We love that dirty water

4,150 miles. That's what the trip odometer reads on our trusty Corolla, now parked outside my parents' house in a suburb of Boston. Our trip -- relocating from the San Joaquin Valley in sunny California to the greater Boston area -- is at an end.

We started our last day by leaving Philadelphia around 10 AM and stopping in New Haven for lunch around 2 PM. D and I met at Yale back in 1995, when we were both undergraduates, and we haven't been on campus since a reunion for D's class in 2003. In fact, it's the longest either of us have been away from Yale since we first enrolled as freshman. There were a few surprises waiting for us on campus. Yale continues be active in renovating several parts of campus, and several additions surprised us, like the new mini-gothic structure used as an entrance for Cross Campus Library (CCL). Wait, as I look for info on this renovation, I see that it's now called the Bass Library. (I used to half-joke that the library was named for Wilbur Lucius Cross. Well, that unfunny joke is now even less funny).

We had lunch at "Wall St. Pizza", formerly Naples. The name has changed, the walls have been painted bright colors, but the pizza remains the same (a good thing). Our booth featured an (original?) map of the Yale campus c. 1933 that was interesting to examine and discuss while we ate our "awesome" pizza, in D's words. [D's note: Let me reiterate... AWESOME pizza, same as ever.]

After spending some time walking around campus -- and marveling over how schlubby Yale students look when compared to the Vanderbilt students we had seen in Nashville a few days ago -- D and I got back in the car and drove the final stretch to Boston, just in time to hit some tolerable rush-hour traffic.

Now we're at my parents' house for a few weeks (at least) while they continue to process of moving out of this house (their residence since 1966) and into their new home across town, and D and I look for a house of our own.

It's safe to say that both D and I consider our cross-country trip a big success. We met lots of people, saw wonders natural & historical, ate some great meals, and had some good conversations. We've already started planning out our next (slightly smaller!) trip when the opportunity presents itself, covering western Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Virginia.

We'll keep this blog going, though probably not with daily entries. Still, stay tuned....

No graves today... almost...

For our last morning in Richmond, we made our way down Monument Avenue to visit the Poe Museum. As it turns out, the building housing the Poe Museum is attached to the Old Stone House, which purports to be the oldest existing home in Richmond, built in 1754. Poe never lived there, but he most likely visited as a boy. Every home Poe did inhabit while he grew-up in Richmond has long since been demolished, although parts of one of his boyhood homes are on display in the museum (his boyhood bed, some bricks from his office downtown, etc).

The museum was just OK. There were a few decent exhibits, and some of Poe's original writing is on display. However, a substantial portion of the museum and central garden (pictured here) were under renovation, meaning many things were inaccessible out of what was, in total, a fairly small collection.

Neither D or I realized how important a writer Poe was in American literary history, however, and the museum did a good job of painting that picture. Considering that he died relatively young, he produced a great deal of innovative work starting at an early age. We both left the museum resolving to read more Poe. It's also been interesting to see -- over the course of this trip, and our own lives in places like NYC and Philadelphia -- how many places in the US have a claim to Poe based on where he lived and worked (he was even stationed at Fort Moultrie for a bit).

After the museum, we needed to get on the road for Philadelphia, but before we did -- and seeing as how we were already in the Shockoe Slip neighborhood, at the base of Church Hill (which you'll recall we climbed yesterday) -- we decided to locate one more spot. Browsing the web while writing last night's blog entry, I'd learned about a train tunnel that used to run through Church Hill, built in the early 1870s. Part of the tunnel collapsed during rehabilitation work in 1925, burying a train and several day workers inside. Successive efforts to the rescue or salvage the bodies and the train resulted in further cave-ins, so the tunnel was sealed-off in 1926. In 2006, some exploratory efforts were made to locate the train and determine the feasibility of recovering the train and missing bodies; the issue remains unresolved. We did manage to find the sealed tunnel entrance, although this photo (taken with my mobile phone, as I forgot our camera in the car) isn't great. If it were better, you'd see that the only thing written on the sealed entrance is "1926". A better photo is available here.

It's spooky to think that Church Hill, while crowned with the church cemetery we visited yesterday, is also the unintentional internment site for those day workers. Nowadays, no company could just "lose" a few workers in a tunnel collapse and decide to seal it off, rather than excavate until the bodies were found. At the very least, there'd be lots of ongoing media attention.

And with that... it was off the Philadelphia. The drive was boring, as we'd expected, although Sheila's decision to take us straight through DC (rather than around the Beltway) meant we got a half-decent view of some our capital's monuments while we sat in traffic.

We got to Philadelphia (and a great home cooked meal) around 7:30 PM. Tomorrow, we're off to Boston. Amazingly, and with very mixed feelings, our trip is just about at an end.

Richmond? Why would you go to... Richmond?

On Sunday morning, we woke-up and headed into Charleston again for a brief post-wedding brunch with the extended family. Afterwards, we drove into downtown Charleston and parked just north of Marion Square Park, a beautiful patch of green in the center of town. The visual highlight of the park is a tall pillar topped with a statue of John C. Calhoun, who was born in South Carolina and served in a number of public offices at both the state and national level. While he died in 1850, he was a huge hero for the Confederacy thanks to his pro-slavery and "states' rights" stances through the first half of the 19th century. That's why he's got the monument here. He also knew how to take a great crazy picture.

Elsewhere in the park is a relatively new, tasteful, modern Holocaust memorial, dedicated to (and naming) many of the European Jews who fled before or during the Second World War to settle in South Carolina. This led me to consider the fact that Charleston was the heart of the slave trade in the antebellum period and how unusual it is that the Holocaust -- which occurred half-a-world-away -- merits a memorial in Charleston's most prominent public space, but no similar memorial is present for the thousands (millions?) of African-Americans who were enslaved here for over two hundred years. Wouldn't you be surprised to find a memorial to African-Americans enslaved in the US in the middle of a German city?

Of course, I couldn't resist dragging D on a foot trip through the older parts of Charleston in order to find St. Philip's churchyard, where Calhoun (and many of his family members) are buried. D was a good sport.

After finding Calhoun -- and the closest Starbucks, which in true Starbucks style was exactly 1 block from the next Starbucks -- we were on our way to Richmond, some 6 hours away.

The wedding we attended this past weekend was infested with UVA graduates, several of whom had lived in Richmond before or after college. What we heard from most of them was: "Why would you go to Richmond?", or perhaps "I guess if you need to stop somewhere for a night, you can do worse than Richmond." So we weren't expecting much.

As it turns out, Richmond is terrific. First, we're staying at a great bed-n-breakfast, located in the Carytown neighborhood, called the Museum District Bed & Breakfast. It's a huge, beautiful house (and carriage house, where we are staying) built in 1922 and only recently renovated and converted into a B&B. The owner, Anna Currence, runs a friendly, professional business here and has really made us feel at home. D and I have stayed at B&Bs all over the country, but this place is a cut above the norm (and at a very reasonable rate, too).

D picked this B&B because it's close to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the museum is closed Mondays and Tuesdays, so we'll have to miss it. Instead, we started the morning by heading to our next destination: The Edgar Allan Poe Museum. Oh, wait, that's closed on Mondays, too. No worries; D is an attorney, and wants to see John Marshall's house, now also a museum. So we open our guide book for directions and... also closed Mondays.

Here's what we did do: We logged over 20,000 steps (D's note: My feet hurt), starting by walking up Church Hill to see the old, wooden church where Patrick Henry gave his famous speech and Poe's mother is buried. There are also great views from the church of the surrounding areas. Then we headed down to the center of Richmond to see the so-called "Confederate White House", the mansion that served as Jefferson Davis' headquarters during the Civil War. It's located next to the Museum of the Confederacy, which we toured first. The museum is OK; the house is quite interesting. It's mostly intact from its Confederate days, and contains quite a few of its original furnishings. As it turns out, President Lincoln visited it a few days after Davis fled (in the closing days of the war) and only a few weeks before Lincoln was assassinated. Our tour guide was extremely knowledgeable and passionate about his subject, but a real piece of work: He paced constantly while speaking, spoke quickly, and did not make eye contact with anyone on the tour. I desperately want to write him and give him some compliments along with some mild constructive criticism, but D says I can't...

It vaguely irked me that everyone working at the museum and the house calls it just "the White House" and kept calling Davis "the President". (Also, the house is clearly gray, not white).

After a stop for lunch, we caught a cab over to Hollywood Cemetery. Our B&B had told us about this and gave us a booklet detailing the cemetery's history and some of its more illustrious occupants and grave markers. Among others, the cemetery contains the graves of President John Tyler, President James Monroe, and Jefferson Davis. That's Tyler's pictured here. In 1841, Tyler was the first Vice-President to become President upon the death of an elected President; one of his nicknames was "Your Accidency". He later played an active role in the Confederate government, the only US President to do so. (Later in the day, D began singing the words "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too" to the tune of T. Rex's "Metal Guru").

Elsewhere in the cemetery, we located Davis' fairly large, scenic plot, surrounded by various family members (most of whom are children who died premature deaths).





Our last stop was a huge pyramid built as a memorial to Confederate soldiers, and surrounded by many Confederate graves -- some 18,000 in total throughout the cemetery.

There are also many new internments at Hollywood -- quite a few. One stone caught our eye as we walked back towards the entrance.


Tomorrow, it's on to Philadelphia, and then to Boston. Hard to believe it, but this trip is almost over.

Clyde Moultrie Dangerfield would be proud

We've been in Charleston, South Carolina for the past 2 days for a wedding on D's side of the family. We have kept busy with family events, but we've been able to see some parts of the city, too.

On Friday morning, I drove out to Charleston's small airport to retrieve my brother-in-law. The airport really is small - almost as small as FAT. Afterwards, we headed down to Patriots Point, overlooking the harbor, which is loaded with various military-themed memorials, including the USS Yorktown and the Cold War Memorial, an interesting replica of a submarine half-submerged into land. Patriots Point is also one of two places on the harbor where you can catch a boat out to Fort Sumter, the starting point of the Civil War. More on Fort Sumter in a bit.

Friday afternoon, we all headed into downtown Charleston. It's a beautiful, historic, well-preserved city bounded on 3 sides by water. We took a 90 minute bus tour of the city courtesy of "Doin' the Charleston" Tours. The tour used a combination of driving around with an on-board TV showing media relevant to each location we visited (mansion, historic site, street scene, etc). The tour guide, Marvin (who is pictured on the homepage) definitely knew his Charleston history; he also wasn't shy to tell you his political/historical/everything agenda and point of view (McCain = good, Gore = P.T. Barnum, Fort Sumter tour = waste of money, tipping Marvin = very good, etc.).

While touring through Charleston, I noticed an unusual obelisk in one of the parks. This was not mentioned on the tour, so I asked Marvin about it. He told us the story of the USS Hobson, which was accidentally sunk during military maneuvers in 1952 with great loss of life.

Saturday, we decided to follow Marvin's advice and skip the Fort Sumter tour (which involves taking a boat out to the tiny fort, now mostly ruins). Instead, we headed down to Sullivan's Island to see Fort Moultrie. The Fort was actively used from pre-Revolutionary time through 1947, undergoing numerous upgrades, and coming under attack twice during it's active life (once during the American Revolution, and once during the Civil War). Today, it's been converted into a museum, with different sections of the fort designed to replicate how it looked in different time periods. From the fort, you also have a great view of the harbor, with Fort Sumter in the distance. You can see it to the right of D here. Overall, Moultrie was a good value -- we learned quite a bit -- and we couldn't help but enjoy the fantastic weather. Afterward, we managed to snag a seat at Poe's Tavern, named for Edgar Allan Poe, who evidently was stationed at Fort Moultrie from 1827-1828.

In the evening, we attended the wedding itself, which was held at Alhambra Hall in Mt. Pleasant. The setting was against the harbor, and in addition to a steady flow of tourist and commercial shipping in the background (and a darkening sky that thankfully did not open up on an outdoor service), we could also see Fort Sumter. In the same way that weddings in Manhattan try to get wedding party photos with either Central Park, assorted iconic buildings, or the Statue of Liberty in the background, I'm guessing that weddings in Charleston try to get Sumter in the background. You can see it just to the left of the wedding party (and to the left of the big ship that moved quickly across the horizon).

While it wasn't our wedding, we couldn't resist a picture of ourselves here, either.

Tomorrow, we're planning to get a few more hours in downtown Charleston, and then it's on to Richmond, Virginia.

Another day, another hotel chain

With a bit of sorrow, we left Nashville -- which we loved -- and headed on for South Carolina today and a family wedding. Roughly, this meant some 9 hours of driving, but we managed to break it up with lunch at the Clingman Cafe in Asheville, North Carolina, in the up-and-coming River Arts District. I've been to Asheville a few times in the last few years, mostly for business, and I think it's a picturesque, interesting place to visit (and presumably live), but I had not been anywhere near the Rivers Arts area before. It looks like a lot of empty warehouses, but bit by bit, they are being filled with new businesses.

After five hours of driving, we were fortunate to make it to the Clingman Cafe before it closed at 4:30 PM. The food, and coffee, was great. Afterwards, we got back in the car and made it to Mt. Pleasant, just outside Charleston, around 8:40 PM.

So, not much to report today. We made no non-essential stops along our way. We started at a Holiday Inn Select, and wound-up at a Marriott Residence Inn. To make up for today's lack of eventfulness, we'll share a few photos and thoughts from previous days. For example, here's our encounter with a very tall woodsman on the campus of Northern Arizona University (NAU) a week ago. We'd asked for directions to the "Muffler Man" in a Flagstaff grocery store...

D&P: "Excuse me, how do we get to the Walkup Skydome at Northern Arizona University?"
Grocery store employee: "Where?"
D&P: "We're trying to get to Northern Arizona University."
GSE: "I don't know where that is."
D&P: "Oh, OK, thanks an---"
GSE: "Wait... do you mean NAU?!"

Here are some Native American ruins we saw in Arizona, not far from the Grand Canyon. These were built by the Lomatki over 800 years ago, and abandoned for reasons unknown c. 1250. Amazing, somewhat spooky, and beautiful to see in the setting sun.




And here's P in Sun Studios with the original microphone (so they told us) used for recordings by Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, et al., some fifty years ago.

(D's note: Yeah... pretty much what he said. Also, I want to note that we just arrived in Mt. Pleasant only to find out that my dad, in his 60s, now has a soul patch. Pretty cool. Also, the aforementioned Marriott Residence Inn makes great chocolate chip cookies. And yes, it's been that slow of a news day, folks.)

So now we'll end with the Top 6 Things We're Already Missing about California:

1. Our neighbors;

2. Our cousins and college friends scattered around the California coast;

3. The lack of humidity (although D's hair is quite happy to have the humidity, thank you very much) and the great weather overall;

4. The eucalyptus trees on the drive to Carmel (actually, we're just missing the ability to drive to the Carmel/Monterey area, period);

5. P's former coworkers. And while we're thinking of that...

6. Buffalo spaghetti

Honorable mention: Rasputin Music. P made two dire observations when he came to Fresno: That (1) Tower was the closest thing to a "hip" record store in the entire San Joaquin Valley, and (2) Tower was going out of business (ok, that second thing was national, not just local, but still...). It's like the old WC Fields joke about 1st prize being a week in Philadelphia, and 2nd prize being two weeks in Philadelphia -- it was bad enough that Tower was the hip record store, but then to have it go out of business... (D's note: I don't like this reference.) So it was Fresno's saving grace to have Rasputin Music, a Bay Area chain, move into Tower's vacant shell in short order and provide a decent place to find music for our final year in California. It also served as a destination for the less desirable CDs in our collection prior to our move.

The Tennessee Two

Thanks to poor internet connectivity at the Holiday Inn Select we're staying at, we weren't able to post last night. So you'll have to endure two days of our trip at once. Fortunately, they were both fairly low-key days, especially a 2-hour stopover at the Coin Express laundromat on 21st street in Nashville today (recommended!) with our coffee and a copy of the New York Times. It was like being back in Brooklyn.

Yesterday morning, we spent our last two hours in Memphis hitting a few sites associated with the American Civil War, or, if you're a monument in the South mentioning the Civil War, the "War Between the States". As it turns out, Confederate Park was located directly across from our hotel, overlooking the mighty Mississippi river. The site marks an important spot for the Second Battle of Memphis, in 1864, when Confederate forces briefly took the city. A large plaque installed by the "Confederate Dames" in 1909 details this battle -- making specific mention of the Union generals who hid or fled during the battle -- and also mentions the First Battle of Memphis, in which Union naval forces crushed the South's navy... although you need to read between the lines to figure this out. The South is full of plaques and parks like this, honoring Confederate victories and valor etc., mostly installed between 1890 and 1930 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. This was the period when the South did a fantastic job of retroactively winning the Civil War -- or rather, winning its memory -- by rewriting the way the war was remembered. In short, this meant establishing that (1) both sides fought in the Civil War for noble and glorious reasons (and not for the preservation of slavery, even though it was added as a specific right in the hastily-assembled Confederate Constitution), and (2) both sides must surely agree that Reconstruction was a misguided and corrupt enterprise. By the 1950s, historians started to question this approach, leading to a trickle (and later of flood) of books arguing that the Civil War was not necessarily a noble undertaking for either side, and that Reconstruction wasn't all bad by any means. Still, the Southern view of the Civil War and its aftermath lives on, thanks to monuments like the one of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Confederate Park (noted as a "True American Patriot" on the monument pictured above) and the successful addition of anti-northern terms like "carpetbagger" and "scalawag" to our vocabulary -- terms still being taught without an explanation of possible bias when I was in high school in the early 1990s.

From Confederate Park, we headed to Nathan Bedford Forrest park, something we had to see to believe. Sure enough, in the center of Memphis -- a city that is 61% African-American -- is a park named for the hero of the Second Battle of Memphis, but also the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (although his defenders argue that he really tried to disband the Klan...). Underneath this equestrian statue of Forrest are his mortal remains.

After this, we hopped in the car and headed for Nashville. At 3 hours, it seemed like a mercifully short drive in our trip. Along the way, we detoured to Franklin, a small community about 30 miles outside Nashville, with beautifully-preserved old homes and a walkable, high-end town center.

We arrived in Nashville around 3 PM. Here's what we discovered quickly: Nashville, while definitely the home of country music, is also a hip, East Coast kind of place, with lots of construction, renovation, and innovation visible most places we went. We stayed across from Centennial Park and its famous replica of the Parthenon (modeled on the Parthenon before the Ottomans managed to accidentially destroy it, and 7th Earl of Elgin made off with its statues).

We had dinner (both last night and tonight) in Hillsboro Village, an active part of town near the Vanderbilt campus. (I got accepted to Vanderbilt, but did not attend -- a good thing, or else I would not have met D). We also wound-up having breakfast there today at the excellent Pancake Pantry after the aforementioned respite at the laundromat up the road.

This afternoon, I managed to drag D over to Tennessee's capitol building so we could visit the grave of American's 11th President, James K. Polk. D and I met in college through a pseudo-political debating society that chiefly consisted of members trying to publicly create the most absurd debate arguments possible while clandestinely circulating alcohol around the room in new and innovative ways. President Polk was the patron saint of our organization, because (1) he fulfilled all of his campaign platform promises, and (2) more importantly, there was an eponymously named, very wordy They Might Be Giants b-side (later remade for one of their albums) that detailed Polk's career. We took a few pictures at Polk's grave site (including this "Hey! Look who we found!" one), apparently raising the suspicion of a capitol guard who eyed us curiously until we left. Our guess is that President Polk doesn't get a lot of visitors these days.

We also passed statues (but not the mortal remains) of Presidents Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson (the two Drews?) on the grounds before coming across this interesting statue of Alvin York, a hero of the First World War who single-handedly killed 28 Germans and took another 128 prisoner in the closing days of the war.

We also passed the War Memorial Building, built to honor WWI veterans, and surrounded by later memorials to the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. The base of the Korean monument was marked with the words, "Where Communistic Military Aggression Was Defeated", an accurate but awkward way of describing the Korean War. (A similar claim is absent, unfortunately, from the nearby Vietnam War memorial).

(D's note: If it looks like P dragged me all around Nashville looking at relatively boring monuments, well, that's because he did. But I love him anyway. And he agreed to join me after dinner Tuesday night at the Douglas Corner Cafe for open mic night, for which I love him even more. If you're ever in Nashville on a Tuesday night, head on over to this place (though probably best not to walk there... we did - a nearly 3 mile walk - and it's not in the best neighborhood). No cover, $5 beers, and singer-songwriters that were really good (mostly). In general, it was really nice to just chill in Nashville. We did not go to any museums and, monuments aside, we spent most of our time just strolling around Vanderbilt University and its environs. Ahhh, to be a college student again. I especially liked sitting next to a neo-hippie undergrad at breakfast and overhearing him exclaim: "I agree God blesses America, but what about all the other countries? I mean, dude, God loves Iraqis, too!" Loved it.)

Tuesday's step count: 13,000+.
Wednesday: 17,000+.

Tomorrow, we'll be trying to catch-up with the Olympic torch. Or, driving to Charleston. One or the other.

Walking in Memphis

A very full day today in Memphis, topped off by watching the Memphis/Kansas game on Beale Street and now back in our hotel room.

We started our morning by getting back in the car and driving about 15 minutes to Elvis Presley Boulevard and Graceland. Graceland was Elvis Presley's home from 1958 until his death and claims to be the second-most visited private residence in the US after the White House. There's no question that it's a giant tourist attraction as we approach; the estate owns a huge plot of land across the street from Graceland's 13 acres containing multiple shops, restaurants, a hotel ("The Heartbreak Hotel", of course), a giant parking lot, and housing items like Elvis' converted 100 passenger jet (how they got that down Elvis Presley Boulevard, who knows).

We park in the lot ($8) which is quite empty, not surprisingly for a Monday morning. We have three tickets options for tours: Mansion (the low-end option), Platinum, and "VIP". We opt for the Mansion tour only, which still runs us close to $50 with a AAA discount. It's an audio tour; this is mandatory. Everyone is given headsets. Shortly afterwards, we board a shuttle which takes us... across the street and up a driveway to the front of Graceland. The "shuttle" trip takes about 1 minute.

We wait for a few minutes outside Graceland before a young man gives us the rules: No video or audio recording, no flash. Oh yeah, the house was built in 1939 and sold to Elvis in 1958. That is all of the Graceland-specific history we'll get on the tour; the rest of the tour consists of:

1. See how Elvis had the place decorated when he died in 1977;

2. See Elvis gold records and memorabilia;

3. Hear a few anecdotes on the audio tour, courtesy of Elvis and Lisa Marie. Outside of the young man at the front door, no other staff at Graceland will offer up any piece of information (nor do they seem to want you to ask). You either know it already because you're a big Elvis fan, or you hear it in the audio tour, or... that's it.

Not surprisingly, Elvis' decorating taste in the mid-70s turns out to be garish. [D: I want to give the guy a break, considering his decorating taste was frozen in 1977. But wow... a mirrored basement? Geometric-print carpet in the kitchen? Green shag carpet... on the walls??? Seriously, the picture on the left was BY FAR the most tasteful in the house. Enough said]. The house is also surprisingly small, although the external buildings -- converted into offices, rec space, a racquetball court, etc., add to the overall square footage.

The tour finally culminates in the "Meditation Garden", which now contains the graves of Elvis, his parents, and his paternal grandmother, who outlived her son, daughter-in-law, and grandson. As we arrive at this mini-cemetery, it occurs to us that the house gives us no sense at all of who Elvis was or what he was like. Not that it's easy to get in touch with historic, almost mythical public figures, but being at his house as he left it in 1977, you might expect some sense of who he was or what he was like. Instead, it feels empty. Buddy Holly's small gravesite in that rural small-town cemetery 2 days ago was much more moving. Instead, milling past the graves, D and I can only remark that Vernon Presley (Elvis' Dad) signed the epitaph on Glady's grave, adding "BY: VERNON PRESLEY" at the bottom of the marker.

The tour over for us non-Platinum or VIP types, we avoid spending too much money in the multiple Graceland gift shops (that's right... there are several), get back in the car and head back to our hotel to drop off the car. We'll spend the rest of the day on foot, racking up 16,000 steps today.

After a quick lunch, we head down Union Street for Sun Studios. Sun is the spot where Sam Phillips discovered and produced loads of talented performers in the mid-to-late 1950s, including Elvis (his first recordings), Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, and countless lesser-known but talented performers. I'm wary of some reconstructed, non-authentic replica of the "original" Sun Studio, but lo and behold, the studio is basically intact. Memphis' spotty economic history allowed the studio to sit mostly vacant for decades (ever since Phillips moved Sun to a larger space a few blocks away in the late 1960s) before being turned into a lucrative tourist draw. Our tour guide, a young fellow named Slim who never removes his sunglasses, is engaging and knowledgeable -- a refreshing change from Graceland -- and even though the tour encompasses a grand total of 2 rooms (3 if you count the tiny original reception area) it lasts about 45 minutes and covers quite a bit of ground. D and I both enjoy it a great deal, and we stick around at the end to buy a few souvenirs in the shop/snack bar attached to the studio. We agree that Sun's legacy is helped by several great logos.

The whole Sun experience makes me want to dig my Sun Records box set out, but of course it's packed on a truck somewhere crossing the US, and I'll have to wait to hear the handful of Sun tracks on my iPod tomorrow during our next drive.

[D: Sun was awesome, one of my favorite stops so far. I really got goosebumps standing in that room where Johnny Cash and Elvis recorded, goosebumps that didn't come at all in Graceland. Plus, the folks at Sun (staff and visitors) were by far hipper, younger, and, frankly, thinner than the folks at Graceland. (There's a reason why they need a shuttle at Graceland just to get across the street.) At Sun, and while walking around downtown Memphis and interacting with Memphis locals, it occurs to me that for the first time on our trip, possibly even for the first time since we moved to California, I feel at home. Part of it is the weather -- there's that humidity that I wasn't really missing! -- and part of it is that Memphis, with its history, music and struggles to keep the inner city from falling into complete blight, reminds me a lot of the Philly I knew while growing up. The closer I look, the more I realize how much life there is in Memphis, and I found myself really rooting for the city to complete its revitalization. (Not to mention genuinely rooting for the Tigers to win... it was a sad, sad night.) I think Memphis gets short shrift. Particularly if you are a fan of blues, soul, R&B or early rock 'n' roll, you MUST come here. I don't know if we'll ever get back, but there's still a fair bit more to see (the STAX museum in particular).]

We cut over a few blocks to walk back to downtown Memphis on Beale Street; this takes us past a few Tennessee historical markers, including a few for Robert R. Church and his offspring. We'd never heard of Church before. Turns out, he was a very wealthy ex-slave (the first black millionaire in the South) who helped improve the city of Memphis at a time when segregation was rampant; his work was carried on by his descendants, including his son, a powerful Republican(!) leader in the days before the civil rights movement.

Speaking of which, our next major stop was the National Civil Rights Museum. The museum is based in the former Lorraine Motel, the spot where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in April, 1968. It's very moving to stand outside the museum and look at the balcony where King was killed, marked by a wreath all of these years. D and I both spent quite a bit of time looking at the former motel, silently.

The 40th anniversary of his assassination was 3 days ago, so the museum has been busier than usual with visitors and media. The museum traces the history of the civil rights movement in the US from 1619 until MLK's murder; it does so with countless signs, placards, visual aides, multimedia pieces, and large items like a vintage coffee shop counter, a replica of a bombed-out bus, etc., culminating in the rooms King and his associates stayed in during his final days. In fact, while we only had 2 hours to spend at the museum, there was so much to read and look at on the walls that we easily could have spent 4-5 hours there trying to soak everything in. Most Americans of our age learn about the civil rights movement in high school history classes, and we get a highly abbreviated version at best. The real story is much longer, involves thousands of people, and was more violent than people our age generally realize. It wasn't just about President Johnson signing some bills, or the Supreme Court ruling on Brown vs. the Board of Education. It was about millions of lives over hundreds of years. And -- seeing more than a few people wearing t-shirts juxtaposing Dr. King's image with that of Senator Barack Obama -- it's clear that many feel the civil rights struggle hasn't ended. D took a picture of this sticker affixed to a pole in front of the museum:
[D: A quick note about the Lorraine Motel. Having just come from Dealey Plaza, and having waxed philosophical about JFK's murder on and off for the past 24-hours, I assumed the Lorraine Motel would seem to have less of an impact. Totally the opposite. What you realize while you're staring at the balcony before Room 306 is that unlike JFK and RFK, who were essentially killed by crazy nut-jobs... no matter how much those nut-jobs and others have tried to assign deeper motive to those killings, MLK Jr. was killed out of pure hatred. Hatred for a man simply because he was a different color and wanted equal rights. It's not only moving, sad and horrifying... but it's shameful. Though many, including P, have pointed out that at the time of his death, King's influence was waning, and that if it had continued its decline he might have ended up like Jesse Jackson - somewhat marginalized - I can't help but think that this was the biggest loss of the '60s. As I watch people of all races interacting -- offering to take each others' pictures in front of the motel, walking side-by-side through the museum -- I take solace in the fact that, though civil rights issues clearly still exist, race relations have come a long way in large part because of what King did.]

After the museum, it was back to the hotel for a break, then on to dinner on Beale Street. Suffice to say, our day was a lot better than the Tigers'. Tomorrow, we're off to Nashville.

From Dallas to Memphis

We woke up relatively early today to make our way, by foot, over to Dealey Plaza, a short walk from our hotel. In the same way when we visited Honolulu at the tail end of our Hawaiian honeymoon some years ago and only visited Pearl Harbor, our only goal in Dallas was to visit the site of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963 and the assassin's perch/workplace at the Texas Book Depository, the top of which has now been converted into the Sixth Floor Museum (the lower levels are now used by Dallas County; oddly, the first sign you see when entering the building is a posting of the Texas legal code that forbids you from bringing concealed weapons into a workplace, even though they are legal to conceal elsewhere in Texas).

When we arrived at the Plaza on foot, both D and I had the same reaction we've had at other historical sites: it's a lot smaller than you think. It's the same reaction I had when I first saw Wall Street years ago: this is it? In fact, Dealey Plaza, located next to a major freeway overpass, seems like an afterthought to downtown Dallas, and as we learned in the Museum, it was one of the least-well attended portions of the motorcade that day. It looks much as it did in November of 1963, with only a few minor modifications (noted elsewhere on the web by assassination aficionados) to lighting, signage, and foliage. At first, we thought the large white structures surrounding the Plaza were built as a tribute to JFK; in fact, they are a WPA construct from the 1930s and are quite visible in photos taken on November 22, 1963; we've just never noticed them before. Apparently, this is a common reaction of visitors to the site. The structures do appear to be in poor shape, however.

The other surprising aspect of Dealey Plaza is that Elm Street is still an active motorway, with many cars cruising along and under the overpass at speeds of 40 mph and more as we watched. More than a few tourists put themselves in harm's way crossing the street to separate sides of the Plaza as cars whizzed by; no doubt, crossing the street is made more tempting by the presence of an "X" painted on the roadway in the approximate location where President Kennedy was hit by the fatal shot.

[D's note: For those of you who knew me as a teenager, you can imagine what it meant to me to be in Dealey Plaza. (And for those of you who didn't know me, let's just say there was life before Sydney Pollack.) The Plaza and the Sixth Floor Museum, see below, were incredibly moving and sad. And it was bizarre to see "the grassy knoll" up close and realize that it was just a little patch of grass just aside the Book Depository; you realize that anyone who was standing in Dealey Plaza could not have accurately determined, once they even realized what they just heard, that gunshots came from the grassy knoll as opposed to the Book Depository. I can't imagine driving past this site on a regular basis, as many in Dallas seem to do, without thinking about the murder of a man 13 years before I was even born. P and I were waxing philosophical for the rest of the afternoon after visiting this...]

After spending time looking around the Plaza -- and, of course, up towards the former Book Depository -- we made our way to the Sixth Floor Museum. The Museum, opened in 1989, is a beautifully assembled, chronological exhibit that summarizes President Kennedy's life and career, culminating in that fateful final day in Dallas, and then leading into the resulting pursuit, arrest, and murder of Oswald, and the decades of subsequent re-investigations into the assassination by various government agencies and congressional committees. The Museum pays respectful attention to many of the conspiracy theories out there, but does lend itself strongly to the belief that, at the very least, Oswald was the only person shooting at JFK that day. There's even a re-creation of the sniper's nest Oswald created for himself in the window, and you can essentially look down on Elm St. from the same perspective he did 45 years ago.

[D's note: Yeah, looking out the window is rather freaky. It really does appear to have been an easy shot, and it's incredible to think that anyone would be allowed up there during the President's motorcade, let alone someone who owned firearms. As P mentions below, it is, harrowingly, not at all difficult to imagine how Oswald could have pulled this off. On the other hand, it's very difficult to imagine that any one person could be filled with enough demons to want to do this, and maybe that explains why so many people insist that more than one person was involved. I like thinking of it that way, as opposed to assuming that so many people who believe in vast conspiracies are just plain ignorant. On that note, however, I was surprised to hear a young woman, probably about 20, remark that she thought President Kennedy's wife was pretty and then ask whatever happened to her after the murder. WHAT???? Can anyone not know who Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was??? Well, since I'm in a forgiving mood, I'll assume she was actually a very mature looking 8-year old.]

During my visit to the museum, I was reminded of something my grandfather said many years ago: That if Adolph Hitler had visited the US in the 1930s, he would have seen our cities, our cars, and our wealth, and he never would have started WWII. D and I had a similar thought: If every Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist visited Dealey Plaza, half of the conspiracy theories out there would dissolve. Looking at the sniper's nest, looking at Oswald's history (including a failed assassination attempt on right-wing general Edwin Walker a few months earlier), looking at the small size of Dealey Plaza, and Kennedy's relative lack of security that day, it just wasn't that hard for Oswald to do what he did. He had means and opportunity. As a Frontline piece back in 2003 put it, Kennedy just had the bad luck to drive by a building where a man with a rifle had the desire to shoot at him.

Which brings me to my second reaction while visiting the Museum: The Dallas police really botched the handling of Oswald. They probably wouldn't have apprehended Oswald at all had he not been foolish enough to (1) leave evidence everywhere and (2) kill police officer J.D. Tippit as he raced to get away from the scene. Then, unbelievably, they trotted him out for a press conference in the basement of the police station at midnight on November 23rd. He hadn't even been assigned counsel. Finally, they couldn't manage to keep the press out of the police station all weekend following the assassination; this made it all too easy for Jack Ruby to hang around and shoot Oswald on Sunday morning when it was convenient to do so.

OK, this isn't a JFK assassination blog, it's our travel blog, so I need to move on. Besides, there are too many interesting or moving aspects of the Museum to discuss here -- suffice to say, if you're in Dallas, this is absolutely worth two hours of your time. We made one last stop in the gift shop and bought a magnet with the image seen at right. (Side note: As I write this in our hotel room in Memphis, Senator Ted Kennedy is on TV speaking at a rally for Senator Obama today. How strange it must be to be Ted Kennedy. By the time you are 36, four of your siblings have died -- two the victims of high-profile assassinations -- and you've barely survived a plane crash yourself. A year later, your brother's dream of putting a man on the moon comes true just as you, at the very least, fail to prevent the death of a young woman and leave a dark shadow hanging over the rest of your long and otherwise fairly distinguished career. If Ted Kennedy had died in that plane crash in 1964, imagine how differently he'd be thought of now. Likewise, if Vice-President Richard Nixon had been elected President in 1960 and killed in Dallas in 1963, imagine how differently he'd be thought of now).

After a quick lunch, D and I finally hit the road for Memphis. Unlike the country roads of Texas yesterday, we were on major highways the entire way -- efficient, but not charming. Our only detours were for a needlessly long side-trip to Starbucks just outside of Dallas courtesy of Sheila and a stop for dinner in Carlisle, Arkansas at the excellent Nick's Bar-B-Q and Catfish. There are signs for it on the highway. Oh, we also stopped at a Wal-Mart in Arkansas. I mean, how could we not?

[D's note: Unbelievably, P has forgotten to mention what's been keeping us sane in the car on our 5-hour driving stints: an audiobook of Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation. We downloaded it on iTunes because it was the only thing we could agree on (P wanting something history-oriented, me wanting something that wasn't so soporifically dry that I'd end up driving us off the road). It really had nothing to do with the fact that we were going to visit the place where Kennedy was killed, honest. Anyway, it's a very entertaining book. And I am very thankful that Sarah Vowell isn't the least bit attractive, or else I'm fairly certain P would declare her his soulmate and leave me somewhere in an Arkansan swamp.] [P's note: Sarah, ignore D. If you're out there -- call me!]

Now there's a documentary on about Martin Luther King, Jr., on TV, who was assassinated forty years ago this past Friday...

A few graves on the way to Texas

Yes, 11 hours of driving today. Maybe more. But we broke it up with a few interesting stops along the way. When you're traversing this stretch of the US, you'll take anything you can find that qualifies as "interesting", since most of the terrain looks like this.

After an early start, we made our first significant stop on Route 60 at the Billy the Kid Museum in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. You may not have known that William Henry McCarty, aka Billy the Kid, was shot and killed and buried in Fort Sumner, but just try driving anywhere near Fort Sumner and you'll know soon enough, thanks to historical markers and giant billboards.

The Museum is run by Don Sweet and his wife, and Don wasted no time in telling us that the museum was opened in 1950 by his father and had been run as a family business ever since. He also mentioned that dear ol' Dad had originally opened the museum as the "Fort Sumner Museum", but changed it after 90 days to the "Billy the Kid Museum". What Don didn't tell us is that five miles down the road, adjacent to the actual gravesite of Billy the Kid, is another Billy the Kid Museum... anyway, admission to Don's museum was $5 and, all things considered, it was probably worth it. The museum contains a decent amount of Kid-related memorabilia from the past century, as well as one of his rifles and a few other relics of the age. Of course, the problem with a Billy the Kid museum is that there isn't much to the life of Billy the Kid; his inflated reputation as a killer of 21 men and an expert marksman was really made posthumously by Sheriff Pat Garrett, the man who shot him dead. He was only 21 years old when he died -- not much time for legacy-building. Or maybe it is, as we'll learn later in the day.

After leaving the museum (which starts out strong, but -- as another sign of the thinness of Kid history -- degrades into a very generic "Western" museum with things like old saddles, old typwriters(?), a two-headed calf, etc), we headed five miles down the road to the Kid's grave. We'd learned in the Museum that the actual site of Billy the Kid's grave is somewhat of an open question, but at least since 1940 a marker has been in place of where he was generally agreed to have been interred in 1881. Subsequently, that marker has been stolen several times, leading to its current location inside two concentric cages.

After New Mexico, it was on to Texas. We fully expected western Texas to be big and open, but... we may have underestimated how big and open. Huge expanses of empty land (some being farmed, some lying fallow) were occasionally dotted with tiny outposts of humanity. We saw at least a dozen small towns (Jacksboro, Olney, Jean, Seymour, etc) that made our old hometown of Reedley, California, look like a metropolis, consisting more of empty, boarded-up storefronts and nondescript empty buildings possibly meant for agricultural or industrial use, but more often just in an advance state of decay, than anything else (how's that for a run-on sentence?).

We did, however, enjoy our stop in Lubbock. Lubbock is town of 200,000, but its chief claim to fame is as the hometown of Charles Hardin "Buddy" Holly. The town is home to several modern monuments to Buddy. We made our first stop at the Buddy Holly Center, a small, well-designed, well-organized museum. Buddy was only 22 when he died, but he left behind far more than Billy the Kid -- proof that age doesn't tie directly to legacy. He was only professionally active for a few years, but his output was significant, and his growth as a songwriter was evident even over that brief time. Perhaps more than any other premature rock-n-roll death, Buddy's begs the question of where his career would have taken him in the 1960s or beyond. Some argue today that he would have gone on to challenge the Beatles for artistic adventuresome in that decade. It's an interesting idea, and walking around the Center, we certainly couldn't help wondering what would have become of Buddy had he lived past 1959. Perhaps Buddy's legacy is a beneficiary of his early death. One of Buddy's friends was Waylon Jennings (from nearby Littlefield, Texas), who was even a member of his backup band during that fateful final tour. Looking at photos from that tour, Waylon appears as a clean-cut, professional performer cut from the same cloth as Holly. But a documentary being screened in one room of the museum had a late middle-age Waylon on-screen several times, sporting sunglasses, a sleeveless denim shirt, and a mullet. Would this have been Buddy's appearance had he made it to 50? Would his early recordings and appearance appear anomalous and quaint decades later, like those early photos of Roy Orbison or Willie Nelson, perhaps with just those few early hit records to his name? Would he be touring the oldies circuit by the late 1960s, like so many other early rock-n-roll pioneers?

Our original plan was to leave the museum early enough to spend a few hours in Fort Worth before getting to Dallas for the night. After consulting with Sheila, our new travel companion, we realized this wasn't realistic. Instead, we spent some extra time in Lubbock seeking out the Lubbock City Cemetary. We found it quickly, and right inside the entrance, we found Buddy's grave. His parents are buried to either side of him. You'll notice that pilgrims have left guitar picks and pennies on the marker.

Finally, back in the car. We arrived in Dallas around 10 PM. My initial impression is that Dallas has the charm of Los Angeles combined with the architecture of Las Vegas sans the strip. I'll have a better perspective after we've walked around tomorrow.

Our day in Santa Fe

We took a break from endless driving to spend a full day in Santa Fe today. The city is beautiful -- completely built in the old Spanish colonial/adobe style. In fact, everything looks this way -- from the smallest hovels to the plethora of government buildings to every single hotel (chain or otherwise). Here's a good example - one of the bigger hotels.

There is a lot of history in Santa Fe -- witness the mural detailing the tale of the old Santa Fe Trail at our hotel above D's head -- but even more than history, Santa Fe is rich in... galleries. Seemingly endless rows of art galleries selling a mixture of artwork, quasi-artifacts, and tourist tsochkes trading on the region's mix of Spanish, Indian, and frontier history. If I need to buy, say, socks, I'd be out of luck here, but if I needed a portrait/icon of the Virgin Mary rendered in Spanish colonial style c. 1790 I would have a wealth of options.

We made a few planned stops today and did a lot of walking -- in excess of 15,000 steps. We started our day at the SITE gallery, where we saw a series of installations by an Icelandic artist (a resident of Santa Fe since 1980) known as Steina. The installations were all fairly interesting, but the clingy docent and our empty stomachs didn't combine well. I was more fascinated with the gallery being built right next door by a company called "Sarcon", which sounds like the name of a corporation run by a madman in a superhero movie who is secretly bent on world domination and is using his company to, say, build missile launchers under the guise of constructing boxy art galleries.

After SITE we made our way to downtown Sante Fe for breakfast at Cafe Pasqual's, which was crowded for good reason. We then made our way (by car) up to Museum Hill, overlooking some beautiful private homes in the surrounding hills. While there, we visited the Museum of International Folk Art and the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art.

Afterwards, we spent hours wandering around downtown Santa Fe, which in addition to its many adobe buildings, also has the street layout (and street width) of an Old World Spanish town. Streets are often just wider than a single lane, and sometimes switch freely from one-way to two-way and back again within a few blocks. We saw the San Miguel Mission Church, which dates from 1610 and is the oldest extant church in the US. Pretty amazing.

We also saw the Loretto Chapel, which boasts a spiral staircase which apparently should not be able to exist from an engineering perspective, but does ("as seen on Unsolved Mysteries!", a sign outside boasts). We paid $2.50 per person to see this staircase. If you go to Santa Fe, do not spend money on this. I took one look at it and knew my engineer father could debunk this in minutes; as it turns out, the good people at Snopes have already done it for him.

Finally, we made our way to a small bookstore across town; along the way, we visited with a few dour but interesting wooden figures in a small park by the river. I don't know why D looks so down in this photo...




She cheered up once I entered the shot.






On to Dallas by way of Lubbock and the Buddy Holly Museum tomorrow -- 11 hours of driving!