Skyring on Route 66

[Skyring]

On Friday, I'm heading off on a trip I've dreamt of for a bloody long time. This is the big Route 66 run, Chicago to LA. The Great American Roadtrip.

With the kids and a couple of friends.

I've got a blog here which I've used for planning, and most likely I'll add in updates from the actual trip as I can.

The guts of it is that I'll be attending a convention in Washington DC two weeks from now, and when I made the decision to attend, I also noted the possibility to do Route 66 from Chicago west. Turns out that after booking with Netflights, the cost of having the car sent back - regardless of whether the car actually changes locations, they still charge you for it - is about the same as driving it.

So I decided that I'd drive to DC and back from San Francisco. SF because I like it better than LA, and I'd be able to do the Pacific Coast Highway drive.

I looked around for people to share the driving with, and my two twenty-something kids put up their hands, roped in a friend, and I found another friend from New Zealand. That's for the trip east, and we're going to be covering an almighty distance in twelve days. A fair bit of Route 66 included.

The trip back, well I've only got one confirmed roadmate, but she's a good one, and we did a little bit of Route 66 in 2009 between Oklahoma City and Tulsa. We enjoyed that so much we decided to do the whole lot.

Flights. I've got a return ticket CBR-SFO organised. The kids will be travelling with me on the way over, but head off to New York after the convention and will be making their own way back, via that big Qantas leg JFK-LAX-SYD.

I've got us in a Dash-8 Q400 shuttle to Sydney, leaving at 1030. We'll have two and a half hours transit in Sydney, then the long flight to San Francisco, arriving about an hour before my New Zealand friend arrives from Auckland. She's a Christchurch resident, and will be glad to escape the months of aftershocks. San Fran will suit her just fine!

I've dropped back to Gold, and none of my fellow-travellers are QC members, so we'll miss out on lounge access on the way over. I'm going to particularly mourn the Sydney First lounge! Oh well.

Don't care what seats we get on the flight to Sydney, but I've put a bit of effort into getting good seats on QF73. By a stroke of extreme good fortune, we've all scored those PE seats in the Y cabin, more or less together. I'm really keen to get a bit of rest on the flight, because once we've hooked up with my New Zealand mate, who arrives an hour after us, I'll be collecting the van and driving to Sausalito.

With five in the party, I want something pretty large, and much as I like the Chrysler 300C, having three across the backseat, sharing with a packed load of luggage, it's not going to be the ideal vehicle. I've got a Dodge Caravan organised, able to seat seven, but I reckon we can do five in comfort and slide the bags in around us.

We've got a day to recover from the flight and prepare for the trip, and then we drive drive drive to LA, west to Alburqueque, down to New Orleans, across to Cape Canaveral, up to DC via Charleston. Lot of driving, but we'll have lots of drivers.

Beginning Friday, expect a continuing series of updates. I'm going to try something different this time around: short bursts of events as they happen, rather than list everything that happened each day. Paragraphs rather than pages.

Wish me luck!

 

[drron]

Good luck!
I am sure you are going to have a great time.Love driving around the states.Have probably driven most of Route 66 but not all at the one time.Looking forward to your reports.

 

[kpc]

Another Skyring TR to look forward to

 

[TonyHancock]

That is one heck of a journey, but I reckon it will be fun.

Looking forward to the trip reports.

 

[NM]

I've got a Dodge Caravan organised, able to seat seven, but I reckon we can do five in comfort and slide the bags in around us.

This is how you pack the bags into a Dodge Grand Caravan when traveling in the USA . That is luggage for 7 people traveling for 3 months!

 

[TonyHancock]

This is how you pack the bags into a Dodge Grand Caravan when traveling in the USA . That is luggage for 7 people traveling for 3 months!

I can't believe you couldn't do that with carry on luggage!!

 

[drron]

This is how you pack the bags into a Dodge Grand Caravan when traveling in the USA . That is luggage for 7 people traveling for 3 months!

how do you travel so light!:shock:
It is luggage for 2 people after shopping for 3 weeks in the states surely.

 

[Heleigh]

Agree with you drron

I sure the photo is not including the roof rack.

Also will be looking forward to TR

Helen

 

[NM]

how do you travel so light!:shock:
It is luggage for 2 people after shopping for 3 weeks in the states surely.

Well, it was like this:

Large blue case on left (vertical) - Mrs NM's Parents sharing single case
Red case on bottom - Mrs NM check-in bag
Small black bag held in by strap - Mrs NM's carry-on bag
Small red case at top - Mini NM#3 (same size as two blue cases on right)
Black brief-case - traveling picnic set including plastic plates, cups, cutting board, cutlery etc (checked-ion for flights obviously)
Two small blue cases - Mini NM #1 and #2
Charcoal bag - Mine!
Small black bag on bottom right - my carry-on bag

The three Mini NMs each had a small backpack for carry-on that they had with them in their seats in the Dodge Caravan.

I was so impressed by the amount of storage space in this vehicle that not long after returning we purchased the closest relative to the Dodge available in Australia, which due to some extra innovation has even more storage space (under the floor where the middle row of seats can fold into).

 

[Princess Fiona]

Super impressed NM The Shrek family of 6 are restricted to 3x 74cm spinners + carryon regardless of destination or length of trip.
Looking forward to the TR Skyring

 

[Skyring]

One day to go

This time tomorrow I'll be in the usual panic, cramming cables into bags, checking that I've got my passport, shoving frantic undies through the drier, drinking dregs of a large cup of cold coffee, making last minute love to the wife, wondering how it will all fit in the car etc.

Thanks, NM, for the shot of the Dodge Caravan. I've been in something like this two years back in Missouri and was impressed at the comfort and the vast amount of stuff it could hold. Not too bad to drive, either. I've got a video I shot somewhere in Oklahoma panning around the cabin, showing one driving, one filming, two asleep and one watching a movie on the overhead screen. I'm not allowed to link to the video because one of the sleepyheads forbade it, but it's a comfy vehicle.

I've been steadily nailing down the itinerary and making bookings here and there. On the way east, we'll have me, my two adult kids (son and daughter) and two unrelated friends, so we'll need five beds. This generally seems to translate into either hostel bunkrooms or three motel rooms.

New Orleans has been the most difficult. Either there are no rooms available for the selected night (Saturday), or the properties have a string of bad reviews. Finally found a place at the airport. Noisy and a long way from Bourbon Street, but affordable and clean. The best line from one of the trip reviews of a budget place was a warning from the desk clerk when asked about local attractions. "Sure you can go out at night, but you won't be coming back!"

Charleston wasn't difficult, considering it's the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. We've got five bunk beds in the noisiest room of a hostel.

I've got San Francisco, DC and Kansas City booked. Everywhere else, I figure we'll play it by ear.

I've been printing out booking confirmations and filing them away in a document wallet. This will be my master resource for the trip. Got the GPS loaded with an American map, filled a portable hard drive with movies ripped from a rental service, and wondered about what else to do. (Lots.)

I've had my last taxi shift for a while last night, done my banking, told the bank I'll be in the States for five weeks, got our luggage out, run a stream of laundry through the machine, checked our seats, registered a bag of BookCrossing books to release on our journey, charged all our batteries, made a note to go out and get a haircut, buy Tim Tams, visit the sale at Kathmandu, and booked a table at a good restaurant in town to farewell the wife, who will be staying at home.

She doesn't like my style of travel. And I can't say I blame her!

 

[Skyring]

An echo on the line

Hey, can you guess where I'm calling from?

The Las Vegas Hilton! Just the way it worked out. Great rooms for $50 each. Couldn't resist.

I'm working on the intervening days, but my next post covers most of yesterday. In between we flew into SFO, met our mate from New Zealand, picked up the exact van we wanted, drove to Sausalito, had lunch, checked in at our hostel, dinner at Fishermans Wharf.

Next day we rode cable cars, took a Bay cruise, explored bookshops, had another FW dinner and just had an amazing time.

Next day was the trip down the coast, which thanks to road closures wasn't as much coast as the Salinas valley. Cheap hotel and a late night drugstrore shopping frenzy.

 

[Skyring]

Monday 4 April 2011

All Comedy, All the Time. 1440 on the AM band coming out of LA, we've got channels full of comedy on the satellite radio, but it's funnier as the signal crackles over the mountains on the way to Vegas.

I'm chuckling away at crackhead jokes, freeway jokes, everything but blonde jokes. There's jokes I've heard before and I know the punchline, but it's true, it's the way the story is told, and the tone of voice and the way the comic pauses at just the right moment. I could tell the exact same joke to someone who has never heard it before, and it's not as big a laugh as one of these guys gets. From me.

Highway One coming down the coast into Malibu. We scoot around this bay, the ocean just about lapping the road, hills reaching down from the other side, sunlight sparkling off the waves, palm trees sprinkled overs the whole. It's just ridiculously picturesque, and I stop the van, pull out the external camera mount, sucker it onto the windscreen, screw on the camera, push the video record button, wave like an idiot as I walk back around to the driver's seat and as soon as I pull out, the highway curves inland, banks of trees rise up to obscure the view, and a big square ugly truck chugs along in front.

I figure that over the next ridge, we'll get a view out over the Pacific again, but no, it's Blandville. This is where the folks who can't afford those million dollar views live. Them and their rusty Porsches.

But I pull a lucky break. It's about ten now and we haven't had breakfast yet. There's a sign comes up, "Paradise Cove" it says. "Beachfront Cafe" it goes on. "Breakfast, lunch and dinner" it concludes, but I was pretty much sold from line one. My son likewise, but he was reading it backwards.
A short distance down a sandy lane, and we found Paradise at Malibu, where the ultimate Californian beach cafe had been built, staffed by hip waiters, and opened up to goggling tourists and the fabulous locals whose celebrity photographs decorated the foyer over a vast lobster aquarium.

"Inside or out?" I asked my coriders, thinking of my night cabbie skin and bald spot baking in the Malibu sun. They looked at me and pointed out to the sand and the palm trees.

A table for six, and we sit in a circle, our chair legs sinking deep into the beach, unsettling us. I'm prepared to be upset by the prices, but they are reasonable. Our waiter approaches, tanned and taut and twenty something. He moonlights with Pamela Anderson.

We make our orders. Lox box, Old Number Three, Belgian waffles. "You want strawberries and cream with that?" Twinkles nods enthusiastically. "You got it!"

Double bagels with the lox, amongst the capers, perfect tomatoes and red onion slices. My "Number Three" omelette comes with bacon, garlic, mushrooms and onions folded inside, handcut chips and capsicum morsels outside. With root beer it's perfect, a second glass, this time with spiced tomato juice, and it's even better. My eyes close in adoration.

"I could have breakfast here every day, easy!" I don't remember who said it, but we all nod. Twinkles, who is the sort of person I want as my life coach, quizzes us on our perfect breakfast. "This one right here!" "Champagne in The Wing!"

"Breakfast in bed," she says, smiling.

"With the one you love?"

"Yes. And don't get up until about three in the afternoon!"

Sounds good to me. Banana pancakes optional.

Our waiter deserves his tip. The food is fantastic, the setting incredible, his smiling banter a joy. We sit around smiling and swooning in delight.

Pause before getting back on the road for photographs and souvenirs. I have a root beer bottle I want to fill with Pacific Ocean. I have plans for this water. I roll up my trouser legs, take off shoes and socks and lay them down beside FutureCat's, her backpack sitting on the sand, before wading in to get my water from an oncoming wave, as she films the moment.

"My bag!" she squeaks, and the footage tilts and blurs as my cameraman pulls her pack up from the water.

I fill my bottle with some difficulty, my rolled up cuffs filling with Pacific Ocean as wave after wave washes over me. But I emerge in damp triumph, making a circuit of my smiling camera dolly, the background all ocean and sand and palm trees and bemused millionaires.

Down the way, Santa Monica beckons, a great ferris wheel jutting out of the sea. Here are souvenirs, another bumper sticker, street performers and dipping dots. Bookcrossing releases are made, themed with titles of piers and death rides and my own contribution, "The Pacific", left beside the entrance to the Pacific Park amusements.

There's a sign marking "Route 66 - End of the Trail"' and at the very end of the pier, a souvenir stand with Route 66 stickers and signs and keyrings. I'll be back here in May.

Next stop, Hollywood. Here I'm losing my LA freeway innocence on roads ten or twelve lanes wide, filled with rushing traffic: Mustangs, Corvettes, Hummers in primary colours.

Just as I'm beginning to feel part of the flow, riding the rhythm of the road, there's a comment about the LA atmosphere - "You can really smell the smog!" and I trace it down to the dilapidated vehicle ahead, spewing out oil smoke from somewhere underneath.

Crack! We've been hit! I'm thinking gunshot as FutureCat indicates a spreading crack in the windscreen. Can't think of anything I've done to attract road rage, but there it is, and a small object bouncing on the road ahead, the smokey old car slowing as the driver gesticulates.

"He's cooked his engine."

Poor bugger, but we've got a windscreen that needs replacing and it will put a hole in our holiday.

Worry about that later. For the moment it's holding up and we have to find a good place for our next photostop, that famous Hollywood sign. Sunset Boulevard and Vine isn't it, but we stop anyway, just to walk down an avenue of Stars. Captain Kangaroo and Ava Gardner and Veronica, who has used a gold marker on a vacant star.

Paying more attention to the GPS than the landscape, we find ourselves winding up through a rabbit maze of twisting lanes, barely a van wide. Several times we have to scootch up against a garage door when a local comes hurtling past. Eventually, somewhere near the top, there's a glimpse of the famous sign through a chain link fence. We pile out, the van parked in a ridiculously improbable position, and take our photographs with various toy traveling companions.

And then the streets widen again: lane, street, road, highway, freeway. Ten lanes wide, rushing frantically along past signs and landmarks and studio complexes.

I hand over the driving to Twinkles and fall asleep in the back.

Passing the Fort Irwin turnoff. On a railway siding yard are rows of tanks and personnel carriers, lined up on the rail tracks, ready to roll off to war, or to one of the massive training exercises conducted in the desert here. Mountains and dry hills cover the horizon, the plains covered with sparse shrinking vegetation and random ruins. A rusting trailer, a chimney, a shed with holes in the roof. The air is clear here after the smog of LA, and we can see details a long way off.

Up ahead is a long-dead ruin, rubbish scattered in an overgrown copse, a car tilted with its bonnet in the air and doors long gone, sad old house tumbling away. I think of those who once lived here, a family waiting out the winter cold and the roasting summer, living and loving and growing before the end came and the roof fell in.

We draw closer and I spot a satellite dish and a pickup truck. Maybe there is life in this old house yet.

There are white signs on the side of the road, each one bearing a commandment, modified for highway reading. "Do not bear false witness", "Do not covet". What I like is that each one has a phone number. Not a toll-free number, I notice. Who picks up the phone, I wonder?

"Hey man, Jesus here, we save twenty four seven. You want salvation, you got it!"

A common name here in Southern California. After all, our waiter two nights back was Angel, and at least one of us ordered wings.

I glance at the GPS. It's showing us doing 71 in a 70 zone, and I can hardly credit it. After the freeways, we seem as if we are crawling along.

 

[drron]

Really enjoying it.Hope you remembered the T2 lanes on the LA freeways.Love how 90%+ of the vehicles just contain the driver and no pax.

 

[Skyring]

Over the Miss

A city and a river. Surely not New Orleans already? I raised my eyebrows at DD. “Baton Rouge”, she replied. I shrugged. Another hour to go.

FutureCat looked around from the front passenger seat. “The Mississippi!” she exulted.

I smiled. It was exciting. The first time I crossed the Mighty Miss, I did it three times in five minutes, due to Discoverylover’s need to take photographs of the Missouri and illinois state welcome signs.

To anybody raised on a childhood diet of Mark Twain, it was exciting. A river on the far side of the world and it could make one’s heart pound. I was certainly laughing like a schoolboy the first time.

We had begun the day in San Antonio, awake early after a midnight stroll around the Alamo and along the Riverwalk. We had the light breakfast our hotel offered, and as soon as we found a likely gas station, stopped for gigantic coffees and junk snacks. It’s still an experience to enter a shop where an entire aisle is devoted to beef jerky. Makes one’s stomach pound.

We plugged Houston into the GPS and hit the interstate east, listening to Mary Roach’s offbeat and intimate exploration of space travel, “Packing for Mars”. She left no stone unturned: sex, alcohol, faeces, chimps, vomit and dandruff all came under her eye. It’s rare to find a laugh-out-loud book about space, let alone a work of non-fiction, but here it is.

We chuckled all the way to the Johnson Space Centre Visitor Centre, where for $20 we got free run of the touristy bits. Probably best to grab a meal outside, is my advice, rather than fork over a tiny fortune for a plate of munchies and noodles at the “Moon Wok” or other stalls feeding the captive market.

At least it wasn’t genuine space food, which Mary Roach had managed to link to bears, vomit and veterinarians.

DS and I opted for the Spaceship hall in what seemed like a giant space playground full of rides, handson learning stations and cute simulations. Here were genuine pieces of space hardware: the “Faith 7″ Mercury capsule, a console from Mission Control, spacesuits and space food.

The piece of hardware that moved me most – and as a schoolboy I’d travelled vicariously with Neil Armstrong as much as Huckleberry Finn – was an article that had never left the ground. A lectern with a presidential seal, from which John F Kennedy had launched his nation to the moon.

JFK’s spirit was living here, infusing the piece of moon rock, the Gemini and Apollo capsules, the photographs, the mission patches. He had his human flaws, but he touched the stars.

I reveled in the hardware, the moon rover simulations, the mock-up Skylab, the kids piloting the Space Shuttle “Adventure” in for a safe landing. And at the gift shop I bought a bunch of stuff, including a bumper sticker to add to the growing collection on the rear of the van.

Marked as tourists for all to see, we got back on the interstate east and east. The freeway interchanges around Houston had been suitably heroic, making my heart race every bit as much as baseball-capped Texans in ugly huge pickup trucks, but here it was just a long slug over terrain increasingly swampy.

At one point I noticed a truck hauling what looked like a huge piece of modern sculpture. Two semitrailers long, it was slender and gracefully tapered. I looked it in puzzlement until it slotted into my recognition as a blade from one of the thousands of windmills in West Texas. Sure enough, two more followed.

A surreal moment in a good day that was about to finish up perfect.

 

[Skyring]

Pastime

Charleston is a town where history is in the houses and the stones. It leaps out at you, smiling sometimes, sometimes grabbing you by the heart. It's a place I'll visit in the future.

I don't know how we managed to time our overnight visit so that we arrived on the exact 150th anniversary of the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the beginning of the Civil War. Just happened that way, without planning, which kind of describes my life. I remember aiming for a quiet moment in early 2008 to drive my rental car around the Arc de Triomphe. Early arvo, I thought, it will be about as empty as it gets during daylight hours. Of course, that happened to be just a few seconds before the Olympic flame for the Beijing games passed through, and there were about a million protestors and gendarmes and helicopters and tourists...

Charleston was full of tourists for the anniversary. People dressed in period costume, people with cameras, sometimes all three in the same frame. We stopped at a bakery to pick up a bunch of salty brownies for Discoverylover and the struggle to find a parking space within walking distance reminded me of the Arc de Triomphe episode a bit.

Anyway, we eventually found a a spot that was legal, dropped a quarter in, and looked into the bakery. Big jars of goodies: muffins, cookies and yup, saltwater brownies.

A young man asked me what my desire was, and I looked him square in the eye, and said in my Australian accent, "I have travelled here from the year 1957 to buy a dozen of these brownies."

This is technically correct, but still he gasped, said, "What?" and gave me the sweet pleasure of repeating my line. I then fumbled with the coinage when paying him, holding out a palm of change to let him select the correct amount. US currency is always difficult for an Aussie, with those nickels and dimes the wrong way around.

Speaking of sweet pleasure, FutureCat and I sampled one of the dozen, and dear glory, but it was good! If there are more than a few crumbs left in the box tomorrow, Discoverylover, it will be a miracle!

 

[Skyring]

First steps


Snack, CBR-SYD by skyring, on Flickr

Canberra's new airport terminal is world-class. It's light, airy, spacious, transparent. And half-complete. When the second building, a mirror-image of the first, rises over the rubble of the old shed, it will be a welcome worthy of the nation's capital. A glass atrium will end the u-shaped two-level drop-off and pick-up rank, allowing arriving passengers to grasp the layout at a glance. Jets and taxis separated by a few sheets of glass.

I embrace my wife, dropping us off on my cabbie patch, and we meet up with the fourth member of our group inside. Twinkles shared high school with my daughter, and has been a frequent visitor to our house, stroking our cats, sharing movie sleepovers, and now adding a smiling welcome to our trip.

We'll meet our fifth, fellow BookCrosser FutureCat, in San Francisco, where she is hoping for respite from months of aftershocks in Christchurch.

Our bags pile onto the conveyor belt. I've got three bags full of stuff, fifty kilos of books and baggage. My son has two small and suspiciously light bags, and the girls are somewhere in between..

I've dropped back to Frequent Flyer Gold now, and although I'm allowed one guest in the lounge, I'm not going to leave two out in the cold, so we find a table at Hudsons coffeeshop for the hour or so we have to wait. We've missed the morning crush and the terminal is quite pleasant at nine and ten o'clock. A few metres away Virgin Blue operates from what's left of the old terminal, cramped and narrow, while we Qantas passengers have space and elegance, the tall windows giving a view out over the taxiing jets and the rolling green hills beyond

There are worse places to wait. And worse company to wait with. I'm going to enjoy this trip.

Our flight is called and we file aboard, patting the aluminium hull of our Dash-8 propliner along with my daughter, who is as enthusiastic a traveller as I. My smile needs to squeeze aboard sideways; by the end of this extra long Friday I'll be in San Francisco, and there are few places in the world I love quite so much.

We're seated in a block of four, somewhere on the middle on the port side. It's really a bit of a bus trip, as it's overcast all the way apart from enough breaks in the clouds to work out where we are. Mostly I read the inflight mag, which has a pocket review of Iori, amongst others.

We land on the cross, taxi in, unload, browse through a chocolate shop - there's a chocolate Kama Sutra, one of us notices - and find the transfer lounge.

A minute or two and the bus arrives, giving me the chance to shoot a few plane bums.


Plane Bum by skyring, on Flickr

(Yeah, I know it's late and I only managed a few spotty updates during the trip. I'll be posting stuff way out of order in short bursts, so we'll get the whole thing done, but in a jigsaw fashion. I'm back home now, and sighing in between singing all my Route 66 songs. I had a FANTASTIC time.)

 

[Skyring]

Hoppin' in Joplin!


Joplin by skyring, on Flickr

The talk was of tornadoes that day in Joplin. A massive outbreak had hit the US over the preceding few days, and here we were in tornado territory.

We were back on Route 66 after taking a few days off to see friends in Kansas City and to attend a Sister Hazel concert in Columbia, and we'd had a packed day so far, with more to come before my optimistic destination of Tulsa.

After a planned meet at the Missouri Welcome Centre just shy of the Oklahoma line fell through - closed for repairs and the off-ramp blocked - we rescheduled for Starbucks in Joplin. Discoverylover, who had helped with the navigation by slumbering in the passenger seat, a happy Sister Hazel grin on her face, now found the right location on the GPS and we headed back up I-40, going backwards at one point when our driver missed the exit.

We were hours late, the light was fading fast, but I was determined to snap that Joplin sign. You can't do Route 66 without Joplin, Missouri!

KSReader and her BookCrossing daughter KSKid lit up the Starbucks carpark when our dusty van pulled up beside them. It was good to see these two, whom we had last seen at the Kansas City BookCrossing convention in 2009. KSReader had been one of the organising crew, and KSKid had helped Discoverylover launch a book into a fountain one evening.

Anyway, we hugged, smiled, chatted, swapped books and grinned at each other. BookCrossing is like that - a global community of happy people sharing books, quirkiness, generosity and love. I suggested getting a group shot by the sign a couple of hundred metres away, and although KSReader advised driving, I said I needed the exercise after lunching at Lambert's Cafe in Sprinfield.

America is not set up for pedestrians. It must have taken the best part of half an hour to struggle across the road get the shot, walk back along the grassy verges and collapse into Starbucks for a round of hot drinks and some more bookswapping.

And then we made our goodbye hugs, said we'd be glad to see them in Australia and/or New Zealand, and hit the road. There's a long stretch of Route 66 running through town, and we followed it out into the last few miles of Missouri, and over the border into Kansas. Not much of the old road in Kansas, but we made the most of the thirteen miles over several night hours. But that's another story, the story of the mailbox in the middle of the road.

Joplin was fine when we left it, but like a visit to pre-war Hiroshima, we should have taken more time and photographs. On 23 May 2011, Joplin was hit by a huge tornado, destroying about half of the town, including our Starbucks, and killing more than a hundred people. Poor Joplin! That happy hour in my memory will now be forever tinged by sadness.

 

[Skyring]

Looking for couth and coffee


Rolla Roadkill by skyring, on Flickr

The Midwest was not the home of high style. The roadhouses had whole aisles devoted to beef jerky, some places you could assemble your own hot dog or taco, and although the pour-your-own coffee sections often had cappuccino machines, they had several spouts, labelled "Vanilla Capuccino", "Caramel Capuccino" or "Chocolate Capuccino". I began to suspect that they did not conceal an espresso machine inside!

Coffee was a continuing problem. At home, I can walk into Artoven in Manuka, ask for a "super-ginormous family size slender latte" and get exactly what I want. But they know me there.

In the USA, I had not only my accent cloaking my desires, but the varied interpretations of what the coffeefolk thought I'd said, filtered through whatever technology they had available. One "slender latte" from a McCafe in Iowa turned out to be filter coffee with some very dubious milk pumped in. I'm not entirely sure it was liquid milk.

Then there was the time I was served an iced coffee. Heavy on the milk, so I guess it was a latte of some sort.

Top marks for a "slender latte" went to an Oklahoma Starbucks, who produced a latte, probably not made with low-fat milk, topped with whipped cream and caramel syrup.

"Uh, you want Splenda in your latte, right?" asked one barista. Discoverylover cracked up and I repeated "slender, please!" as I sucked in my gut.

Discoverylover became my interpreter after a while, and my coffees became less random. And not quite as much fun.

I'll talk about the food another time, but let's just say that rural America was pretty rural.

We hit Kansas City late one night after a whole day of Midwest, and I was determined to find some style. Somewhere. Anywhere.

We'd booked into the Raphael, which was an indulgence on my part. A classy joint, right across from the Plaza. We spotted a restaurant/bar opening off the lobby and went in for a nightcap after a day on the road.

It was really nice. Dim light, a piano player, bar staff in formal clothes. Instead of my usual beer, I ordered a martini, and sat there sipping it, basking in the glow.

The piano player was quite an entertainer. Believe it or not, he had a pet monkey, and he talked to it and it did tricks as part of the act. Sat on his shoulder, reached down and tinkled a few keys, waved to the audience.

The musician took a few requests and was rattling out some good tunes. "Piano Man!" someone asked, and he gave us a great version, rolling his eyes and voice in over-the-top Billy Joel.

The monkey hammed it up for a while and then went visiting, jumping up on tables, begging for pretzels and nuts. It came to us, squatted over my drink, and then to my astonishment and horror dangled its testicl_s into the glass.

"Get away out of it, yer filthy little cough!" I snarled, and it scampered back to its master.

I followed, fuming, and the piano man looked up at me as his monkey sought refuge on his shoulder.

"Do you know your monkey dunked his nuts in my martini?"

"Uh no," he replied, "but if you hum a few bars I'll pick it up."

 

[Skyring]

Bourbon and beignets


Cafe Beignet by skyring, on Flickr

New Orleans was perfect. We'd planned our visit for Saturday night after another long day of driving when we could use a little relaxation. Halfway through our eastbound crossing of America, New Orleans was our chance to let our hair down, sample the fabled delights of the South, get wild and hungover.

The one black mark was that I couldn't find a hotel that was within walking distance of Bourbon Street, reasonably rated, and remotely affordable. We ended up near the airport in a chain motel of which I now have zero memory.

Seems that there was some festival going on that night and people had flocked in to enjoy the evening. The best accommodation had long since been snapped up. But we followed the GPS voice into the central area. Parking wasn't too difficult once I'd swallowed the cost, and we found Bourbon Street easily enough - just follow the noise and the crowds!

It was everything I'd hoped for and more. I could have spent the whole night just leaning on any Bourbon Street corner watching the people. Folk of every age, colour, shape and origin flowed past, all happy and excited, smiling and talking, snatches of song and dance animating their progress.

Bourbon Street itself was a lane lined with bars, restaurants, souvenir shops and entertainment venues, brightly lit under verandahs filled with partying people. Music came from out of the air, and pretty women magically scored chains of beads, generously supplied by the folk leaning over the balconies above.


Desire Menu by skyring, on Flickr

I loved it. Every odd detail. The couple walking a miniature horse. The guy on a mobile phone, bent double with a finger jammed in his free ear against the noise. The street church, praying for the souls of the sinners. The line of mounted police, the horses suffering their noses to be stroked by the tipsy and curious. A diner named Desire where we sat down for some Cajun cooking and stood up for enveloping hugs from the hostess. Gumbo, crawfish, local beer, dishes we couldn't pronounce but licked clean.

We had a bourbon on Bourbon Street. They came in a rack of five test tubes and we conducted our own experiments, snorting them down and stamping our feet. Alcohol was cheap and plentiful, but really just the atmosphere was enough to intoxicate.

We straggled along, looking and photographing and enjoying the night. Amazingly we all kept together and eventually found ourselves in an open air jazz bar, where we listened to the band pumping out golden notes, consumed the local sweet pastries called beignets, and immersed ourselves in New Orleans.

I sat down beside a young lady at the bar, about my age. She smiled at me and I offered to buy her a drink. Hearing my faint Australian accent she asked, in a delightful Southern music, who I was and how was I here.


Satchmo by skyring, on Flickr

"I'm a taxidriver in Canberra," I said. "I drive politicians to Parliament, public servants to the airport, veterans to the War Memorial, drunks home from the pub. I keep my limousine shining, I play jazz for the passengers, I offer them Minties, I laugh at their jokes. And as I drive around the parks and avenues of the national capital, I dream of travelling to exotic places full of fascinating people. Like yourself, right here."

I subtly waggled my eyebrows at her, and she smiled.

"You know what I dream of?" she replied. "Women. All night and all day. I wake up in the morning and I think of women. I get up and go to work and I look at the women on the bus and the street. I dream of women all day long. I go out at night and look for women. I'm a lesbian, honey."

She raised her glass at me and sauntered off. Two more ladies sat down as I thoughtfully sipped my Sam Adams. They were low-cleavaged under strings of beads, and they twinkled at me in a charming manner.

"G'day!" I smiled. What a night!

"Ooooh, listen to him! Where you from, big boy? What are you doing here all alone?"

"I'm Peter, from Australia." I mimed a kangaroo bounding through the bush. "You know? I'm a lesbian."


Cophorses by skyring, on Flickr