Michael and Sarah's Great Cross-Country Adventure

the final stretch

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah) — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:22:00 +0000

We drove from Indiana into Ohio. On the way we stopped in the town of Columbus, Indiana. This is a town that has built a reputation for great architecture in its public buildings, mostly schools and churches. It started in the '60s (I think), and since then they have attracted all sorts of great architects. There are some very cool buildings, especially some of the churches. There is also a great Chihuly chandelier in the visitor center.

In Ohio we stayed in the town that hosts Kenyon College. We stayed with the parents of a friend of mine from New York, Aili. Kenyon is a really beautiful school by my standards. I think if I had ever considered going to Ohio for college, I would have really liked it. Aili's parents were really good to us and cooked us a great meal. It was really nice, especially since these were the people we stayed with to whom we had the loosest connection.

Kenyon is right near Ohio's Amish country. The Amish don't like you to take their picture, and frankly I don't blame them. I don't think it's religious, I think they genuinely don't like being treated like a tourist attraction. It was bad enough that we were driving around their neighborhoods and were clearly there to gawk at them and nothing else. But It's quite cool how they live back behind the main roads and have their own little world back there, nearly totally cut off from the country they live in. If we were in a foreign country, I would think of them as this cool sociological attraction. Somehow because they are American I have never thought of them as that exotic. But actually they are quite exotic, in their long black skirts and white headpieces out playing volleyball on Sunday afternoon.

We drove quickly through Cleveland, where we saw the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame building, designed by I.M. Pei and distinctly reminiscent of the Louvre. We drove up to Detroit, which I had wanted to see given my apparent obsession with rejuvenated factory towns. But Detroit hasn't rejuvenated. Downtown is quite poor and full of unhappy-looking people. But then the worst part is that there is this magic line to the north, and when you cross that line there is an immediate change, with manicured lawns and gigantic houses. Old houses, from the auto barons back in the day, but still inhabited by them. The only thing that's odd is that all these rich people don't drive expensive European cars, they all drive American cars. I've never seen so many American cars in my life. Our little Chevy Malibu finally fit right in!

This was the home stretch, and we weren't making many stops by then. We drove from Detroit to Buffalo, with only a brief stop at Oberlin (where Peter briefly went to school). In Buffalo we stayed at a hotel, but we had dinner with a long-time business associate of my dad's, plus his family. It was really kind of his to take us to dinner, especially considering he has no obligation to my dad. The coolest part is that he is a volunteer fireman, and he took us on a tour of his firehouse. It's all state-of-the-art, and we saw all the high-tech equipment and went in the fire truck and everything. He had Mike ready to sign up for duty.

The next morning we took a quick detour to Niagara Falls. I love it there, and Mike and I had gone together 10 years ago. As he said, it's been 10 years and it's still flowing. It's an incredibly impressive sight, even if the stupid Canadians have ruined the view on their side (for once the Americans are the ones with taste and preserved their side with a state park). It was an appropriate final tourist destination I think.

Even more appropriate was driving back through my own college town and along the scenic Mohawk trail on our way back to Boston. After everything we have seen, we both agreed that Rte. 2 really is one of the most beautiful drives in the country. Pretty amazing after all that. This picture doesn't capture it, but if you'd been there, you know.

We've now been back for over a week. There is so much to think about and more than 1,500 pictures to go through. Thank you to all of you who followed the blog, we were really happy to share it with you. I hope to see you all soon and get to talk about it in person.

With love from Newton,

Sarah

more states in the middle

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah) — Sat, 03 May 2008 14:23:00 +0000

We drove from Iowa along the Mississippi River to St. Louis. The part in Illinois was kind of dull, but the part in Missouri was really beautiful. All the trees are blooming, and it's all green rolling hills alongside the river. It was another surprise, like Kentucky - I had had no expectations for Missouri at all.

St. Louis was also a surprise. The arch is much prettier in person than in pictures. It really was worth seeing. We went up inside, which is cramped but a nice view.

The other very random thing in St. Louis is called the City Museum. It's not so much a museum as a gigantic piece of interactive installation art. An artist-sculptor-architect took a 10-story factory building and is still in the process of creating the ultimate jungle gym/sculpture/treehouse/everything else. It was Mike's dream, since he always wants to climb on things and crawl through things and normally it's not allowed. But even I found it very cool to explore and walk around (I didn't crawl so much). Even if you just stay on the stairs, it's worth visiting.

We drove from St. Louis to Bloomington, Indiana, where my cousin Allison is just finishing up college. We had a really nice time visiting with her, even though she had a final the next morning (yuck!). Indiana was also surprisingly pretty, and again very Eastern.

That's all for now.

With love from Hopkinton (again),

Sarah

the real Midwest

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah) — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:19:00 +0000

I'm not sure if I'll say everything in this entry, or do it a bit at a time. We had several days without internet access, and then the trip was nearing the end and we just lost the drive to write. But I'm going to try to finish out the blog, since I think it's a nice record.

We drove from Wyoming into South Dakota. On the way we made a last-minute decision to visit the Devil's Tower, which is this big rock that juts out of the land in the total middle of nowhere. It really is quite impressive, and very bizarre. The rock isn't smooth, it looks like it is formed from columns of rock. It's quite large and very flat on top. We walked around it on a path. Mike thought it was much cooler than me, but both of us had kind of had enough when we were on the far side of it and as far from the parking lot as possible. I have to admit that the highlight for me was the prairie dogs that have built a city just inside the entrance to the park. They are so cute!

We drove into South Dakota and down to Mt. Rushmore. The hills around there, called the Black Hills, are oddly reminiscent of the monument, so at every turn you think you might see it. It seems like the sculpture was made to reflect the rocks around it, although I guess probably not. It's pretty impressive, but also kind of lame because it's surrounded by this horrible parking lot whose entrance looks like a toll booth on the highway. We parked on the side and hiked in the back, which you're not supposed to do but I would recommend (park in the lot for the "Washington profile view"!).

On the way there we also stopped to see the Crazy Horse monument, which is supposed to be bigger and better than Mt. Rushmore but is barely begun. I guess it's good that the Native Americans are being more ambitious and asserting themselves, but if your monument isn't complete, it just isn't as cool.

Then we drove down to the Badlands. I'm not sure what I expected there, and it's a really tough thing to explain. We went because our friends Sarah and Eric really liked it, but they had trouble explaining it too. It's rock formations, but in a really unique way, and with tons of colors from the minerals in the rocks, and right there at the edge of the prairie - there would be prairie grass right up to the edge, and then it would drop off in this ravine and a network of ravines and canyons ringed by peaks. It was a lot like Cappadoccia in Turkey, except maybe cooler. The thing is, my family flew all the way to Turkey, but it would never occur to my parents to say "kids, this year we're going for vacation to South Dakota!" It really made me think about all the natural beauty in this country.

We stayed that night in Wall, South Dakota, home of Wall Drug. I won't bother to explain what Wall Drug is, but it was worth a stop, especially in that land of nothingness. South Dakota is just miles and miles of prairie, which looks natural and kind of cool and doesn't seem to be used for anything. We mostly drove I-90 because it's the only road, and there were lots of exits straight onto dirt roads. It's a strange state.

The next day we drove into Nebraska, on the misguided assumption that there would be something more interesting there. Nebraska got both of our prize for most boring state. It's just grass, not even cool prairie grass, with some cows, and no interesting towns. There is no redeeming quality.

But we took our time because we decided to stop in Omaha to meet some of my mother's cousins. These are the children of my grandmother's favorite sister, but the their family and my mom's never really met. Four of the 8 siblings live in Omaha, and we met two. One of them, Marilyn, said she came to my house when I was little, but I don't remember. The other, Jim, has never met my mom. Jim's wife Nathalie made us dinner, and we stayed at their house. I have to admit to some apprehension ahead of time, but we had a good time and it was never awkward. It was a taste of America that we might not have had otherwise. These are real Midwesterners, Jim is an NRA member. They both voted for Bush both times. But their daughter is very liberal and is married to an African American from Alaska of all places. It was all a bit strange and random but nice at the same time.

The next day we had our next random encounter, with Mike's mom's roommate from college in Iowa. Jane and her husband Roger also cooked us dinner and gave us a flavor of the Midwest. But I have to say, I will no longer lump the entire Midwest in together. Nebraska is what I've been picturing all my life. Iowa was comparatively quite pretty and even interesting. There are green rolling hills and the population density was far above anything we'd passed through since Portland. Coming the route that we did, it felt positively Eastern.

We stopped in Madison County to see a bridge, which just looked like New England except people seemed to think it had a special significance because of the book and had graffitied the cheesiest romantic crap all over the inside. We also stopped in a series of little villages that are populated by direct descendants of the original German immigrants. Mike said there was something distinctly German about them, but I didn't really see it beyond the fact that they claim to still speak the language.

I'll leave it there for now, and will continue the journey as I'm up to it.

With love from Hopkinton,

Sarah

Starting the trip back east: Oregon to South Dakota

noreply@blogger.com (Michael A. Repucci) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:30:00 +0000

I'm getting totally overwhelmed with the blog. Sarah is better at filtering. We can't possible mention all the things we see and do, not even all the fun or interesting ones. There are just too many. So as you read, keep in mind that there's lots we haven't said. With that in mind, please see a couple new old posts below that I recently finished (Lakewood Church and California: the other blue state), they were posted in a funny order.

From California, we drove from the redwood forests up the coast of Oregon, catching a herd of Elk along the way, and many many miles of New England type rocky shores. In fact, much of Oregon looked just like Cape Cod or Maine. Sarah loved it; to me it was ordinary. But the sea cave full of sea lions (a different species than previous sea lions) was cool.

We stayed in Portland for a couple nights, where our friends Ruth and Dustin showed us around. Portland was cool and trendy, much as I imagine Seattle to be. There's this famous bookstore there, Powell's, that one could spend hours in. And cool public art that you can play with. The last morning we had to wait around a bit for my contacts to get shipped - let me explain.

In California, we hiked along the Big Sur river down to the ocean. It was a hot day, so despite the near ice cold water, I jumped in to the river at this point where it curved and made a whirlpool and deepened to more than 10 feet. You could jump off the rocks along the edge into what had previously been a very shallow river. Two other people were swimming too, though most people just sat around and watched as I stripped down to bikini underwear and jumped in. I was so excited, I forgot that I was still wearing my sunglasses, which were gone when I bobbed back to the surface. Then swimming through a couple more times for fun and to search for my glasses, which I eventually found, I managed to lose my contacts. Being late on a Friday, my optometrist was already closed, so I went nearly blind for the next five days, ordering contacts to be over-nighted on Monday, which didn't arrive till Wednesday. Ahh what a pain. Anyway.

So leaving Portland, we saw several really cool waterfalls, then drove through a lot of nothing until Spokane, Washington, where we had dinner. This reminds me. Road Food has failed us. It's biggest slight was in California, where the author insisted on "ordinary" food. We started realizing that she didn't necessarily pick the best food available, just the most edible ordinary American diner-type food. This works great in the middle of nowhere, but in cities and blue states, there are better options. And it plenty of middle of nowhere locations, she's left us high and dry, having not covered the regions we traveled, or naming once place over two day's worth of travel. Anyway.

We stayed the night in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, which pretty much started the wide open beauty of the US, in my humble opinion. I mean, the spaces just get enormous, and there's a disproportionate amount of beauty, especially in Wyoming. Between Coeur d'Alene - a beautiful lake resort community - and now - near The Badlands, South Dakota - we've seen the most beautiful, and the most boring, stretches of nothing in the US: Montana and the rockies, Yellowstone, grasslands, the Big Horn mountains, Mount Rushmore, and The Badlands, just to name the highlights.

The Badlands, which we just finished seeing tonight, are rather similar to the geological formations we'd seen 8 years ago in Cappadocia, Turkey. And the most interesting part for me is coming to understand, at least in part, why some people think it's not worth leaving the US. There really is everything available here. I mean, if you'd seen the Badlands, don't go out of your way to see Cappadocia. It's almost the same, minus the fairy chimneys.

Well, since I could go on for hours, I'll just stop now. Some little things though. I'd rather live in Montana if I had to live in an empty state. The people there are pretty cool. Wyoming gets the prize as the most empty state, which incidentally also has both extremes of the most beautiful and most boring landscape. And lastly, I'd highly encourage that everyone take a few months or more visiting the US, not just for the beauty, but also for all the different types of people and things. Some of it will be boring, but it's exciting even in the boring parts. Like the random Devil's Peak in the middle of grasslands in Wyoming. Wish I'd had time to do some climbing.

the true middle of nowhere

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:15:00 +0000

First, Michael says that he is no longer going to blog. He says he is too tired of traveling in the evenings to write about it afterwards, and I rush him too much in the mornings. Which is true, I do rush him. We certainly do not agree on how best to use the hours between 9 and 12.

Yellowstone is a very cool park. There are so many bison and elk that you literally become tired of them. At one point, there were bison all over the road and caused a big backup, and we got out and walked to see what it was. As I was walking back alone (Michael stayed with the bison), car after car asked me what the hold-up was. "Bison in the road" elicited huge signs of disappointment. Who wants a bison when they can have a bear?

We didn't see any bear, but we were lucky enough to see a wolf on our way in. He was white and out alone in the snow. You probably can't see him very well in the picture.

Some of Yellowstone is closed because there is still a lot of snow, but our timing was perfect: the road to Old Faithful opened the day we got there. Geysers are not as cool as bears, but they are cool. Some of them are really beautiful, with tons of colors around them. Old Faithful was faithful and shot off on schedule. It was the only geyser we really saw erupt, so it was cool.

We also drove over to the canyon, which was full of snow so we couldn't get too close. It was really beautiful, with tons of colors. The first waterfall took me totally by surprise--everything is so still in the snow, and so I totally didn't expect it. It gave that feeling of an early explorer encountering a waterfall--as opposed to our modern version, where the waterfall is marked on the map and we are waiting to be impressed.

We entered and exited Yellowstone through Montana, as those are the only entrances/exits that are open. This meant that, when we re-entered Wyoming, we were left feeling that it is the poor step-child of US beauty. That first stretch of Wyoming was the most dull landscape we have seen. But then the rocks started getting some iron in them, and when we turned onto a scenic road running through the Bighorn National Forest, almost immediately the landscape became quite pretty. Not the most spectacular in the country, but it held its own.

On the other side was the town of Buffalo, Wyoming, which seems never to have moved out of the 1950s. It was complete with drugstore cum soda fountain, and had a store called "The Office" in place of a Kinko's. No Walmart. In fact, Wyoming is the first place we haven't seen a Walmart. It's really like the world has forgotten Wyoming.

Since we weren't sure how we would spend a Saturday night in Buffalo, we went on to Gilette. I was concerned Gilette might be a large city, but that was a silly concern. We spent our Saturday night with the local ladies playing Bingo. Wyoming is also the first state I can remember in a long time without a smoking ban. And also the first without any immigrants, although there are a lot of Native Americans.

With love from Gilette,

Sarah

winding our way through the Northwest

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 04:37:00 +0000

At the risk of a laundry list, I will try to describe what we've done since I last wrote. I'll post lots of pictures to make it more interesting.

San Francisco is a beautiful city, it's hard not to like it. I managed to get my only sunburn of the trip there, as the weather was hot and sunny. We walked a ton, probably because I was desperate to avoid the car. We had a great time at the Farmer's Market at the Ferry Building, eating very well at all the stands. Then we walked through the center of town, through Chinatown and Market Street, and then took a bus out to the other side and laid in the grass with a view of the Golden Gate. It was kind of a lazy day despite the walking.

We stayed with a cousin of Michael's dad, who has lived in California for years. I'm not sure that I had ever met him, but we had a really nice time with him and his wife. They cooked us dinner, which is always appreciated during our long travels.

The next day we headed up the coast to see the Redwoods. We first stopped in the Humboldt Redwood Forest, and wandered among the trees. The trees have a way of dampening the sound and it feels very relaxing among them. There's also that inevitable feeling of being small around something very big.

We camped that night in the Jedediah Smith Redwood Forest. What we saw of it was less impressive than Humboldt, but it was nice (despite my whining about camping) to sleep in the forest.

Then we drove up the Oregon coast. Apparently I am a true girl of the Northern coast, because I really loved that drive. The rocks and the waves and even the grey weather were much more my style than the California coast. I told Mike I wanted to spend the rest of the trip there and then just fly home. (I had gotten very sick of driving by that point.)

We ended up in Portland, which sadly is not on the coast but is really a nice city. We have close friends from New York, Ruth and Dustin, who were from there and have moved back. They toured us all around, but mostly we just hung out the way we used to do in New York. Lots of coffee shops and good restaurants. It was a nice change of pace, and great to see them.

After a slight delay while we waited for a new pair of contact lenses to arrive by DHL (Michael had a slight mishap in the Big Sur River), we finally headed east. We took I-84, which I liked since we had been on I-84 in Massachusetts/Connecticut. I84 goes through the Columbia Gorge, into which drop some really beautiful waterfalls. Then it heads into the nothingness of Eastern Oregon, and then we headed north into the nothingness of eastern Washington. We managed to not take a single picture during our short time in Washington.

We spent the night in Coeur D'Alene (pronounced Core Dalaine), Idaho. There's a big lake there, surrounded by mountains. I can't say it looked that different from something in New Hampshire, but it was our one taste of Idaho so I tried to make the best of it. We also drove I-90 East, thus making it to my own personal "Mother Road" (just 3000 miles to Boston!).

The ultimate goal was Montana. I'm not sure when I got it in my head that it would be cool to drive across Montana, but that was an important part of this trip for me. As it turns out, Montana is not a long string of amazing mountain vistas like I'd thought. But it is extremely cool to be in a series of big valleys and crossing huge mountains, and the only cities you cross are less than 50,000 people. Mostly, actually, we passed towns of three or four buildings only. We had a nice first glimpse of the Rockies, which I realized I've never seen before. We also drove through a preserve for Bison, which are very very cool animals. They stand around like cows but they run like slow horses, and they are huge and look so cool!

Mentioning the bison reminds me that there were sea lions and elk on the coast, but it's starting to get difficult to remember everything.

Tomorrow we're headed to Yellowstone, so we drove as close to the park as we had time for. We're staying in ski country but the season is over, so I'm not sure there's more than one other person in this huge hotel.

With love from Big Sky,

Sarah

charismatic megafauna

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 15:27:00 +0000

What's cool about California is that it's an open-minded, cosmopolitan state with the natural wonders of a back-country. After driving up the coast from LA to San Francisco, I can see how, if you grew up here, you would think all other places are lame. Since I didn't grow up here, I would not agree that the California coast is the most beautiful in the country. I happen to be quite partial to Maine. But the combination of things here is hard to beat.

The highlight for me is definitely the marine wildlife. While I knew of a few places where the seals etc. hang out, the first ones we saw were at the recommendation of a sign on the road. The elephant seals were sleeping all over the beach, and the young ones were swimming near the shore. My New England mind still has trouble grasping the idea that no one feeds these animals in order to get them to put on a show for tourists.

We also saw sea lions (and maybe seals?) in Monterey, hanging out on the support beams under the docks. Little groups of them would show off in the water, but the big lazy ones would just hang out. I think people do feed these guys to get them to put on a show, but at least they're still wild.

We're in a bit of a rush this morning, so I'll leave it at that for now.

With love from San Francisco,

Sarah

California: the other blue state.

noreply@blogger.com (Michael A. Repucci) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 05:26:00 +0000

We started off from Massachusetts, drove through a sea of red states, and finally reached the blue "shores" of California. We stopped first in Joshua Tree National Park, camping overnight at a crowded but very nice no-hookup campsite. The Joshua tree looks rather like the famed Dr. Suess lorax, only in dull matte desert colors. Foolishly we only got one picture, and by far not the best. I was distracted climbing on all the rocks.

We drove the next morning to LA to stay with Sarah's brother Peter in Hollywood Hills. But before I put in my two cents on LA, a few little side-tracks. Everyone knows the smog is bad in LA; it collects there, trapped by the mountains, and the prevailing easterly winds. But driving over the mountains and seeing the change from crystal clear skies to the thickest haze I've ever seen in my life is just shocking (not even Cairo was as bad). No wonder California is motivated to be the environmental champions in the US - they've got some of the most beautiful nature and they can see the devastation humans are causing with their bare eyes.

Their first obvious attempt at being green were the use of windmills along I-10 just over the mountains outside of LA. Unlike Germany, however, who scatters a few, maybe ten, windmills over several square miles, California has crammed probably every single windmill in the entire state into this one valley. There must have been thousands of them. It's no wonder people protest wind farms in the states. What a way to destroy the beauty of the valley. And I wouldn't doubt that migrating bats do get killed in these windmills; they hardly have anywhere else to fly.

Anyway. LA is an environmental disaster, but I won't say more about that for the moment. Instead let me cover the obvious. We saw the Hollywood stars; there are tons of them. Everyone has a star, including Lassie, Godzilla, Kermit, etc. and actors, singers, and TV personalities that we'd never heard of, plus everyone truly famous. Mulholland Drive was nice, and Beverly Hills was nicer, but I much preferred Malibu Hills (or the hills over Malibu, whatever the name of the place), where houses were set in amongst enormous and frighteningly steep hills, but not packed in like sardines and guarded with 20-foot hedges.

It was great to see Peter, and of all the neighborhoods we visited, Hollywood Hills (where he lives) was definitely the coolest. The streets are very narrow and wind up the hills, lending the place and each house a lot of character and individuality. We also saw a lot of art in LA, and don't get me wrong, I love art, but great art can be anywhere, so why drive 3000 miles across the US to visit museums? I could go on and on comparing LA with NYC, but others have done that before, just watch Sex and the City. I'd rather have NYC any day, though I am jealous of the easy beach access.

My last rant on LA is the old wealth-over-poverty issue, and rather than rant, I will just say it makes me sick how large the gap is in the US. If it's that big in Germany - I don't believe it is - well, at least it isn't flaunted in the face of the poor who sleep on the streets and beg for food and money. (Yes I'm taking to you Mr. Getty.)

After LA we drove up the California coast to San Francisco, and can I just say, not fair. The east coast sucks in comparison. I ate one of the best steaks ever for dinner, before we stopped overnight to camp on a bluff overlooking these amazing rocky shores, thanks to a tip from our friends Sarah and Eric, who'd stayed there in the past. Who knew the central coast had such great beef? And they even prepared it as requested: rare. In those red states - I'm not naming any names - they seem to refuse to serve meat rare.

The next day, we watched elephant seals, sea lions, and harbor seals laze around the beach and docks, before heading into San Francisco, where we stayed with my second cousin and his wife. We spent the next day in San Francisco, and while I did like it a lot there, you can't compare it to NYC. Still, they had a semi-decent public transport, and the access to nature is far superior to NYC. We didn't really have time to get to know San Francisco the way I would have liked, and didn't get to do Napa or Sonoma, but I'd be happy to go back and spend a week or more there.

From there we drove further up the coast, into redwood territory, camping overnight amongst some of the smaller, but still huge trees. It's just amazing the amount of beautiful nature that California has, and more amazing still that they remain blue, which does wonders for the comfort level and food we experienced, even in small coastal towns. The whole state is definitely a place I could visit again and again.

New Pictures

noreply@blogger.com (Michael A. Repucci) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:24:00 +0000

We've added pictures to the past few posts. See below. Enjoy!

Sunny Southern California

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:36:00 +0000

We left Tucson for Los Angeles. We were going to drive the whole way, but Peter (my brother) had plans and couldn't host us until the following day, so we took a detour into Joshua Tree National Park. Much of Joshua Tree looks like the Tucson desert, or some version thereof. But then suddenly you hit some magical elevation and there are all these Joshua trees everywhere. I'm not sure what the link is between Dr. Seuss's the Lorax and the Joshua Tree--everyone seems to compare them, but I don't know if Dr. Seuss made the link explicit. In any case, it's a bit of an eerie (if false) feeling to look at these trees and pretend they're the last trees on earth. (Mike says it's a copyright violation to post someone else's pictures, so you'll have to search Google images yourself.)

We camped at this campside with two huge piles of boulders. There were lots of other people, and I don't normally like camping when I feel like I'm there with everyone else. But in the evening, when the sun is low, the Joshua trees caught the light perfectly and it was really nice to be there. We also hiked up a small mountain before heading back to the campsite for sunset.

Los Angeles is a total change from all that. There have been a few places we have been where I feel like you can really see how damaging we humans are to the earth, and LA is one of them. You drive over those mountains and all you notice is the smog.

On the other hand, LA is also the first place we've been since Pittsburgh where the people are "like us". This is the first time I haven't felt out of place, as if we come from two different countries. It's strange to have driven all this way and lived through all the space that separates the Northeast from California.

One of the first things we did was drive all the way to the coast. We sat and had a drink on the beach, and even though it was chilly it was that perfect blue sky that is the cliche of Southern California. The best part was that a school of dolphins passed by, really close to the shore. We could see them jumping out of the water and kicking up their tails. It was great.

Our time in LA has mostly been spent seeing art and hanging out with Peter. The museums here have some really great pieces, and the Getty center is an incredibly pleasant space to just hang out. It's cool that they have managed to create a space for fine art that has the feel of a spa or some expensive resort in the hills. It would be a great place to host an awesome party.

Peter has a really great house in the Hollywood hills that he shares with three friends. They live on this narrow street that looks more like Provence than LA. The landscape in LA is my ideal--steep green hills all over. That's exactly what I was missing in Berlin.

The other feature of visiting LA is being in the car. It is amazing that you can get on the highway at 2pm and it's stop-and-go traffic. It's also amazing that there are so many highways everywhere. It's such a different city than New York. I think it would take me a while to get used to. And can you really appreciate the sun when it's gorgeous every day?

With love from LA,

Sarah

mostly New Mexico

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 03:13:00 +0000

For some reason, it has occurred to me now to mention that Michael and I do not read each other's blog entries. At the beginning we were, but when you live everything together and then write it all down yourself, you don't really want to read about it again. Therefore, I apologize for repetition, and hope that his perspective is at least different (and therefore perhaps interesting).

I enjoyed the art in Marfa. None of the several Texans working at the various hotels we stopped in had actually visited it, and one described it as coffee tables painted silver and called art. He obviously hadn't been there--they were much too big to be coffee tables. The basic idea is that this artist bought an old military base and he and his artist friends did large-scale installation art in the buildings. The coffee tables were 100 pieces, each 41 x 51 x 72 inches but each slightly different. That was my favorite piece, but there was other cool stuff too. Another interesting one was a reproduction of a Lenin-era schoolhouse in disrepair, which has been left to further deteriorate since it was built in the 1990s. It reminded me of this Jewish girls' school that was opened as an exhibition space for the Berlin Biennial art show we went to in 2006.

On the way from Marfa we stopped at an observatory. I think star-gazing is cool, but telescopes during the day don't do it for me. But I guess we have to balance science and art on this trip.

Then we got to New Mexico. I really liked New Mexico. Since we barely saw anything and were only in the far southern part of the state, I'm not sure it's fair of me to decide that. But I like to think I have an innate connection to the state because my grandmother grew up there. Plus, I love Mexican food, and that's all we ate.

Carlsbad Caverns was really beautiful (I was going to say cool, but I think I'm overusing that word today). We were lucky enough to have gotten there nearly at opening, and were almost completely alone when we got down into the cavern. That was an amazing feeling. I kept thinking about how it must have been when it first opened as a park. And also what it must be like when there are tons of people and all their voices are echoing all over.

So I was impressed by Carlsbad, but White Sands was one of the highlights of the entire trip. I guess that's because we decided to camp. I'm a sucker for feeling like I have privileged access to something, and that's how you feel when you're completely alone in a national park all night. It was just us and one other guy camping, and we only saw him in the parking lot in the evening and on our way out in the morning. I told Mike that White Sands is one of the most photogenic places I've ever been. Every time I took a picture, I felt like I saw another view that was even better. The truth is that probably none of it captures the feeling of being out there all alone.

We drove from White Sands to my grandparents' in Tucson. On the way, we drove through a piece of Coronado State Forest. Honestly, I wasn't even going to mention it, but I happen to know that Michael did (I don't know what he said) and I want to give my version. Michael was navigating while I was driving, and he failed to noticed that the route he wanted to take was all unpaved roads. So there were were, half an hour from the interstate in the genuine middle of nowhere Arizona, and our choice is to go on or go back. So we drove on, for about 2 more hours. I have to admit that it was a very cool drive. But please don't tell Budget Rent-a-Car.

There was something strange for me about driving into Tucson, a city that I have visited so many times but only by plane. The idea that I could trace the road all the way back to my parents' in Massachusetts feels strange.

Tucson has mostly been for visiting and relaxing. My grandparents are 85, and it is really wonderful to see how they support each other and really keep each other going. For some reason I never really thought about it in previous visits. I hope I'm so lucky as to get to grow old with Mike (sorry, I know it's a cheesy note to end on).

With love from Tucson,

Sarah

Lakewood Church

noreply@blogger.com (Michael A. Repucci) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 02:51:00 +0000

As I mentioned in an earlier post, our primary reason for visiting Houston was to attend church at the largest mega-church in the world, Lakewood Church or Joel Osteen Ministries. They've got a congregation of over 40,000, and the Sunday morning service we attended was a more-than-half-filled stadium of about 9000-10000. If you'd ever like to know more specifically what the service was like, they broadcast it live on TV. To properly explain my experience would take me much more space than I'd like to spend writing now, but in short you need to know two things: (1) I was raised by a staunch atheist who regularly spoke about the evils of religion, and (2) I'm a scientist by training who's come to question the belief in natural law and wonder if/how/where faith could possible have a place in my life.

So when Joel first walked up to the pulpit and nearly ten thousand people stood at once to share in worship, a chill passed through me. It was almost frightening, and I seriously considered the horrible scenario where they suddenly decided that I was the devil incarnate. What would I do aside from be brutally mobed by 10000 peaceful God-loving Christians in the name of ridding the earth of all evil.

Of course I'm not evil, and neither we're they going to do such a thing, even if I were. Probably any large crowd united for one cause would have scared me a bit. But try to put this in context. Whether intentional or not, I was broght up thinking of Christians, especially the type who surrounded me, muttering praise to God and blindly folling a charismatic leader, as a group to be feared as much as Nazi's. Who knows what they would do if asked to in the name of God.

Well, the feeling finally passed, as the first 30 minutes or so of the service commenced with a pseudo rock concert, and my concern passed to the regulars whose hearing was most certainly being damaged by the intensely loud sung praise to God. I hoped they didn't think it wouldn't effect them because it was worship.

When Joel finally spoke, every fifth word was God or some other incantation thereof (Jesus, the Father, Him, etc.) but if you carefully substituted your favorite scientific motive instead, most of what he said was quite inspiring. In fact, if you allow for a liberally interpretation of what God is, then I could see totally agreeing with everything Joel said. He was really a good motivational speaker, charismatic, and dramatic. By the end, when he asked that people who lacked faith but wanted help finding it stand, I stood. See, I do want faith. Faith in my convictions, faith in this world and the people on it, and faith in God, if somehow that would help me.

But I don't want to go to church, and I don't buy most of what Christianity has to offer. Nor have I found an answer in Buddhism, Judaism, science, and many other religions. I wish I could just convince myself to believe, but instead I question, as a good scientist, and lacking an answer and faith I just feel confused.

Marfa, Texas to Tucson, Arizona

noreply@blogger.com (Michael A. Repucci) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 02:13:00 +0000

Marfa is an art community in the middle of the Texan desert. We stayed at the hotel El Paisano, where the film Giant, with James Dean, was filmed. A nice place, but actually the most expensive place we'd stayed (the last room in the cheaper place in town was taken just before we got there). The art was interesting (The Chinati Foundation), but not spectacular. Mostly it was weird to come across such an international crowd, and east coast food, in the middle of the Texan desert. Oh, and then there were the weird Marfa Lights. I have to admit, they didn't seem to be cars or houses, but I definitely wouldn't be surprised if they turned out to be some local's kids with flashlights.

From Marfa we drove down to Shafter, a supposed ghost town, which was a total disappointment. Let me say, we'd had in our head this old wild west kind of image, where the saloon and bank are on the same street, and the whole thing was deserted but left as is. Well that wasn't Shafter. Later on we stopped by Shakespeare Ghost Town and Stein's Ghost Town. Both looked more like what we'd imagined, but the former was fenced in and ran tours only on weekends, while the latter was closed for the filming of some low budget movie.

More exciting was the McDonald Observatory. I won't bore you with the details, but just check out this awesome telescope. It was a nice break from the art.

We spent the next couple days at the Carlsbad and White Sands. What to say? If you haven't seen them, go. They're really cool. Of course, if you've been in an unmaintained cave, where you get only the light of your own helmet, it's a totally different experience, but the sheer size is outstanding. Unfortunately, the more rugged tours were all booked. At White Sands - yes it really is white sand - we actually camped out on the dunes, and let me tell you, that was definitely the way to see them, alone through both sunset and sunrise. In between the two are a lot of desert, and though the surrounding mountains sometimes made for interesting views, the spaces in New Mexico and on through Arizona felt much bigger than in Texas, at least to me.

We took a detour through unpaved mountain roads in the south east part of Arizona, through the Coronado National Forest, on our way to Tucson to visit Sarah's maternal grandparents. I would have very much liked to camp at Coronado, as the sites were very remote and primitive, not RV campground hell. But with only six weeks, we can't see it all. It was great to see Ed and Eve again, who are in surprisingly good health for 85 years. They've been married for 63 years, and always seem to work so well together, rather like Sarah and me. Tomorrow morning we make the long drive to LA, where we'll visit with Sarah's brother Peter.

Houston to Marfa

noreply@blogger.com (Michael A. Repucci) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:58:00 +0000

In my last (serious) blog, I talked about Galveston and barbeque in Houston. Well, that pretty much summed up Houston. We spent the next day trying to figure out what to do in Houston, and repeatedly getting two recommendations: go to Galveston, and go shopping. True, Houston had some great shopping, but nothing we couldn't do back east. It was so strange that Houston could be so big, and have so little to do, even according to the natives. We did end up finding a very hopping brunch/bar place for snobby I-think-I'm-soooo-hot 30 and 40 somethings, mostly single. (BTW, these people exist in droves in NYC too, but we generally avoid their see-and-be-seen hangouts.) Of note was how integrated Houston seemed to be, with blacks, Hispanics, whites, Indian (dots not feathers), and others all found together at the restaurant and bars we went to; this wasn't the case in the south. The real reason we went to Houston was to attend the largest mega-church, Lakewood, for Sunday service (see a separate entry). Suffice it to say, it was an interesting experience, and perhaps explains why Houston was so damned dull.

We left Houston Sunday afternoon to visit Sarah's college friend Andy, his wife Shauna, and their 3-year-old daughter Irene. Irene was just the cutest, smartest, little girl. It was nice to catch up with old friends, and just too bad that we can't all live a bit closer together (they're moving soon to Arkansas).

We drove the next morning to Austin, and spent several hours there soaking up the culture. It is truly a very liberal island in Texas, full of many eastern comforts and ammenities. But it's still Texas to an easterner. At a totally superficial level, it still has the huge spaces and cowboy boots, so come on. We drove on, in late afternoon, to San Antonio, in time to have an authentic Tex-Mex dinner, and a stroll around the River Walk. The River Walk is really pretty at night, if a little too perfectly polished, like a Disney World rendition of itself. In the morning it wasn't quite as spectacular, and the chemicals they use to keep the algea from growing in the river are more apparent, tainting the river green in color. The Alamo and Mission San José were both pretty cool, and the review of American history that they provide, I think, can help somewhat explain modern Republican motivation, even though the events occurred several generations earlier.

We drove from San Antonio 414 miles (666 km) to Marfa, along route 90. This part of Texas was actually quite beautiful in parts, and didn't feel quite as big as we'd prepared ourselves for. There is nothing but ranches the whole way, interspersed with small, nothing towns. The mountains and canyons in the last 100 miles, whose rivers feed the Rio Grande, were especially beautiful. More about Marfa later, and pictures too, but our internet connection isn't so good here.

a few days (too many?) in Texas

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:49:00 +0000

Somehow, nearly the whole length of Texas has passed underneath us without me posting anything. Time seems to pass rather quickly here (despite Michael's much-commented-on previous entry). I'll try not to dwell on any one thing here so as not to drag this out too long.

The first point to make is that Houston is an extremely dull town. However, we had the good fortune to be in attendance at a live performance of Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church. According to Der Spiegel (always a reliable source on American eccentricities), Lakewood is the largest church in America, maybe the world. We estimated that about 10,000 people were there with us, in a former basketball stadium that has been converted into a Christian fortress. The service we attended was one of four they do each weekend. Joel spoke, and his wife spoke, and everyone prayed. But the most amazing part was the rock concert, complete with lights and band, and (nearly) 10,000 people singing along. I can't even really explain what it was like. You had to be there.

But then, I kept thinking that it wasn't that different than when I went to see Matchbox 20 and sang along with all the songs. These songs just happened to be about god (and weren't as good, in my humble opinion).

One more thing I do have to say about Houston is that it is the most integrated city I have ever been in. Everywhere we went there were whites, blacks, and hispanics, all in the same restaurants etc. Even at Lakewood.

That night we stayed with my friend (from Williams) Andy and his wife Shauna. I haven't seen Andy in ages, and have never met his now 3-year-old daughter Irene. It was a short visit, but it was really nice to see him and Shauna. They even treated us to our first homecooked meal of the trip (and an incredible chocolate cake). And Irene was great. We had a good time.

The next morning we took a quick pass through Austin. Austin is kind of quaint, if you can say that about anything in Texas. There were some cool places to hang out, and it has a nice homegrown off-beat feel that we haven't experienced anywhere else. Everyone says Austin isn't Texas, but I don't know about that. Just because you didn't support Bush doesn't mean you're not in the land of cowboys and sprawl.

We left Austin and drove to San Antonio. I liked San Antonio a lot too. The much-touted River Walk has a bit of a Disney feel, but really is quite beautiful and extremely pleasant to walk around. Everyone says the Alamo, which is right downtown, is smaller than you expect, and yet I wasn't prepared. It looks like a dollhouse compared to the buildings around it. Like a play church that some rich person built for his daughter on their big estate.

This morning we went by another of the missions on the "Mission Trail", on which the Alamo also sits. This one, San Jose, is still quite intact and you can see what it must have been like when the Spanish were there converting Indians. The whole thing about Texas independence and the history of that area glazes over the treatment of the Indians and, for that matter, the Mexicans. It's surprising that, with such a large hispanic population, they haven't been more heavily criticized for that.

After San Antonio we took a long drive to Marfa, way out west. Despite all you can say about the size of Texas, actually we didn't mind the drive out here. It was 6 or 7 hours, but we took a very fast back highway and passed through a variety of scenic places. Mountains, desert, artificial lake (dam), small towns, etc. I suppose if you had someplace to be, it would feel long. But for us, it was quite varied and not a bad drive.

Marfa is a bit of an artists' colony, tho not very interesting so far. But we did drive out to view the "Marfa Mystery Lights" tonight. They look like car headlights out on the horizon, but apparently have no known cause and can't be traced if you try to find them. The most entertaining part were the men with thick Texan accents behind us, commenting on what they saw and what they thought about it.

With love from Marfa,

Sarah

Texas is...

noreply@blogger.com (Michael A. Repucci) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:56:00 +0000

a

really

big

state

full

of

ranches.

This

is

a

blog

based

simulation. =)

Crazy 'bout Cajun Country

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah) — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:19:00 +0000

Cajun country is my new favorite spot. True, I was probably severely influenced by the food--fresh seafood everywhere. But it really has a great feel, and is a lot of fun. It looks quite unassuming. In fact, when we drove through the guidebook-recommended towns, we didn't want to stop in any of them. But we had planned a night in Cajun country and had to pick one.

By chance, we ended up at the Bayou Teche B&B, and met Mary-Lynn, the proprietor. Mary-Lynn could make anyone love the Cajun country. She had plotted out a three-day itinerary for us and probably would have gone further if we'd actually stayed. Her B&B was outside our budget, so she offered us her "hunting lodge" (more of a mobile home by the side of the road) for "whatever your budget is". She sent us to Crazy 'Bout Crayfish for dinner, then met us there and drove us out to her favorite little nightclub, where she chatted with friends and we listened to a great jazz/blues ensemble. And then she told us when to wake up to catch the Zydeco breakfast.

Zydeco (pronounced ZIE-deko) is the black cajun music. People come from all over the country to listen to it, and to come to this breakfast. The band started playing at 8:30am, and people were dancing by 8:35. I ate eggs over-easy, served on top of some kind of cajun biscuit and smothered in "crawfish etoufee", which is this creamy sauce with crawfish tails. Then we danced. Incidentally, we had an appetizer of crawfish etoufee over jalepeno cheese corn bread at Crazy 'Bout Crawfish, before our 5 lb. of boiled crawfish for dinner. So good...

I could go on and on about the food. On the way out of New Orleans we stopped at this shack by the side of the road (recommended by Road Food), which was packed, and I had fresh shrimp cajun with jambalaya. Yum....

And now we're in Texas, where the only "vegetables" on the menu last night were (I kid you not): cole slaw, potato salad, baked beans, pinto beans, or jambalaya (rice with meat). The menu warned "our vegetarians" that even the BBQ sauce had meat in it--as if a vegetarian would be there to begin with.

Anyway, I highly recommend Cajun Country. Stay in Breaux Bridge with Mary-Lynn.

So far Texas has failed to impress me. It's big and flat and hot and humid. I thought the beach in Galveston was ugly, but I've never been one for city beaches. Some of the old streets and mansions were nice. Houston feels like one giant suburban sprawl. But wow, the people are nice. In Germany, if you smile at someone, they look at you like you might be crazy. In Boston, if you smile at someone, they smile back. Here, if you smile at someone, even just on the street corner while you're waiting to cross, they say "hi, how are you?" I don't even know the correct response to that. "I'm fine, how are you?" Right there on the street corner?

With love from Houston,

Sarah

The big lone star state.

noreply@blogger.com (Michael A. Repucci) — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 04:03:00 +0000

The saying that "Everything is Texas is bigger" already seems to be true. We crossed in this afternoon, and the wide open spaces already loom large, foreboding a very long drive with little to see. We headed along the Gulf coast, over a free (state-funded) ferry, to Galveston, on our way to Houston. It was nice to see the ocean again, to dip my feet in. Galveston is basically the Ocean City Maryland of southeast Texas, but with many really cool Victorian homes - finally a new era of architecture. Something about the place just suits me. The few people we've met have been really nice, and in a way that doesn't seem to have the underlying fake-ness I find with southern hospitality.

Houston is huge, but the first thing I noticed was a much higher standard of living. Now granted we could have driven through just the nicest parts, but we drove through the supposedly nice parts of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, and still saw a lot of poverty. Maybe Texas just does a better job at segregating its poor - I wouldn't put it past them - and the oil rigs really are all over the place, so you know they've got to have plenty of blue-collar workers. But so far, the whole state looks much wealthier on the whole. Guess I will have to update you on this. Last note: I'd had enough Cajun and southern cuisine to last me for quite a while, so the ribs and beef brisket were a nice change. Too bad for Sarah, 'cause the list of vegetables included baked beans, potato salad, jambalaya (Texas style), and other non-suited-for-vegetarian "veggies"!

A crazy night in cajun country!

noreply@blogger.com (Michael A. Repucci) — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 03:01:00 +0000

If you couldn't tell, I was done with New Orleans, almost before we got there. On the way out, I had more beignets for breakfast - Cafe du Monde, much as I love it, was too crowded to bother, but Cafe Beignet served similarly yummy fare - and an oyster Po Boy for lunch - Louisiana Seafood Exchange/Crabby Jack's is another point for Road Food. Up river from New Orleans are many old plantation homes, including the one pictured in "Gone With the Wind". I'd already seen enough antebellum/plantation homes, so I will let Sarah describe that for you. I'm ready for a new style of architecture.

After my disappointment with New Orleans, aside from the jazz, Cajun country was a very pleasant surprise. You can see the influence of Cajun culture on New Orleans when you visit, but only faintly. The real thing - see the swamp tour from a previous post and what follows - is much more to my taste. The town we ended up in, Breaux Bridge, is the site of Louisiana's big yearly crawfish festival. Aside from that it looks like nothing special. But fortunately, we happened upon a very large and friendly B&B owner who took us under her wing.

It took patience and much time to get things moving with this wonderful woman, but in addition to letting us stay in her hunting lodge at our named price - the B&B was out of our budget though very beautiful - she toured us around a local lake where hundreds of Egrets were nesting, recommended the Crazy 'Bout Crawfish restaurant where Sarah satisfied her crawfish craving, took us twelve miles out to the local Friday night Cajun/jazz/blues hang-out, and insisted we get up early for the Zydeco breakfast at Cafe des Amis. Though all three of our guide books recommended this breakfast, the tip to arrive at a painstakingly early 7:30 AM was extremely worthwhile, as we would have otherwise waited in a very long line. We enjoyed an odd/amazing Cajun brunch - my dish was a surprisingly good crispy fried dough filled with a savory spiced shredded meat and topped with powdered sugar - then danced to a live Zydeco band on a packed floor, all early on a Saturday morning! (Zydeco is a fun, jazzy type of Cajun music, with Black roots and a strong rhythm, whose central character comes from the sound made by rubbing a spoon up and down an old metal washboard.)

The New New Orleans

noreply@blogger.com (Michael A. Repucci) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:51:00 +0000

So we've spent 2 nights, about 1.5 days, in New Orleans. I had visited twice before, for the annual neuroscience conference, both times pre-Katrina. Suffice it to say that nothing noticeable has changed, at least to my memory and in the downtown areas that we walked through (Garden District, Warehouse District, French Quater, and Faubourg Marigny). It's a pretty city in parts, but often right next door to a pretty part is a crappy looking part. I don't think that was Katrina's hand as much as it is piling poverty upon richness - a common theme in the south.

New Orleans definitely isn't a place I could live. It's missing something for me. But we enjoyed the cajun food (Mother's), the jazz and blues (Snug Harbor), the coffee and beignets (Cafe du Monde). I'm looking forward pushing off, deeper into cajun country. It's hard to get to know locals in a place where everyone's a tourist; I'd rather stick to the smaller cities and towns.

post-Katrina New Orleans

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:42:00 +0000

We have spent a day and a half in New Orleans. Overall, I'm not sure what I think of it. Parts of the city are really beautiful. Oddly, the buildings remind me a lot of Antigua, Guatemala (or not so odd, since apparently New Orleans is also Spanish colonial architecture). Bourbon Street is a bit of a drunken mess, but people are so happy that I find it hard to be annoyed. In general, it is quite simply a city in a good mood.

At other moments, though, I found that I failed to be enchanted by it. Sometimes it seems very dirty, and the really popular places are so overrun with tourists that they are no longer pleasant and relaxed, like this area is supposed to be. The food is good (and a very welcome break from the smoked meat we get everywhere else), but it's so heavy that we skipped dinner last night.

So while it's been really fun, I don't really mind that we're leaving today.

A few items of note. It's a little over two years since Hurricane Katrina, and in general you don't see evidence of it at all. Sure, there are some collapsed houses, but not very many, and if you didn't know there was a hurricane, you might think it was something else. There are piles of tourists, especially considering it's off season and the middle of the week. But houses are on sale EVERYWHERE. In the French quarter, near the convention center, in the poorer areas of town and on the outskirts. Nice houses, broken down houses, everything. It's like they finally got their insurance money and have decided it's not worth it to stay.

On a lighter note, we went to a jazz club last night. Unfortunately they had a blues guitar instead of jazz, but it ws still fun.

With love from New Orleans,

Sarah

en route to New Orleans

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:02:00 +0000

We arrived yesterday in New Orleans, but I'll save the description till after we leave. This is our first stop for more than one night--yay, we don't have to drive at all today!

Yesterday we toured another home in Natchez before leaving. It was recommended by the tourguide at the octagonal house (Longwood) as being a more archetypal house. Since all these houses were "town" houses, as opposed to being on plantations, they aren't what I really picture of old Southern homes. This one was more like where we got married--big house on lots of land. Except since it was taken over by the National Parks Service, they didn't convert the land into a golf course.

On the way into New Orleans we stopped for a swamp tour. The swamp (or really bayou) was really beautiful. It's really peaceful to drift along among the cyprus trees. Our tour guide liked to hear himself talk and told us all sorts of Cajun tall tales, which was an experience in itself. I think the highlight was the alligator on a log. (In answer to a comment, no, we haven't seen any other wildlife yet.)

With love from New Orleans,

Sarah

The long road to Nawlins

noreply@blogger.com (Michael A. Repucci) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:13:00 +0000

I can't really say too much about the rest of Alabama, or Mississippi for that matter. There just isn't much there, and most of the nothing isn't even beautiful. Jackson is hardly worth pointing out, aside from the fact that we stayed overnight outside the capital. Road Food pointed us to a good place for breakfast, but we didn't linger, enjoying instead the slow drive down the Natchez Trace Parkway - pronounced to rhyme with matches - which runs from Nashville TN to Natchez MS. The surrounding state forest was quite beautiful, and though we could have and probably should have camped, we didn't, staying instead in one of the sketchiest motels yet.

Natchez has many old town houses (antebellum homes I think Sarah keeps calling them), though most aren't any nicer than the old houses we'd already seen in Nashville and Huntsville, with the exception of a few amazing houses - Longwood (an unfinished octagonal mansion) and Melrose (owned and maintained now by the national park service) - which were set upon much more land than your average town house, more like a plantation home. We also watched a spoof play on the "Pilgrimage", the time in the year when people come to Natchez to learn about and celebrate southern culture, which made me feel almost as uncomfortable, as a Yankee, as I did watching "Bowling for Columbine", as an American, in Paris.

We left Natchez to catch a swamp tour outside of New Orleans, which was really awesome. The swamp, in its unbridled wild nature, has a real beauty and elegance to it. And we finally saw our first live wild animals (after the hawks in WV): a large female gator, a small baby gator, a great white egret, and many smaller bright green tree lizards. Our guide was a real storyteller, bitter and yet content with his lot in life as a Cajun-American.

We drove along backroads (US-90) from the swamp tour in Slidell to New Orleans, past what was presumably a heavily damaged area (now replete with new construction), past the lake over which Katrina built up speed before wrecking downtown New Orleans, and parked ourselves at a nice hotel in the center of the French Quarter, just off Bourbon Street. A little pampering after our long southerly journey!

the Old South

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 03:59:00 +0000

Today we drove through Mississippi. Mississippi appears to be mostly forest. Much of our way followed the Natchez Trace, an old trail that had been used by the Indians and then by traders, who would float their goods down the Mississippi River and then walk back home. There were various ancient sites of interest along the way, but otherwise nothing but trees and small clearings. It was quite beautiful.

One of the things we saw was an old plantation home that had burned down. All that's left are the corinthian columns standing in a giant rectangle. It was very odd walking among these columns, as if you were at an ancient Greek ruin in Mississippi.

We also visited a couple of ancient Indian sites. I hadn't realized that there was anything left of pre-Columbus civilization. They're just grass-covered mounds, nothing too exciting. But there were signs that explained about the culture a bit. It reminded us of visiting ancient Saxon sites in Germany.

We arrived in Natchez (rhymes with MATCHES), Mississippi, in the afternoon. Natchez is in the midst of its annual "pilgrimage", when people dress up in Gone With the Wind outfits and open their homes to the public. We toured the largest octagonal house in the US. Only the ground floor was finished before the war, and the rest is just a facade with bare wood inside. Quite cool.

The finale of the day was a play called "Southern Exposure", which takes place during the pilgrimage. It was a comedy, supposedly making fun of the rich old families. But the audience - mostly old women - laughed most at the jokes against Northerners. Meanwhile, we seemed to find the anti-racism commentary much more entertaining than they did.

With love from Natchez,

Sarah

'Bama for Obama

noreply@blogger.com (Michael A. Repucci) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:26:00 +0000

I kept imagining Obama being pronounced to rhyme with Alabama as we drove through on our whirlwind tour. What a great campaign slogan. As it was we still didn't see many campaign signs or support - haven't since we left the north-east - except for Ron Paul. That's really just an aside, but I don't have much to say about 'Bama.

Huntsville was/is the site for a big NASA research center, where a lot of the Saturn and Apollo tests were conducted. But the museum was a total disappointment, at $20 a person, and the only good exhibit was an entire Saturn V test rockets (one of three in the world, used for tests before the actual launch, and nearly flight ready itself). The old houses were much cooler. We happened upon a tour of one house given by a very energetic southern woman, who told some fabulous stories about the house and its prior owners.

The road food, at this point, has passed beyond the realm of normalcy. It's still really good food, but at places that you'd never given a second thought to in the north-east. Dinner in Tennessee - which we took early in Nashville before driving down to Huntsville - was cafeteria-style, foods kept heated in metal tubs behind the counter where you slide your tray. Breakfast, actually, is what we'd call greasy diner food in the north-east. I like it that way, but I don't know how many times I can eat breakfast like this. And dinner last night was basically a fast-food barbeque joint. Fast food barbeque?!