Honda-bonding

The first car I owned was a red VW Dasher with a hand-cranked sunroof whose gearshift came right out of the car whenever an adolescent male drove it.  “It’s something about the way athletic young men shift,” my mother said, when she guessed that Garret and not I had been driving when the latest event occurred; my brother had presented the detached stick to her a few weeks earlier, with a desperate plea for help.  The car lasted me only several months in my very late teens.  It was a pretty disappointing vehicle.  The second, which I purchased when I was about 35 and had moved from big city to small city, was a three-door Saturn coupe with an electronic sunroof.  (That third door was a brilliant engineering decision.)  I bought it when it was two years old, and drove it for ten years, until some landscaper in an oversized pick-up truck, misunderstanding the ‘stop’ part of ‘stop-and-go traffic,’ rear-ended me on route 66[*].  Suburban living requiring a car, I bought the Honda.

I chose the Honda because it had a stick, low miles, decent mpg and a sunroof, and the color was interesting without being show-offy.  Also because trusted mechanic Ralph put the kibosh on:  all Volkswagens, most Mazdas, all Nissans, all Fords and every other make that isn’t Honda or Toyota.  Boring, Ralph.  Very boring.  Boring, though, is so much better than frequently requiring expensive repairs.

So I’m not a car person.  I don’t name them (M.N.’s Jaguar was ‘Miss Kitty;’ my nieces name all the family cars, things like ‘Buttercup’ and ‘Azanda.’)  When my car aficionado friends (who mostly don’t name their cars) asked me whether I liked my new car, I was a bit stumped.  I mean, it runs.  And it stops when it’s supposed to.

Having this conversation with a woman who once told me she’d spent a sunny Saturday afternoon washing her car’s engine, because she likes to do that herself, you know? is talking at something like cross-purposes.  Prior to that conversation, I had no idea you could wash a car’s engine.  I would have guessed it would be bad for the engine to get water and soap all over it.  Another friend built her car from a kit.  Another enters his – engine shining – in car shows.  When a group of these – let’s call them aficionados, though ‘loonies’ keeps coming to mind – decided we should all get together and drive these fancy vehicles through the Virginia countryside, now that the Corvette’s scratch had been buffed away and the antique Jeep’s engine tuned and the Toronado’s paintwork shined, I was pleased to be able to announce that I’d just vacuumed the Honda.  They all looked at me funny, and then K.C. patiently said, “You could drive the Cobra.”

After almost 9,500 miles and six weeks of multi-hour use most days, I now officially like my car.  It did everything it’s supposed to, it got decent mileage, it never scared me with weird noises at night in isolated places.  The sunroof is irritating, as it sucks my hair out and makes a lot of noise, which the Saturn’s never did.  The mileage isn’t as good as the Saturn’s.  When I get up over 65mph or thereabouts, the steering wheel agitates a bit before settling down, and sometimes the dashboard makes rattling noises.  The former, per Ralph Jr., poses no safety hazard but could be cured with four new tires.  The car is boring as can be – try counting all the blue Hondas you see someday when you’re driving a fair distance.  But there are so many things a car can be that are so very, very much worse than boring.

The car did not like the steep hills we encountered in South Dakota, and I would have to gear down to maintain a reasonable speed at times.  Those times usually took me by surprise; it seems the long, slow climbs are more challenging than the short, steep ones.  More probably I just pay better attention on short-and-steep stretches.  We did just fine in the Arizona and Tennessee hills.  I’m sorry I didn’t get to visit Denver and see the Rockies on this trip, but I suspect the car is better off this way.  I’m glad, too, that we didn’t meet any snowy or icy patches.  I’ve never had any problems with those in NoVA, but they tend to be brief and not very snowy or icy, so I’d rather not test things in Montana.

It probably helps that I am, mostly, a conservative driver.  I like to stick to about 10% over the speed limit, so six or seven mph for most of this trip.  There were moments when the big digital display started with 9, but they were brief and apologetic.  In my entirely subjective experience, I was more likely to pass other cars than to be passed through the midwest, while in Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma and from Florida up the east coast, I got passed more than I did the passing.

I like to drive with the sunroof open and, often, music playing, but I haven’t yet been taken snuck up on by a siren-sounding emergency vehicle.  My ears are good enough, so far, to handle all the inputs.  The first time an ambulance comes up behind me without my noticing, I’ll turn down all the volumes.  I do not mess around with emergency vehicles.

The ex once joked that if I ever got pulled over for failure to stop, he would tell the patrol officer, “But sliding right through that intersection must be okay, officer.  She does it all the time.”  That’s a little bit truer than it should be for a few of NoVA’s many, many, many, many gratuitous stop signs, like the one near my old apartment that was there solely in case someone was coming out of a little-used office-building parking lot.  I actually proposed to the ex that we should get out there with a blowtorch and cut the useless thing down, but he declined.  Seriously, you do not need a three-way stop for a driveway.

I stay to the right except when passing.  If someone’s tailgating me, I pull over if I can – and kinda maybe hit the brakes a couple of times if I can’t.  I rarely tailgate myself, and when I notice myself doing so, I know I’m over-stressed.  I use my turn indicators, even when changing lanes, unless there’s no one around but the truck I just passed, and it’s way back there now, although often I use the blinker even then. 

I suffered no accidents on the journey, and had very little worry that I might.  I am not a nervous driver, but try to stay alert, and extra aware when I see deer crossing or falling rock warnings.  That said, I agree with critics who posit that we get far too many road signs, signals and warnings in the U.S.  The one sign that caused me a brief alarm was in Muleshoe, Texas, that cautioned drivers about ‘Deep Sand’ at the side of the road.  It’s one I’d never seen before, and I had a quick flash image of the swerve to avoid a deer, and then the Honda up to its hubcaps in sand.  That’s why we upgrade to the AAA Premier membership before embarking on a cross-country road trip.

My closest call was actually pretty nervous-making:  it was nighttime on route 101.  A pick-up truck passed me, moving pretty briskly, and then slowed down so we were even about a mile later, he in the passing lane and I in the travel lane.  Next to each other.  So, you know, he shouldn’t have changed lanes right then.  But he did.  He started sliding back into my travel lane while I was still in it.  So my first thought is, ‘He wants to kill me!’ and my second is, ‘Hey, dummy, pay attention,” which I think while hitting the horn, in time to wake him up to swerve back before the collision, so everyone’s fine.  Rattled by the inattention, but fine fine fine.  And I’m especially glad, because I’ve gotten to like the little Honda, and I don’t want random sleepy or distracted or tense strangers pitching it onto the Pacific cliffs.

Funny.  When I bought the car in 2011, it was a hunk of metal.  This morning, I heard someone on ‘Car Talk’ say he has a Honda Civic that he loves, and I could relate.

---

[*]This is not the famous rock-and-roll route 66 in the western US, but the infamous traffic-choked route 66 in suburban Washington, DC.

Day 32: Manchester, Tennessee, to Adel, Georgia

Thursday 24 October –  Before I fell asleep in the Manchester motel, I wrote in my journal a bit:  “Goodness, I am sleepy, and goodness what a lot of work it is downloading pix and naming them and writing up my log.  And goodness how out of shape my poetry muscle is.  I hope it will get healthier & springier. ...  I’m glad to be going to Florida.  I would have missed it if I hadn’t, and ignored the whole southeast.  Right now I’m in Tennessee, where I’ve never been before.  And the wifi won’t work & I’m very, very sleepy.”

Boring, right?  Except that it hits so many elements of my 9,500-mile, six-week exploration.  I’m writing and I’m paying attention to myself.  I’m in a place I might never have visited if not for this journey; I’m headed to a place I have been before, with a chance look at it in a new way, to stay with a dear friend with whom I don’t talk often enough.  Some things aren’t working the way they should, but that’s okay, and I’m focused on what I can achieve.  I’m happy, and I’m getting plenty of rest.  One of the biggest mistakes 21^st-century westerners make with their health is stinting on sleep.

autumn foliage in Tennessee

So all told, I remained in great shape on the morning of Day 32, as I hit the highway to continue south, and a bit east.  I was glad not to skip the southeast, and especially so as I noticed that this rural part of the country reminds me a lot of New England, the one area I thoroughly missed on the journey.  There were deciduous trees – oaks, and something whose leaves were maple-shaped but not maple-colored – and the fields were small, and the hills frequent.  (Frequent hills are more a northern- and western-New England thing, not the norm along the coast.)  Also frequent were signs announcing that I was entering a new watershed; they came along every ten to twenty miles.  They gave the name of the watershed, and then the plea or admonition, “Help Keep it Clean.”  How many people think, though, about the effect of their actions on the watershed unless there’s water actually right in front of them as they flick that cigarette butt or squirt the fertilizer onto the roses?

Funky little orange mushrooms in Tennessee.

The road twisted frequently, unlike the superhighways of the west, and I was surprised, somehow, by the frequency of those hills and mountains.  Road signs gave the grade of particularly steep stretches:  for “6% Grade/4 Miles,” the speed limit drops to 55 for cars and 20 for trucks.  My Honda’s cruise control wouldn’t hold on those steep downhills; I’d set it for 61 and watch it edge up toward 70, then try holding the car in third gear.  Sometimes that worked; sometimes the brakes came into play.

close-up mushrooms

The grades required a good bit of attention, but it wasn’t all hills, so I could look out at the passing landscape occasionally.  Even under solid cloud cover, the scenery was lovely.  There was one scene that struck me especially:  on Nickajack Lake, I saw a small island that seemed to be composed entirely of trees, crowded closer together than you’d imagine they could be.  No dirt, no grass, no rocks:  just trees.  That it was on a lake called Nickajack didn’t make it less memorable.  I’ve just looked up that lake – it’s real; I didn’t make that name up.  It was created when the Tennessee Valley Authority dammed the Tennessee River in 1967, which is actually rather exciting.  I learned about the TVA in middle school, probably around 1977, and I honestly didn’t know then, and still don’t know today, why I learned about the TVA.  But I’m pleased to have seen, after all these years, one of its products.

I was headed toward Chattanooga, which I learned about at home as a small child, because there’s a song about it that also includes the word “choo choo.”  There is also, a billboard informed me, a newspaper called ‘The Chattanoogan.’  Those are two good reasons to learn about Chattanooga.  Drawing closer to the legendary city, the road changed; there was more traffic, more billboards, more signs advertising Days Inns and Cracker Barrels and Antique Malls.  Too much traffic, too many billboards and signs.  Maybe Georgia’s to blame.  There was definitely a sign that welcomed me to that state, with the sentiment, “We’re glad Georgia’s on your mind.”  However, there were also signs that said Chattanooga was still ahead, and however many times I thought, “Chattanooga, Georgia,” and even said it aloud to the windshield, “Chattanooga, Tennessee,” still sounded right.  I had said both about a dozen times each when I saw a sign welcoming me back to Tennessee.  Odd.

Chattanooga, seen from Lookout Mountain, and a very
long way from New Mexico

Having returned to Tennessee without having more than barely left it, I gave serious thought to checking out Lookout Mountain and Ruby Falls, the latter apparently contained within the former.  After about 700 signs in 100 miles, I’d been hypnotized into thinking I had no choice, and took the exit just north of Choo Choo Town.  Driving up Lookout Mountain, I flashed back about two weeks and 4,000 miles to a wrong turn in redwood country.  The trees here were much different, of course, and the drop-off to the left much steeper, but the road was the same twisty, turny, narrow street, closely veiled with tall trees, with seemingly no one else around.  As I type this, months later, I’m thinking about driving through the southwest desert – apparently flat, definitely dry, with cacti and scraggly bushes adorning an endless horizon.  If the places I’ve been are so very different, could I possibly be the same?

Could anyone visit Ruby Falls, or any magnificent cave, and emerge entirely unchanged?  This is a commercially-operated cavern tour, featuring something ludicrously billed as the largest underground commercially-owned waterfall in the United States that’s accessible to the public, or some such.  The number of qualifiers in the statement makes it distracting from the solemnity of what is, actually, a glorious sight.

The Falls - a narrow stream of water,
but impressively high.  And beautiful.

Lookout Mountain and the Falls are so heavily advertised, and the sales pitch so aggressive even after one enters the castle that provides access to the tour, and the different packages available for different entry fees so poorly explained, that I walked out of the castle as soon as I figured out that my lowest-priced option was $18 and I’d have to wait 45 minutes to spend an hour and a half on a guided tour with a couple dozen other people.  I’m like that.  But from the castle’s front steps, I got a view of the valley and the city and the Tennessee River, and I realized there are too many wonderful things in the world I haven’t seen, and I might be standing on one of them.  I chose not to leave without checking, and I’m glad I did.

Ruby Falls stalactites and other formations

The tour-guide patter was pretty silly.  Most of what he told us was covered by the small display in the waiting area that covered the discovery of the cave and falls.  The mountain has a natural entrance to a series of caves that people have explored and used for centuries, from pre-Columbian times.  However, in 1905 a railroad closed the natural entrance to the Ruby Falls caves, so spelunkers could no longer get access to them.  In 1928, Leo Lambert and a group of cavers tried to drill an entry into the known caves, and accidentally hit a series of new caves, without a natural entrance and so previously unexplored.  They crawled through narrow tunnels on their bellies for hours, discovering gorgeous rock formations and, eventually, the Falls.  Mr. Lambert brought his wife to visit a few days later – in 1920s dress, she wriggled on her belly through tiny rock tunnels – and named the Falls for her.  More exploring, more drilling, elevator installing, castle building, and ta dah!  The caves opened to the public in 1930.  I feel like I should have heard of them before driving by them by chance.  Have you ever heard of them?

Moss on stalagmite

The tour begins in a boring, human-carved and –dynamited tunnel, featuring big blocks of limestone with sharp angles and discrete electric lights.  As the guide starts his patter, the snake of tourists winds around a corner or two, and then – the good stuff starts.  Multi-colored, glossy smooth limestone formations in flowing sculptures, weird repetitions, beautiful shapes and ugly shapes.  I do not understand the need to find familiar shapes in random, surprising rocks.  However, Ruby Falls’ formations include an alligator, a cactus, angels’ wings, tobacco leaves and a burro’s behind, each with a sign to let you know what nature intended when sculpting this limestone.  There’s moss growing underground because of the electric lights, and although it’s completely unnatural I think it’s beautiful.  And the Falls themselves, with a well-composed sound- and light-show that genuinely enhances their grandeur, are marvelous.  The owners offer tours by lantern light on Friday nights; I think that could marvelous in a very different style.  If you'd like to see all the pictures I took in the cave, you're welcome to look here.

The guard warned us before the show started that the lights and music switch off automatically, so no use begging him for one more minute.

Chattanooga, not far from a BofA and Community Pie.

Back up in the sunshine, I gazed around at the valley a bit more to re-acclimatize to outside.  Then I scooted into Chattanooga, where the mid-afternoon downtown was very sparsely populated.  It looks like it’s already undergone some kind of urban renewal, but there were only a handful of people eating at the artisanal pizzeria and brewpub, and few other options for lunch.  What is up with Chattanooga?

Georgia was back on my mind pretty quickly, and not the kind of old-South Savannah or new-South Atlanta that pop into my mind first when I think of the state.  This was lushly forested, bottom to top, hills and mountains.  This was mountainy-man country.  The trees were mostly pine, and the deciduous trees were mostly varied shades of green, from light yellowy-green to a dark, rusty green.  I wonder if they ever get autumn colors around there.  They still had summery flowers; exit 296 on the northbound side was awash in long-stemmed flowers in myriad shades of purply-pink.  I would not have thought there could be so many variations on purply-pink.  And the road signs say, “Caution:  Bridge May Ice in Winter,” rather than the “Bridge Ices Before Road” common in my hometown.  Imagine a winter where ice is only a possibility, and not a certainty.

If I were a mountainy man, I would know how to forage the
Georgia forests for little orange mushrooms.  Or something.

It is really easy to hear pop-country music on the radio in the United States, and only very slightly easier in rural Georgia than in Washington, DC, or eastern Massachusetts.  So I listened to a lot of it as I drove, and at about 8,000 miles hit my limit for the second time on the trip.  I think it wasn’t just the fantasy romance that the country crooners pitch, but the juxtaposition of that fairy tale with the cruder but no more fictional fantasy of the adult superstores, which got more numerous in the southeast.  I shoved a disc into the player, and cleansed my brain and emotions with cynical Los Angeleno whammy wavers Concrete Blonde and their Anne Rice inspirations.  I felt better at once – but I still yearn to be someone’s dream come true and he mine.

Atlanta, shortly before sunset.

Traffic around Atlanta was heinous, but I got a good view of Olympic Park as I dawdled past.  It was actually a bit uplifting to see the monument.  I do not care for traffic, for crowds, for lines, but.  But.  I do not like going more than a day or two without talking to anyone but bartenders and desk clerks.  There’s got to be some balance.  The clerk at the Days Inn just off the interstate in Adel, Georgia, did not have time to chat.  I fell asleep looking forward to seeing A.K. and J., and entirely unaware that the next day would also bring Mr. John the Pickle Man, the most entertaining stranger I encountered on the whole trip.

Day 31: St. Louis, Missouri, to Manchester, Tennessee

Wednesday 23 October – Some parts of this Elizabethan Progress I planned carefully, especially in the early stages as I had my flight to Fairbanks booked, and lots of friends who needed to know when, exactly, I’d be barging through their front doors.  Once I got back from Alaska, though, things got a lot more ad hoc.  There were deadlines, like Day 28 needed to be Kansas City, so I wouldn’t bump up against M.N.’s weekend guest and marathon partner.  Day 29 needed to be St. Louis, when three friends were all available for dinner.  Between Fairbanks and Kansas City, though, I mostly planned as I went along, and after St. Louis, I had no idea how I’d get home.  Via a slight northern curve, as recommended by Mapquest and a kind neighbor who wanted me to ‘give Indiana another chance?’  Or I could take an almost-as-short route through the Kentucky bluegrass.

But then A.K. dropped a note inviting me to Sarasota.  If only I weren’t so ready to be home, and so unwilling to add an extra thousand miles of driving to the trip.  I did not turn down the invitation right away, though; I’ve learned a thing or two about these signs from the universe.  At some point on Tuesday night, as I pondered whether to stay another day at M.N.’s before heading home, I suddenly realized with perfect clarity that only a fool would skip the chance to see A.K.’s new home in Florida, and have whatever adventures might offer on that journey.  So I wrote to warn her I’d be there in three days, enjoyed a late-night chat with Mr. N., and went to bed excited and content.

Zoo duck, safe from dogs.  One hopes.

Wednesday morning started with a revivifying wrestling match with the N’s pool cover, and then 30 minutes of swimming.  That’s right:  late October, swimming, outdoors, St. Louis.  The pool cover, like fancy, unburst-able bubble wrap, did a great job of keeping the water warm.  I ought to look into joining a swim club; I love it so.  Back in the house, showered and clothed and ready to go, I opened the freezer in their kitchen to pull out my cold packs, and saw a duck.  It was a gosh-darn entire duck, with all its plumage, frozen whole.  I suspect Mr. N. uses it to train the dogs, or something.  One of them shows promise as a hunter.

For me, it is very weird to see an entire duck, with all its plumage, in a home freezer.

All the big cats are beautiful to me, but there's something
about these rosettes - and the 'tear tracks' on cheetahs -
that's especially alluring.  I still don't understand why
some people want to own a wild cat like this at home.  Did
you not notice the claws?  The powerful jumping muscles?
The stretch and reach and powerful jaws?

I had booked a reservation at The London Tea Room a few days earlier, as they require advance notice to cut the sandwiches extra small.  With the decision to boot-scoot Sarasota-wards, I phoned in to move my meal to sadly early for tea, and then set off to the wondrous St. Louis Zoo.  The zoo is not only wondrous, but free to all (though the off-street parking is painfully pricey).  They have a well-regarded cheetah conservation and study program, and great displays, from American Wood Ducks (and American termites – I never bother with that exhibit) to Malayan Sun Bears; from the painfully unattractive Bat Eared Fox to the silly-looking Grevey’s zebra (sorry, but their rear ends?) to the magnificently beautiful jaguar.  You can look at the hippos both above and below-water, thanks to a well-placed and extremely sturdy glass wall.

My luck was in, and all the cats were out, mostly basking in the chilly sunshine – except the cheetahs, but I was booked to meet them up close in their native land in a few weeks, so that was okay.  I put my 24 zoo photos online; you can look at them here.  There was so much to see, and for the good of the animals they’re well spread out, so there I was, back on the phone, changing my teatime again.

I learned about The London Tea Room from someone posting on The Uncrushable Jersey Dress, where tea comes up a lot, and had been looking forward to visiting for about two years.  This is mostly because I love Tea The Meal – so soothing – but also significantly because this particular tea room’s menu says things like, “Strawberry Salad:  Fresh sweet strawberries tossed with mixed greens and pecans in a strawberry vinaigrette, garnished with honey goat cheese, made from the elusive wish-granting, peace-loving honey goats of Zembla.  No extra charge.  8.95 USD.”  Droll, yes?  Of course, I didn’t eat the salad, just miniature sandwiches, a scone and some shortbread.  But I did get a white tablecloth, and a proper napkin, which the lunch-eaters around me did not, and the scone was great.

Now, at my pace, the 1,000-mile drive to Florida warranted two nights Econolodging, and I had a few oddments of food for motel meals.  But I needed a loaf of bread.  I figured downtown St. Louis, which housed the tea room, would have an artisanal bakery somewhere close at hand.  This downtown was a lot like Kansas City’s; a retro-yet-timeless style, with lots of brownstone and brick.  However, while there were more hip cocktail lounges and sushi bars than seemed sustainable, bakeries were thin on the ground.  A couple of tea room patrons (the staff, apparently, commuted from elsewheres, and got their carbs in-house while working) recommended a restaurant that might help, and I set off on the search.

I found a lousy grocery store – corn syrup in everything, although cole slaw, peanut butter and bread do not need corn syrup – and, after that, an independent bookstore.  The bookstore clerk suggested the wine bar next door, which had a sister restaurant that baked bread in-house.  The wine bar suggested the sister restaurant, which was just a block away.  The sister restaurant, in the after-lunch lull, had a bartender who checked with the non-retail bakery next door and then proffered half a loaf of whole grain, sliced.  That, folks, is how we get the marketing done in St. Louis.

Au revoir, St. Louis -- photo taken one-handed out the sunroof, maintaining a very conservative following distance
behind that truck.  If you've never seen it, you might be surprised how beautiful the St. Louis Arch is.

Illinois farming country in autumn.

It was very cloudy and a bit chilly as I headed east into Illinois in the mid-afternoon.  The cornfields soon returned, but here the stalks were all dried up and dead, and frequently interspersed with stubble fields, bare fields, and fields with summer-green shoots of something unidentified poking from the earth.  These big, flat fields, under a huge sky, were all bordered by deciduous trees with green, yellow and deep purple-red leaves.  And they got pretty as I moved further southeast, and the clouds cleared, letting in the sunshine.  That was more what I’d gotten used to; I had absurdly good weather almost every day of my six-week trip, and overcast St. Louis came as a surprise.  But sunshiny Illinois reassured me – it’s St. Louis, not me.

Illinois, however, was making me drive 65 miles per hour.  After over a month of 70 and 75, I felt like I was plodding.  The mid-Atlantic area, though, where I live and will do most of my driving in another week, limits driving speed to 55 in most areas.  I had a momentary worry that I wouldn’t be able to hack it, but then remembered that it’s really, really rare that I’m trying to get 400 miles before bed.  So I figured I’d probably be okay.

There’s a note in my journal that reads, “sunlight on water.”  I don’t know why I wrote that.  I wish I did.  I bet the reason was very good.

Actually taken just outside St. Louis, but it gives an
accurate idea of the Illinois/Kentucky trees in late October.

I do remember the fields turning to trees, and trying to peer through the trunks – at a sedate 65, that’s manageable – to see whether there were fields behind.  And the trees turning back to fields, and the sign advertising a Giant Superman Statue in Metropolis, Illinois, at the southern border of the state.  I was not even vaguely tempted to stop for the Giant Superman Statue in Metropolis.

The southern border of Illinois is formed by the Ohio River, and I crossed the river, into Kentucky, via a long bridge across the wide river; it’s about three-quarters of a mile.  The sun was dropping into the water off to my right, and the bridge has two steel arches, one at the beginning and one at the end.  I think those elements have something to do with keeping the whole structure up.  They are very mechanical, very engineered, and yet often so very beautiful.  I know I gasped as each metal hump swooped up before me, with the river on fire to the west.  I want to go back and do that again someday.

In Kentucky, the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln (as the welcome sign tells travelers), I had a moment of déjà vu.  The approach into Paducah, Kentucky, which looks too big for just 25,000 residents, was just like the approach into St. Louis from the west via 64/40; that mix of woods and offices and highway signs promising suburban comforts a short distance from the exit ramp.

In fact, one of the Food Next Exit signs included the logo for Showme’s, a restaurant I, who spent at least four weeks a year, and usually much more, in Missouri from 2004 through 2008, had never heard of before.  Missouri is famously the show-me state:  “I’m from Missouri,” you can say when you’re feeling skeptical, and if anyone seems confused you can add the kicker, “so you’ll have to show me.”  So why am I just finding out about this chain now, and in Kentucky?  Sadly, Showme’s doesn’t seem to have understood the original Missourian concept very well.  I’ve just looked up this chain, and it seems to be run on the Hooters model, with beer and wings on the menu and not much on the waitresses.  Cleavage wasn't what the Missouri people were necessarily demanding to see.

Yuk.  The National Quilt Museum seemed like a better bet.  Especially since seeing some of D.B.’s quilts (you remember D.B., back in Seattle) and hearing about her friend’s quilting machine.  However, it was 5:45pm, and I was unwilling to risk exiting, driving who knows how far to the museum, and finding out that it closed at 6:00.  Or wasn’t open on Wednesdays, or something.  But that makes another good reason to head back to the Illinois/Kentucky border country someday.

Other attractions I chose to skip included numerous vineyards.  There were a lot advertised on the highway signs in Illinois and Kentucky, but setting aside the whole drinking-and-driving question, when time is limited, I prefer to spend more of it on zoos, tea rooms, stubblefields and driving than on drinking midwestern wines.  Not that there aren’t probably some excellent ones – c.f. Augusta Winery, mentioned in the Day 30 post – just that there are probably a lot more sub-excellent ones, and often little to tell the difference until you’ve paid your five bucks for a tasting.

So drive I did, crossing counties via the Tennessee River, which wasn’t as broad as the Ohio, but still impressively wide.  I always play the license plate game in my head, albeit in a very distracted manner, when I’m on the road, and tonight in this Kentucky corner I noticed that the plates around me were overwhelmingly Illinois, Alabama and Tennessee, with the locals apparently busy in some other part of their state.  I wonder if that’s real, or if I wasn’t paying good attention (good enough to write a note about it, anyway), or if it was a one-time fluke.  Before I could solve the question, I noticed a billboard for Trail of Tears Park.  That would be another great place to explore, if it weren’t late, and I had a big stock of anti-depressants.  Seeing the sign on the highway, as an ‘attraction,’ was enough to shake me up a bit.  It’s like seeing a billboard advertising Dachau, or Nanking, or Hiroshima when you’re not expecting it, thinking about cheap motels and gulf-side beaches.  I do think it’s good for me to get jerked out of the quotidian and pleasant, and reminded of the too-frequent and brutal, but I doubt those will ever be experiences I actively seek.

Not long after, with no river, no warning, I was – blam – in Tennessee.  And Nashville was not far over the border, spiky and glittery and really rather elegant looking, especially in contrast to the billboards and chain stores of its outskirts.  I thought about stopping in the city for the night, so I could take a look around in the morning, but I was in no mood for urban cheap-motel prices.  Also, I really dislike the name ‘Murfreesboro,’ and wanted to get the town, not too far south of Nashville, behind me before I fell asleep.  About an hour past Nashville, I found a Quality Inn with Roman-style columns and friezes, a Sistine Chapel print, and a Grecian ruins print in the lobby, and a six-foot-tall Buddha-head fountain right outside.  I believe one of the Buddha’s powers is protecting travelers from irrational fears of Murfreesboro, which put me in the right place.