Two More Roads

Continuing from my last post, here are the other two drives between Washington, D.C. and Lincoln, NE that stood out:

The third notable drive, and my favorite of the bunch, was the drive from Little Rock through the Ozarks in northwest Arkansas.

Near the beginning of this drive, before I reached the Ozark Mountains, I stopped at Hendrix College, where a good friend of mine used to teach.  I think it's been a while since he's been there, so I don't know if the campus looks like it did in his time, but it was really pretty.  It's a small school in a small town, but was a nice place to stroll around for a while before setting off on my drive for the day.

The Ozarks are not particularly large mountains, but are a very pretty area.  The roads are twisty and turny, with some ups and downs, but until the drive through the Smokey Mountains, are fun to drive, not teeth-clenchingly  stressful.  It felt kind of like someone grabbed U.S. 129 at each end stretched it out just a bit.

If you read my post on Little Rock, you'll know that Arkansas has long been mocked as the home of drunken hillbillies (well, maybe you already knew this).  A lot of this stereotype comes from early depictions of the Ozarks and the people who lived there.  They were poor.  From what I saw, the area is not so poor any more, but I did see a share of trailers and really beaten-up homes along the way.

I stopped for lunch at the Burger Barn, which apparently has been around for a long time and is a local famous place.  It's just a roadside drive-in where you order at the counter then eat in your car or under a tent.  And it was good.  I'm glad I stopped!  While there, I got to talking with a couple from California who'd just moved to the area because the lady's mom had retired there.  They loved it.  They thought it was pretty and easy.

If you're ever in northwest Arkansas, stop at the Burger Barn!  The chef is gruff, but the burgers are good.

Finally, my last notable drive was between Kansas City, Missouri and Lincoln, Nebraska.  Not because the drive was particularly scenic (it was not) or full of neat things (it was not).  But because a huge swath of Interstate 29 and many surrounding roads were washed out by floods from the Missouri River.  Apparently, the states upstream of the Nebraska/Iowa area received significantly more snowfall than usual and, depending on who you listen to, the Army Corp of Engineers may or may not have managed the dams properly to prevent or reduce flooding down river.  (I'm inclined to think that when you have a massive record snowfall, there's going to be a flood later, no matter how well it's managed.)

Anyway, for me the flooding meant about a 90 minute detour, which actually allowed me to see more of country and small towns around the Missouri/Iowa/Nebraska intersection.  But for the people who live there, it meant at best a massive inconvenience every day or at worst, the loss of their homes or farms or businesses.  Ironically, that whole swath of North America also suffered it worst draught and longest heatwave since the 1930s.  Many parts of the area got more than 30 days of over 100 degree heat this summer, and no rain.  So the area managed to get hit with draught and flooding.  Man.

The area looked like this for miles around.

Two Roads

Between Washington, D.C. and Lincoln, Nebraska, I did a lot of driving.  Much of it was pretty mundane, especially the drives on the interstates.  But I had four drives that stood out for one reason or another.  Here are the first two.

The first was the drive from Winchester, VA to Asheville, NC.  The road itself wasn't too spectacular, but I made a couple of stops along the way that made it worthwhile.

In Winchester itself, I ate dinner with Donnie "NERD" Shelton and his wife, Sarah.  Winchester is too far away from a big city that I'd want to live there, but the historic part of town was pretty nice.  I stayed at their home for one night before heading south to North Carolina.  (And although I've met him before, I'd like to point out that Donnie was the first friend I made while playing The World of Warcraft!)

Along the way, I stopped to see the Natural Bridge, one of those stone arches above open air.  Part (all?) of The Last of the Mohicans was filmed there, and it is quite beautiful.  The only downside is the bridge is on private land, so you not only have to pay to get in, but there are really tacky tourist traps on the land, too, (away from the pretty part, at least) like a wax museum.  Do people actually go to wax museums?  And for any reason other than to say they did the cheesiest tourist thing imaginable?

The Natural Bridge

She spent the afternoon cruising down the river.

The second interesting road was my drive from Asheville to Nashville through the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountains.  Well, interesting is the wrong word... "terrifying" is more accurate.

I intentionally avoided the interstates for this part of my drive so I could see more of the mountains.  So I programmed my GPS to "avoid highways."  Little did I know that it would take me onto U.S. Highway 129, which has to be one of the twistiest roads in the whole country.  Its curviest part is known by some as The Tail of the Dragon.  For about 90 minutes, my driving was constantly hand-over-hand, with either the gas pedal pressed to the floor to make it up the mountains, or the brake pedal pressed to the floor so I wouldn't sail off over a cliff or crash into a tree.

One wrong turn and I'd be in that lake.

The drive was pretty fun for the first 20 minutes or so, because there's no place else I've driven that requires, well... so much "driving."  But as the road got steeper and more crowded, and as my GPS let me know I had another 22 miles of it... Oi!  And there was almost no place to pull over.  I did pull over a few times, just to settle my nerves, or to let some bikers go past me, but I sure was glad when the ride was done.

I stopped at the dam at the end of The Dragon to stretch my legs and feel normal again.

I'm pretty sure it's a really fun place to ride motorcycles.  How do I know this?  Because there were about 10,000 bikers riding the road and milling around the pull-offs.  Oh, and because a couple of companies send photographers out to the side of the road to take your photo as you're driving/riding.  The photos of my dinky little Saturn aren't too interesting, but there are some cool shots of people on their motorcycles.  I bet if I rode a motorcycle to U.S. 129 just to ride that particular road, I'd like a shot of myself taking a sharp turn.

Kansas City, Missouri

A few of my friends from the CFTC have lived in or spent a lot of time in Kansas City and they really like it, so at their urging, I went slightly out of my way to see it.  I stayed two nights, which gave me a full day in town.

The thing I liked best about KC was its architecture.  I didn't take a formal tour or anything, just wandered around downtown.  But even just doing that I found some great stuff:

Some government buildings

The U.S. Courthouse

The public library

Kansas City, MO prides itself on having more fountains than any city in North American (and maybe only Rome(?) exceeds it world-wide).  I only saw a handful, so I'll have to assume the rest were where I didn't wander.

I was told that KC makes great BBQ, so I stopped at a BBQ place for lunch, at a farmer's market called the River Market.  It's a lot like the West Side Market in Cleveland, only it smelled like cow pies.  Not sure why, since it's right in the middle of the city and I didn't see any live cattle around.  /shrug.  The BBQ was good despite the suspicious odor.

The thing that made the biggest impression on me was actually a sad thing, though.  While nearing the end of my walk around town, I wandered back past the public library and towards my car.  Just as I reached the corner where the library is, a bird dropped straight down out of the sky next to me!  Straight down!  (After I told a friend about that a few days later, he suggested maybe the bird flew into a window, which was possible given its location and the design of the building.)  The bird kind of rolled back and forth on its torso for a minute then managed to get up on is feet.  He wasn't obviously injured (I mean, no blood, no crooked wings), but there was definitely something wrong with him.  He just stood there, beak open, and not moving except for blinking his eyes.  It was scary and sad all at once.  :(  He was sort of near a door and people kept walking past but he didn't fly off or walk away.  I wanted to help but didn't know how or if even anyone could help.  I found a couple guys who do maintenance for the business district and they came over to look at the bird, and started calling around to see if anyone could come help.  I knew my continued presence wouldn't do anything to help the bird, so eventually I took off.  I don't know if the bird recovered, or was put out of its misery, or if it just lingered around for a while then died.  :(  But it made me really sad.

/hug

I'm sure my friends who told me to go to KC feel bad that my biggest impression of the city was an injured bird.  That's not all the impression I got.  It was pretty, clean, and the people were friendly.  

Wichita

A city that was on my mind from the start of the trip was Wichita, Kansas.  The very first friend I ever made on the internet (on AOL Instant Messenger, back in 1999 when I was at home all day studying for the bar exam) lived and still lives there.  I've known Damon for 12 years now, but only met him once, when he was on business in D.C.  So in addition to meeting him again and his family for the first time, I got to see a city he'd always described as a really nice place to live.

I was there on the Sunday and Monday of Labor Day weekend, so I expect it was a lot quieter than usual.  But Damon was right -- it is really nice.  As usually happens when I stay with friends, a lot of my time was spent just hanging out in the suburbs.  But Damon, Kristi and Ethan made up for trapping me in a subdivision by also taking me all around town, and we stopped by some places I probably wouldn't have seen on my own, like this donut shop that offers about (I'm guessing) 60 flavors of donut.  Including one with bacon!

Kristi, Ethan & Damon.  Damon likes a nice cold beer with breakfast.

The two "things" we saw were the Keeper of the Plains, a giant metal statue of a native american (Indian?  Anyone know if there's a preferred word for the people who lived here before the Europeans arrived?) and Botanica, the botanic gardens and butterfly house.  <Ugh!  Writer's block!>  <Later:  Maybe it's not writer's block, maybe it's that I don't have a whole lot of stories to go along with the things I saw in Wichita.>

So, without fun stories to accompany my photos, here is the Keeper of the Plains:

And Botanica:

The big lily pads are 3 or 4 feet across.

How not to be seen?

From the Children's Garden at Botanica

Overall, Wichita seemed like a nice place.  Probably nicer for living in than as a tourist destination.  But if you ever find yourself there for a few days, you might like it.

Oklahoma City

Back to doing this blog in chronological order...

I had only a short time in Oklahoma City, which was my first stop after Little Rock.  From the start of the trip, the whole middle of the country was a pain to plan.  In order to visit Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Kansas City, Missouri, I would have to backtrack somewhere, either on my way out west or on my way back east.  I managed to make it work out on the way from Arkansas to Colorado, but my map is kind of a zig-zag.  That's OK, I'm not really in a hurry.

At the Cowboy Museum (statue modeled after an original by Frederic Remington).

But making Oklahoma harder to add to the mix was its lack of much to do outside of Oklahoma City.  Oh, and Tulsa, but I've been told that the entire staff of the National Trust for Historic Preservation all hate the city.  Maybe it's all that cheap 1970's facade covering up the 1880s brick storefronts?  Doesn't matter ... I avoided Tulsa and went to Oklahoma City instead.

One of the treats of Oklahoma City, which would have gotten me to visit anyway, was the presense of two more friends from the World of Warcraft:  Mitchell (aka Etch) and Chrissy (aka Aconyte).  Like most other Warcraft friends I've seen along the way, I had not met them before, but in a way I had.  The three of us went out to dinner in a downtown neighborhood (well, I guess it's downtown) called Bricktown.  The Bricktown Brewery, which isn't the kind of place I'd pick for myself -- it's kind of big and it appears as if it was designed to please crowds by being bland.  But it was quite tasty!  (So good pick, Mitch and Chrissy.)  That neighborhood has several restaurants and bars, and a canal/park area to walk through.  My guess it it gets a lot of people at dinner time and during events at the nearby stadium, but might be pretty quiet a lot of other times.  Even on a Saturday night, it was pretty easy to get around and parking wasn't too much of a pain.  I'd say that was true for all of the parts of Oklahoma City that I saw (which, admittedly, were few):  Pretty nice and easy to get around.

Chrissy & Mitchell in Bricktown

The "thing" that I saw in Oklahoma City was the Cowboy Museum.  I expected one of those small-town museums with hand-written descriptions and folksy stories about the area.  But it was quite large and professional and had a whole lot of stuff.  Much of the museum is devoted to art celebrating the cowboy.  I only let my eyes scan most of that, as I was more interested in learning about cowboys themselves.  Well, this museum has all of that:  What they wore, where they worked, how they branded and roped cattle, their saddles and other horsey items (argh, I went to horse camp when I was a kid and don't remember what half that stuff is called!).  The museum also has a huge collection of barbed wire.  Did you know there are over 1,300 kinds?  Now you do.

So you know how I like it when I learn how one place I've visited is related to other places.  Well, this one's tenuous, but one of the cowboy suits the museum had on display (a 20th Century piece) was designed by Nudie Cohn, who also designed Elvis's famous gold lame' suit!  I'd never heard of Nudie before visiting Graceland, so I felt pretty smart when I saw him listed as the designer of some more, um... respectable clothes.

Well... semi-respectable.

Asheville

Still going backwards in time...

I stopped in Asheville after leaving Washington, D.C., where I took a break from traveling for about a week.  I'd originally planned to visit Asheville as one of my last stops, but due to a last-minute schedule change, I stopped there early.  Fortunately, my godparents' son, Paul, and Paul's wife Heather, were very happy to host me.  They moved to Asheville within the past couple of years and love it there, and want everyone else to love it too.  And love it I did!

Heather and Paul

I thought I'd only stay for two nights, but wound up staying for four because I liked it so much, so Asheville turned into an impromptu "audition" city, and I spent some time checking it out to see if I might want to live there.  In short, Asheville seems like a really cool town.  Lots of art and artists, beautiful landscapes, affordable homes, places to eat, culture, all four seasons (with a short winter), etc.  It's maybe a little short on what I'd call "big city culture" like Broadway shows or major league sports teams (although there's a minor league baseball team).  And I also suspect that it's short on jobs.  At least professional-type jobs, which is what I'd probably look for.

For those who don't know, I used to live in North Carolina.  In Durham then Raleigh and I liked it a lot.  For a number of reasons, I chose not to make it my home 10 years ago, but I've always been fond of the state and might have thought about returning, except that nearly everyone I was friends with in the Triangle no longer lives there.  But one of those friends, Kenny, now lives and works in Asheville.  Through him, I got to meet a couple of other locals, all of whom seemed to like the area a lot, almost as much as Paul and Heather!  And with me knowing those three locals, I got to see a pretty wide and varied swath of the city and its suburbs.

Kenny, showing me around Asheville, including its half-a-skyscraper, on the left.

Like the Triangle, and like other places in the South and the Midwest, people were pretty friendly and laid-back.  And there is a definite liberal-leaning feeling to the area.  So I suspect I'd fit in personality wise.  True, Asheville is in the South, which would worry me a little, were it not for my previous experience living in North Carolina, which I know from experience is not too extreme when it comes to some of the, shall I say, less desirable qualities often associated with the South.

Aboard La Zoom, a funny little tour of Asheville.

So as of the writing of this post, I've now visited four of nine (and counting?) cities that were on my list of places to explore (plus this one which got added when I arrived).  Of the four, I'd say I like Ashville the best, with Des Moines a close second.  Philadelphia is still cool, although I see less reason to relocate there.  And Nashville, as I noted in a recent post, didn't feel like it was a good fit for me.  So in a few months, I'll check out the job opportunities in Asheville, and see if there's a chance it could keep me employed and become my next home!  Obviously, I still have many stops left, but Asheville is currently my favorite stop.  The only downside to my visit is that because I was doing a lot and spending time with people, I took fewer photos than usual.  Sorry!

Let me take this opportunity to plug my hosts, Heather and Paul.  Heather is a real live artist, whose work is awesome and can be found for sale in Asheville.  Please check out her website!  Paul is in the early stages of developing his business of making hand-crafted guitars.  I do not believe he has any for sale yet, but keep an eye out for him.  (Paul, tell me if I'm wrong.)  And here's a sample of one he made for himself:

It sounds as good as it looks.

Nashville's Music

Once I pretty much knew that Nashville wouldn't be a place I'd settle down, I decided to spend my last day in the city being more of a tourist.  I got lucky that Tuesday nights have a lot to see and hear, but unlucky in that I had to choose between what sounded like two great shows:  The Grand Ole Opry, classic home to country & western music, and the Doyle and Debbie Show, a spoof of country music and the people who sing it.  I chose the latter, and I'm glad I did, but went on a backstage tour of the Opry during the day so I'd at least get to see the place.

The tour of the Opry was pretty good.  It wasn't very long, but we went everywhere the musicians go:  Through their entrance door, their dressing rooms, past their post office (My favorite part! You can send your favorite star mail by just writing their name and "Grand Ole Opry" on the envelop!), the greenroom, backstage, and on the stage.  I knew, well, absolutely nothing about it before, but the Opry started as a stage concert and radio program in the 1920s and has been showcasing live country and bluegrass music ever since.  So if I ever feel nostalgic for my stop in Nashville, I can listen in every Friday and Saturday night.  The Opry hosts singers of all sorts, but it also has members.  Being a member is both an honor and an obligation to perform a lot at the Opry.  I'm under the impression people willingly do so, though.

The Opry's stage.  That circle is from the floor of the Opry's former home in the Ryman Theater, downtown.

Last tidbit about the Opry:  I did know know or remember this, but Nashville flooded last year.  Badly.  The water got so high, that the stage at the Opry was under 4 feet of water!  I don't know every single thing that flooded in the city, but lots of places I saw were still closed or the people who lived and worked there would say things like "we just reopened after the floods from last year."  How did I miss knowing that Nashville totally flooded?  /scratches head

The Doyle and Debbie Show was a laugh-out-loud spoof of country music by two very talented singers/actors.  They perform weekly at The Station Inn, a pizza parlour.  The place was jammed the night I went, but in a good way because everyone was laughing and enjoying the show.  If you're every in Nashville, I highly recommend you go see Doyle and Debbie.  And if you'd like to listen to some of their music, you can stream it online.  Not sure which songs to listen to?  My favorites were ABCs of Love, Fat Women in Trailers, and I Ain't No Homo (But Man, You Sure Look Good To Me).

It doesn't look fancy, but it's hilarious.

So, Nashville was a little bit of a bust in terms of looking for a possible new home, but was great when it came to the entertainment.  Oh, and switching gears partway through -- from explorer to tourist -- reinforced my belief that avoiding the cool stuff in cities I might move to is a smart move.  I liked Nashville a lot better on my last day there than on the preceding days, but I knew my tours/shows were unfairly skewing my perception of the city.  I mean, it's not like I'd be at the Grand Ole Opry every night if I lived there.  So it was great to see those things, but wouldn't be smart to base a decision to move on stuff like that.