Two More Days to Go, I Hope!

We're in Fort Worth this evening, after the day that represented probably the shortest drive of our journey (just from Texarkana to here). We rolled into Dallas around lunchtime and went to the West End area, which Mike had fond memories of from his days at EPA; as it turns out, however, all the retail stores in the former cracker building are now defunct. The restaurants are still in the area.

Best of all is a WONDERFUL new zoo/aquarium called the Dallas World Aquarium. It's an indoor rainforest on multiple levels. We saw birds in free flight (including a Sadie but I didn't get a good picture), some toucans, spoonbills and other things; and lots of other creatures: sharks, manatees, little monkeys that look like lions (I forget what they are really called). Best of all was a giant octopus that was being fed at the moment we were watching the tank. Mike was taking about a 10-minute movie but I finally told him to knock it off because nobody, not even on YouTube, was going to be interested in a 10-minute movie of an octopus eating!

It was definitely the best aquarium I have ever been to, including the Monterey Bay one.

After the Aquarium we went to the Ripley museum. No matter how many times I go to one of those I still enjoy going to those. I used to like to read the Ripley books when I was a kid, along with the Book of Lists and the World Book Encyclopedia. My favorite thing at the Ripley museum was the two-headed baby, or, if you like, the one-bodied babies. I like to ponder how much of a person you have to have in order to count as two separate people.

Fort Worth has a pretty happening downtown, with a ton of restaurants and at least three theaters. We had barbecue, and I wish we could have seen an improv comedy show but unfortunately it was for 18 and up only.

Tomorrow is Mike's birthday, and we hope to make Odessa by evening!

Graceland: More Tasteful than I Thought

I've watched a few episodes of MTV Cribs in my time, and Elvis's spread was much smaller and less garish than the digs of many a rocker or rapper. Yes, he had a fake fur "jungle" room, and a pool room completely decked out in shirred curtain fabric, nd a TV room with three televisions in the wall, and his own raquetball court, but anyone who had that many gold records gets cut a little slack.

After Memphis came Little Rock and the architecturally interesting Clinton Presidential Library, suspended over the Arkansas River. IT was a fun exercise in personality cult construction with an orientation video so moving that it could bring burly men to tears. My favorite aspect of the library was the lifesized oval office. It made me want to celebrate with a good cigar.

Tonight we had dinner at another Roadfood special, Bryce's cafeteria in Texarkana, TX. Tomorrow, vast stretches of my least favorite state in the union await!

I heart Memphis

We pulled in to Memphis around lunchtime today and had lunch at A&R Bar-b-cue, which came highly recommended on roadfood.com. It did not disappoint.

After that, we headed for the downtown. Memphis has an attraction on mud island, right along the Mississippi River, which I'd heartily recommend. It's a river park with a huge--like 5 blocks long--scale model of the Mississippi, that you can walk and splash in, curated with as much as you'd want to know about all the headwaters and every little stretch. At the end there's a huge fountain, Lake Ponchartrain, full of splashing kids.

The park is accessible by monorail and there is also a museum of river history and an amphitheater with concerts.

I particularly liked the museum, despite the fact that it was obvious that the museum has not been updated since the early 1980s. My favorite was a "theater
of disasters," covering every eventuality from cholera to boiler explosions to the 1927 flood, all illustrated with contemporary woodcuts etc; i told Mike it was disaster porn. :) The museum covered every aspect of the Mississippi river and its people, from the Native Americans to the explorers to the shipping to the role of the area in the Civil War to the advent of the blues.

Because it was sunny today but is supposed to rain tomorrow, Graceland got put off until the morning. We did drive all the way over here from Cookesville listening to relevant XM radio channels, however. There is of course a blues channel (74), but did you know there is an all-Elvis, all the time channel (20)? It's better than it sounds.

Cookesville, TN

We arrived yesterday afternoon in the beautiful city of Charlotte, NC, which appears to be the banking capital of the universe. The AAA guide says that there are 9 major banks headquartered there. It's a lovely, new city, with neighborhoods full of little mansions, and lots of flowering trees.

We spent the afternoon at the JCC with my friend from college and her baby daughter. What a nice pool--with a big Jewish star painted on the bottom (funny!). It also had a playground full of splashing sprinklers and knobs to turn to make water come out, and Evan was walking around with a purple bucket on his head for a helmet, making the water spray everywhere.

My friend and her husband grilled us a great dinner and then hosted us overnight in their lovely home; then, this morning, we got to visit Imaginon, Charlotte's absolutely beautiful children's library/theater. I would be at that place every week if I lived in Charlotte.

After we left Imaginon, we headed toward Tennessee, and pretty soon I was forced to take the wheel for Mike's involuntary nap. There followed several hours of the windiest, greenest, granite-iest interstate that I have had the pleasure to traverse. It's only a two-lane highway through the Smoky Mountains. It was pretty exciting to drive it, plus we were listening to Obama's tele-press-conference on the XM Radio, so that made it even more interesting. :)

We finally emerged onto the flatter plains of Eastern Tennessee, and let our geek flags fly with a visit to the American Museum of Science and Industry at Oak Ridge, just above Knoxville. This was of course, like Los Alamos, a WWII "secret city," but this one was for the enrichment of the uranium that was used in the second atomic bomb. They had a great display all about the building and operation of Oak Ridge, and then they also had a little boxlike house that you could walk through, all kitted out like a 1940s house, just the same as the houses in which the Oak Ridge workers had to live.

When we finally left Knoxville, it was battering down, so we had to re-evaluate our plan to press on to Nashville. Cookesville, TN is a city with a very cute, old-fashioned downtown where we have stopped for tonight. Tomorrow we press on to Memphis and the obligatory cheese-fest that is Graceland.

On to Charlotte, NC

Our goal today is a shortish drive, to reach Charlotte, North Carolina. We're going to see and stay with a friend of mine from Tufts whom I haven't seen since we graduated back in 1990! It seems incredible that so much time has elapsed since college graduation, and I'm really looking forward to having an opportunity to catch up on everything that has happened over those many years, and to show off my family and meet hers.

I'm not sure what the wi-fi situation is going to be this evening, but just in case I don't get to update before tomorrow evening, our plan for Tuesday is to press on with another long day of driving (it should be about 7 hours, just over 400 miles), from Charlotte to Nashville. This route takes us up and over the Appalchians, and through the old stomping grounds of Mike's ancestors from before they migrated to Texas and subsequently Oklahoma.

Greetings from Troutville, VA

We made 430 miles today, stopping only in Harrisburg PA (lunch) and at Natural Bridge,VA to see the 215 foot tall natural granite bridge that Thomas Jefferson used to own back in the 1770s. The farmland of PA is pretty boring, but the mountains of Western Virginia aren't bad. We had a conversation about how Lewis and Clark must have reacted to seeing the Rockiesfor the first time, when these gentle rolling hills were all they had previously known of mountains.

We saw Natural Bridge because it used to be one of the only tourist attractions if the Early American Republic, along with Niagara Falls, Auburn prison, the prison in Phila, and the US Capitol. History geek gets to drag everyone else along.

Beginning Our Cross-Country Journey

We will be setting out this morning for our cross-country journey of 2500-odd miles, or as Mapquest likes to estimate, 39 hours, over the next eight days. We're not going to be going exactly five hours each day, however. Today's goal is to reach Roanoke, VA or thereabouts. I got up this morning and packed the car myself while Mike was still asleep. Normally he likes to do this because he has the kind of engineer mind that is good at recognizing patterns. But I knew I could do it faster. :)

After the trunk was packed he asked me if I had checked to see whether there was room in the spare tire compartment! Um, no, I didn't look, we are not putting anything in there.

I wrapped some little presents for both of my travelling companions, so they will have something new to open most days of the journey and it will be a little less boring. My mom did that when my sister and I were 5 and 3 and we drove down to Florida as a family (although that was such a complete disaster that she and my sister and I flew back up to NJ again and my dad drove the car home by himself!). Evan got some books and MIke got a book and some new CDs.

The Gates Affair

I find myself particularly interested in the story of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Harvard professor of history and friend of Barack Obama's who found himself arrested by a Cambridge police officer, after the officer followed up on a neighbor's complaint that two men appeared to be trying to break into a house (a house that turned out to be Gates's house).

There has been some interesting debate on the nature of the case. Was it racial profiling? Was the Cambridge cop at fault? Is race still a factor in policing in America? (duh).

Here's my breakdown of the situation.

1. If I lived in a house in Cambridge, and I lost my key, or my door was stuck, and I were breaking into my own house, I would surely want a neighbor to call the police. That, to me is a sign of a neighborhood in which people care about crime. In contrast, my neighbor in Las Cruces two doors down has been broken into several times and nobody called the police (probably nobody saw). I'd rather have a two-minute discussion with the police than have all of my things stolen.

2. However, I will fully accept that race placed a role in the neighbor's decision to call the police. So did gender, I assume. I'm thinking nobody seeing a short white lady trying to break into a house would make a phone call. So race was implicated from the beginning, but the other option was for the neighbor to do nothing, and I don't like that either.

3. When the policeman showed up, it is unclear which of the people involved started the pissing contest that ensued--Dr. Gates or the policeman. It is legitimate for a policeman to ask to see ID--but if that ID was shown, that should have ended the matter. If it did not, the policeman ought to have been disciplined and never should have arrested Dr. Gates no matter how huffy he was at that point.

4. But it would not surprise me to find out that this did not happen. Dr. Gates is a scholar of African-American studies, fully steeped in the terrible history of infringements of civil rights in this country. Given that the entire episode was all too familiar to him, he may have assumed bad faith on the part of a police officer who is responsible for an equal-opportunity response to home break-ins. I am not ready to assume bad faith yet, because I would hate for the logical conclusion to be that police officers don't respond to reports of crime for fear of being called out as racist.

I thought the most intelligent comment given so far in this affair was that by the mayor of Cambridge, Denise Simmons, who is herself African-American. She said that she is reserving judgement, waiting to talk to all of the parties involved, and determined to find out how the situation went wrong, so that Cambridge can ensure that the breakdown in communication that clearly occurred doesn't happen again. That's a point of view that I happily endorse.