as a teacher who encouraged his interest in science, and how it eventually got him to NASA instead of into a coal mine. But few note that his friends were just as fortunate to have him, because without his lead they would probably all have ended up in the mines instead of going to college. (Well, Quentin would probably have managed on his own.) Of Hickham's five friends, though, all went to college: three became engineers, one became a banker, and one became an insurance adjuster.
We drove down the crossroad into Coalwood looking for the launch site, and indeed did find a sign (painted on the side of a bus shelter) with "Launch Site" and an arrow down a side road. Well, "road" is perhaps overly generous. It was a one-car-wide gravel track with a lot of ruts and potholes, and a drop-off on one side for much of its way. We drove maybe a half-mile down this before we decided that since we had no idea how far the launch site was, or what we would do if we had a flat or other car trouble along it, we should turn around and go back. Of course, then we had to drive on until there was enough room to turn around (and no drop-off).
(Looking at the GoogleMaps satellite image later, it appears that the launch site was probably five miles down this road, which is actually an official road, WV 2.)
And so to home, 5243 miles later.
One thing I did not see in any state but New Jersey was the phenomenon of gas stations charging different prices depending on whether you are paying with cash or with credit card.
One thing I packed that I never used was my photo vest. It is still useful for flights, because all those pockets are a great way to carry extra stuff onto the plane, or on coach tours when you are allowed only a small carry-on. However, unless we are going on a nature hike or boat ride, most times it just looks out of place, weighs a pound and a half empty, and is hot to boot. I used to wear it a lot, but now I go for a more minimalist approach. It is also true that one no longer needs to carry all those extra rolls of films, lens, etc. And on a lot of trips there are many days when one does not need a camera, or binoculars, or all the other paraphrenalia.
Licese plates spotted: all US states (except HI, ID, ND, and SD), also DC, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec
Link to my other trip logs:
http://leepers.us/evelyn/trips.htm
Link to my home page:
http://leepers.us/evelynleeper.htm