Ending

We stepped off the bus and stood with our bags at the closed Bowling Green station, hoping that Cousin Clint would be arriving shortly.  

“Is this the only stop in Bowling Green?” Pat asked with an abandoned look on her face.  The station is at a junction of several heavily traveled roads, including I-65.  The Cousins pulled in as we were mulling the question and a minute later we were on our way to Glasgow.

Clint and Corrine’s home sits on a ridge top with a view of the city spread below.  Theirs is a beautiful and spacious home and we were given an upstairs bedroom, one with even better views.  For me, what was most exciting about it was the array of bird feeders Clint has placed in the yard close to window views.  We saw a wonderful mix of feeding birds including cardinals, finches, jays, and others not familiar to me. 

  Glasgow is a city of about 13,000, sited in an old tobacco growing region that nearby has numerous limestone caves and caverns, Mammoth Cave being among them.  A few more days to visit the surrounding area would have been grand (but I say that about most places).

We ate at Moose’s, a local barbecue restaurant.  Moose’s had many families present:  On Thursday evenings, children eat free.  It wasn’t a madhouse - these are all disciplined Christian Conservative children - but there was energy and noise.

Glasgow has a fine area museum with a recreated soda fountain, a living room of an early twentieth century home, a country store, a pioneer cabin, and several Native American displays. Not just a good museum, it was also well cared for.  We finished our day of local culture at a nearby Cracker Barrel store and restaurant for a down home supper of chicken and dumplings amongst a horde of eaters. 

Saturday morning, was a driving tour of Bowling Green with lunch at the Chick-fil-A before being dropped at the small bus station so inconveniently located at the outer edge of the city.  Chick-fil-A is a southern fast food institution.  Based in Atlanta, someone once asked, “How many things can you do with a hunk of chicken?”  And Chick-fil-A was born.  I just checked the internet, and you can find your Chick-fil-A favorite at Bellingham, WA or on the campus of Boise State University.  Oregon is still a Chick-fil-A desert.

A short ride to Nashville for a service stop, a beautiful sunset along I-65, and a 20:20 arrival at Birmingham and we were in Doug’s white pickup on the way to the suburbs.  Arriving at their large and comfortable home, we had a moonlight tour of the trees and a relaxing time in the cool night air.

Doug and Cathy’s daughter Emily and a friend were home for the weekend.  Pat and I joined Cathy, Emily and friend for a tour of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.  The museum and research center chronicled the struggles of the Movement with copies of newspaper articles, video, and a focus on the national and local leaders.  The culmination of the exhibit was a playing of Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech.  The visit was a powerful culmination to our visits to and among cities which were the center of the struggles.  In Montgomery, Little Rock, and Nashville, the history and places of the campaigns for equality formed a significant part of the volkswalks.  We couldn’t walk without learning. 

I walked back and forth comparing photographs of Dr. King.  It seemed to me that in many of the informal photographs, he looked alone, uncertain, and at times frightened.  None of that was present in his public speeches where he was always self-assured, strong, and speaking from a place near the mystical.

The Birmingham Botanical Garden is next to the Birmingham Zoo, located in an affluent suburb of the city.  The gardens extend up a hillside and include a Japanese Garden, a large fern garden, and collections of hostas, azaleas, and cacti.  We wandered slowly, catching photographs, studying plants and comparing notes in the partly clear, cool Monday afternoon.  For a bonus, we stopped at an Apple Store where I found a 4g jump drive and a new card reader.  Within minutes of our return home, I had the camera unloaded into the Air and a backup copy in the drive.  That, good friends, was a serious relief.

Our time faded fast.  After a supper at Romano’s Macaroni Grill, we said goodbye to Doug.  He would be gone to work before we would get up the next morning.

Cathy drove us to the Birmingham Greyhound Station to get ticketed for the 13:30 bus to Atlanta.  Together, we walked the clean streets, enjoying spotty sunshine after the previous day’s rain.  Churches - Methodist, Presbyterian, a Catholic Cathedral, all built in the mid 1800s - joined art deco office buildings, and new architecture in a pleasant mix.

* * * * 

The light was just beginning to fade as we stood in the ant hill of the Atlanta Greyhound Station, waiting for our bus to the airport.  Our tolerance for mayhem used up, we walked around the corner to the Marta station and rode light rail to the airport to pick up the shuttle to the Fairfield Inn, our Atlanta home for a short night.

Up at 04:30 and off the tarmac at 07:00, we flew as we came via Houston.  Pat charmed the Amtrak people at Portland into allowing us on an earlier train.  We are now home.  We have new records here for consecutive rainy days and days without sunshine.  The temperatures have hung below average since our return, making everyone cold and wet.  This sometimes impacts peoples’ dispositions.

And again, we marvel at how quickly time -- time we worried whether we would make it through -- passed by.

Yet the Ark floated while listing to the side where the elephants hung out. Wednesday, 8 March

The rain began yesterday evening and continued much of the night.  As I write, a widening runoff stream is flowing under our rental car.  The view from here is not much: Carol J’s Coin Laundry #1 Grandview, written in mirror image, raindrops bouncing off pavement, a patch of grass.  The view ends at a Domino’s Pizza fifty yards beyond.

On the other hand, this is errand day.  A rainy, cool, drab day lets us do our chores without fretting about what else we might be doing.  After the laundry, we’ll find the post office to mail Pat’s ten pounds of Mardi Gras beads and a few brochures we’ve collected.

We began this walking project not long after the turn of the century, adding one or two capitals at a time.  Some quick math told us we just aren’t going to live that long and we began earnest traveling, grouping capitals and making grand tours utilizing car, train, airplanes, ferry, and now bus.  In the 2009 autumn, we visited seven midwestern capitals, the fall of 2010 gave us ten in the northeast, and this, our first winter trip, yielded eight more.  

As we sit here, watching bouncing raindrops, we have six more state capitals to visit and walk - Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.  Then we can turn our attention to the remainder of the Canadian provincial parliament buildings.  I still have fantasies of walking the pilgrim path from Hamar to Trondheim, or instead, something ending in St. Petersburg.

It is 10:30 on our last night in Frankfort.  We visited and toured the Buffalo Trace Bourbon Distillery and the Kentucky State Capitol today.  Both were fascinating.  Kentucky is, in our studied opinion, certainly among the top five most beautiful capitol buildings, right up there with Harrisburg and Hartford.  

Tonight, we attended the Ash Wednesday service with the good people at the Church of the Ascension, an Episcopalian congregation that started in 1836.  The current church was originally completed in 1852. 

The End of the Road, Part 1 Tuesday, 7 March

Today we visited Daniel Boone at the monument and grave site he shares with his wife, Rebecca, in the Frankfort Cemetery.  Their remains lie at a peaceful overlook far above the Kentucky River. His neighbors include ex-governors and legislators, business people, frontiersmen, both Union and Confederate soldiers, and probably a few ne’er-do-wells to lend a little honesty to the mix.  Imposing war memorials remind us that we spend more time, and the lives of more of the young, at war than at peace.

The walk from downtown to the cemetery was unpleasant.  A narrow sidewalk wound up the hill, passing an 1850s arsenal (now a military museum), all of it along busy, noisy, and exhaust-smelly Main.  Trucks roar up the hill a few feet away.  We pretended deafness and plodded on.

Once in the burial grounds, the noise and stench fade quickly away and the silence of a jumble of gravestones, memorials, and simple markers transports us to a sad, solemn, and quiet reality.

Well-written directions steered us down the main streets of Frankfort, to the capitol building and its nearby non-flowered flowering clock, and twice across the Kentucky River before the uphill trek to the Boones. 

The Rebecca Ruth Candy Factory gave free samples of bourbon balls, a unique volkswalk experience.  Frankfort has several bakeries, at least one winery, and an historic bourbon distillery, but I found no cheesemakers.  That would have made it a home run.

Misery Loves ... Sunday, 6 March

There are significant historical and theological differences among Lutherans and Episcopalians.  

We were walking in Nashville this morning on our way to Christ Church Cathedral (Episcopal) on Broadway when we found First Lutheran Church.  We entered and joined the small congregation that didn’t come even close to filling the sanctuary.  It was a good though uninspired service with a beautiful choir, a good organ and organist, and a few friendly people.  

Theology had nothing to do with choosing the Lutherans, the issue was temporal.  Their service began at 10:30 (we walked in as the service began), and Christ Church didn’t start until 11:00.  The Lutherans would get us back on our trail a half hour earlier.  Done.

Saturday had been miserable.  A line of heavy rain moved across Nashville in the morning and ended about noon, turning to a mere light drizzle.  We deemed it safe and began the Nashville capital walk at 1:00.  Rather than quietly fading away, the drizzle increased slowly while the temperatures stayed in the low forties.  We made our way through seven kilometers of well-planned and interesting walking and, on the steps of the closed-on-weekends Tennessee Capitol (1857), we said, “Enough.”  We were cold, wet, hungry, miserable, irritated and irritating, unhappy, depressed, in pain, and operating without any natural sense of direction.  We made a line down the capitol steps, over to seventh, down to Broadway, and wound our way back to Comfort Inn as quickly as we could.

This morning, with temperatures in the mid thirties with an overcast but rainless sky, we ate our fill of the motel breakfast and, having during the night recovered our resolve, marched off to be side-tracked by the Lutherans for the sake of half an hour.

It turned out to be a good decision.  We needed the time. The entire seven and a half mile course gave us the best of Nashville’s history, architecture, and music.  One of the finest capital walks we’ve done, Nashville - for example - directed us into the men’s room at the Hermitage Hotel to view the aqua and black art deco lavatory.  A sign at the door encouraged women to view the facilities after making sure no men were, at the time, using them.  

Impressed with the Farmers Market complex north of the capital, we warmed ourselves in the food court area and wandered the nearly deserted stalls of a flea market.  Nearby, a 95 bell carillon choir played a few bars of “The Tennessee Waltz” on the quarter hour.  We would have had to wait until the hour to get the whole song.  As an alternative, we hummed the rest.  “I remember the night, and the Tennessee Waltz...”    Just after the railroad overpass, we set off on a large concrete map of Tennessee, very visible from the Tennessee State Capitol up the hill (the area abounds in steps, hundreds of them), walking from Memphis to Nashville to Fort Knox.  The area, besides celebrating and honoring Tennessee, is a memorial to the 1897 Tennessee Exposition and, with commons areas and an amphitheater, is a gathering place during the warm summer evenings.

At Ryman Auditorium, we posed with Minnie Pearl and Roy Acuff before trudging to our finish at the Comfort Inn.  Ryman was for years site of the Grand Old Opry.  I remember a bumper sticker on an old red Honda Civic that read, “If it’s too loud, you’re too old.”  To that candy-assed punk, I say, “If you don’t remember Roy Acuff and Minnie Pearl, you’re too young.”  The boy in the Honda is, by now, realizing he has blown most of his hearing on crappy music and will need hearing aids by forty.  “Oh Sonny, it’ll get worse.”

Next: How we celebrated the completion of our eighth and final walk of this series and met Rand Paul...

Goin’ to Nashville 4 March 2011

There is a scent of Bill Clinton in Little Rock.  He is, of course, omnipresent in his Presidential Library.  His face and voice never leave the Library visitor: walking the library rooms is a car wash of excerpts from speeches, ceremonies, and political moments of the life of the former president.  We become, to complete the metaphor, bathed in his high energy extraverted narcissism.  

This sounds a little negative, doesn’t it?  What comes out of the Library experience is Clinton’s perspective - his desire to do good for the people in many every-day ways.  I also saw his desire to have fun and to see that we all have fun.  In spite of his most naughty and privates behavior being laid bare to the public and the hilarious hypocrisy of his opposition, his joy in life continued.

We ate supper at the Flying Saucer - a tavern near a fracking-inspired earthquake zone - which had hundreds of themed plates hanging from the walls and ceiling.  I was emptying a glass of a local IPA when I looked up at a big platter suspended twenty feet directly above me.  Which is probably why they have a half-block long wall of beer taps.  There is in Little Rock a sense of fun and friendliness that probably did not begin with Orville Faubus.

Pat and I talked about our memories of the Little Rock Central High School (the walk took us to the school and the Historic Site Visitors Center) and the struggles of the LR-9 young people who demanded equal treatment.  These students challenged centuries when they marched into the school on 23 September 1957 and into the face of an enraged 1.000 strong crowd of self-righteous and incredibly wrong-headed whites.  I remember writing a letter - we were encouraged to do so by a teacher - that began “Who the hell do you think you are...”  

We learned that there were originally ten, but a young sophomore girl dropped out, sensibly being overwhelmed and frightened by her aloneness (the Nine were all juniors and seniors).  And I was proud to see the news clips of President Eisenhower overcoming his own hesitancies and acting decisively and honorably, as John Kennedy would do a few years later, in support of basic human equality.

Our hotel, the Legacy, was halfway between the Arkansas Capitol and the Clinton Library, on a bus route, and a mere five blocks from the River Market Trolley.

Which leads to a few words in praise of Hotels.com, a site we often use when traveling.  Hotels.com has found for us many good deals certainly, but also numerous uniquely wonderful hotels.  We periodically end up in hotels we would ordinarily have to avoid because of price.  Three examples:

In Springfield, IL, we had a room on the ninth floor of the President Abraham Lincoln Hotel with a view of the city and next door access to nearly all the Lincoln sites.

Just last week, Hotels.com found us a room at the newly opened boutique Hotel Indigo in Baton Rouge, right on the Mardi Gras parade route.

The Holiday Inn (yes, Frank Zappa asked, “Have you been to a Holiday Inn?”) in Hartford was just off the downtown and our 7th floor view was of the Connecticut Capitol.  A big deal if you’re chasing capitals.

So we enjoyed Little Rock.  When you are there, eat at Fatsam’s Louisiana Cafe in the River Market food court building.  More authentic than several places at which we ate in Baton Rouge, and they serve alligator.  I had a shrimp and white beans on rice that was fabulous.

We had a hard time leaving Little Rock.  Oh, we were ready to go, but the 10:10 bus was sold out.  We sat around grumbling, and then Pat appealed over the head of the zombie clerk to the bus driver and we were passengers 49 and 50.  And away we go.

And here we are in Nashville with a day of heavy rain forecast as well as a deluge of young blond women with guitars and NCAA basketball fans.

Next: Pat doesn’t get her star.

Goin’ to Nashville 4 March 2011

There is a scent of Bill Clinton in Little Rock.  He is, of course, omnipresent in his Presidential Library.  His face and voice never leave the Library visitor: walking the library rooms is a car wash of excerpts from speeches, ceremonies, and political moments of the life of the former president.  We become, to complete the metaphor, bathed in his high energy extraverted narcissism.  

This sounds a little negative, doesn’t it?  What comes out of the Library experience is Clinton’s perspective - his desire to do good for the people in many every-day ways.  I also saw his desire to have fun and to see that we all have fun.  In spite of his most naughty and privates behavior being laid bare to the public and the hilarious hypocrisy of his opposition, his joy in life continued.

We ate supper at the Flying Saucer - a tavern near a fracking-inspired earthquake zone - which had hundreds of themed plates hanging from the walls and ceiling.  I was emptying a glass of a local IPA when I looked up at a big platter suspended twenty feet directly above me.  Which is probably why they have a half-block long wall of beer taps.  There is in Little Rock a sense of fun and friendliness that probably did not begin with Orville Faubus.

Pat and I talked about our memories of the Little Rock Central High School (the walk took us to the school and the Historic Site Visitors Center) and the struggles of the LR-9 young people who demanded equal treatment.  These students challenged centuries when they marched into the school on 23 September 1957 and into the face of an enraged 1.000 strong crowd of self-righteous and incredibly wrong-headed whites.  I remember writing a letter - we were encouraged to do so by a teacher - that began “Who the hell do you think you are...”  

We learned that there were originally ten, but a young sophomore girl dropped out, sensibly being overwhelmed and frightened by her aloneness (the Nine were all juniors and seniors).  And I was proud to see the news clips of President Eisenhower overcoming his own hesitancies and acting decisively and honorably, as John Kennedy would do a few years later, in support of basic human equality.

Our hotel, the Legacy, was halfway between the Arkansas Capitol and the Clinton Library, on a bus route, and a mere five blocks from the River Market Trolley.

Which leads to a few words in praise of Hotels.com, a site we often use when traveling.  Hotels.com has found for us many good deals certainly, but also numerous uniquely wonderful hotels.  We periodically end up in hotels we would ordinarily have to avoid because of price.  Three examples:

In Springfield, IL, we had a room on the ninth floor of the President Abraham Lincoln Hotel with a view of the city and next door access to nearly all the Lincoln sites.

Just last week, Hotels.com found us a room at the newly opened boutique Hotel Indigo in Baton Rouge, right on the Mardi Gras parade route.

The Holiday Inn (yes, Frank Zappa asked, “Have you been to a Holiday Inn?”) in Hartford was just off the downtown and our 7th floor view was of the Connecticut Capitol.  A big deal if you’re chasing capitals.

So we enjoyed Little Rock.  When you are there, eat at Fatsam’s Louisiana Cafe in the River Market food court building.  More authentic than several places at which we ate in Baton Rouge, and they serve alligator.  I had a shrimp and white beans on rice that was fabulous.

We had a hard time leaving Little Rock.  Oh, we were ready to go, but the 10:10 bus was sold out.  We sat around grumbling, and then Pat appealed over the head of the zombie clerk to the bus driver and we were passengers 49 and 50.  And away we go.

And here we are in Nashville with a day of heavy rain forecast as well as a deluge of young blond women with guitars and NCAA basketball fans.

Next: Pat doesn’t get her star.

Leaving Jackson

1 March

We could have gotten on the 12:30 bus to Memphis, a ride with frequent stops.  We would have arrived in Memphis at 7:00 PM, same as our faster, 2:55 PM bus which has less stops.  Pat wanted to take the earlier bus.  Riding on a Greyhound and sitting in a station are equally crappy, but the leg room is better at the station.

After yesterday’s volkswalk, we walked to the Capitol for a quick look, and then ran off in search of post cards and a Mississippi hat pin. Neither of which we found.  

We packed and vacated our room this morning after breakfast, storing our bags at the motel.  Walking through the State Fairgrounds, we stopped at the Old Capitol Museum (closed Monday) where we enjoyed an impressive display on the history of Old Capitol and found not only postcards but also a leather book mark.  From there, we worked our way over to the new Capitol Building and mingled with the Young Republicans and FFA jackets.

I retook photographs from yesterday.  Either the SD Card or the card reader malfunctioned and I could download none of the photographs from Saturday night’s Mardi Gras parade or the Jackson volkswalk from yesterday.  This was worrisome enough that I woke at 03:30 and researched “corrupted SD card.”  Software can recover some unreadables, but that’s for later, back at home.

And we glide north on a Greyhound called “Lucky Streak,” a casino bus it says underneath.  Either way, we’re going to Memphis.

Jackson has a beautiful capitol and surrounding government buildings.  Typically, war memorials abound.  On a pedestal as tall as the old capital, stands a statue of a soldier in Civil War garb, a memorial to the Confederate dead of that war.  At the base of the monument and locked behind iron gates, is a life-size statue of Jefferson Davis.  One must be alert.  When southerners refer to Jefferson, it’s usually not Thomas.

The downtown of Jackson, like Montgomery and Baton Rouge, has many boarded up stores and offices, even in the area near the state house.  

This makes particular sense because the South does not question their love of automobiles.  People drive to the malls because they are there.  It’s how it is.  We rode a Jactran bus to the volkswalk start.  Most buses run on an hourly schedule, are partially full, and are used predominantly be African-Americans and some poor whites.  We were, being and looking oddly middle-class, out of place but welcomed and treated kindly.

We scared several drivers near our hotel who were either caught by surprise by someone - we - being in a crosswalk, or thought we shouldn’t be there.  One black Chrysler 500 nearly stood on its nose and I’m hoping the driver was cradling a cup of hot coffee between his thighs.  Every light is a game of chicken.  

The travel was (do I overuse the word?) tedious.  UNTIL we arrived at the Memphis station.  In quick succession we witnessed

• A short, wiry man with a deep voice and carrying a duffle bag almost as long as he was tall got into a tussle with both a bus driver and security about getting on the bus to Nashville.  As the conversation heated, we saw him lift and slap the ankle of his artificial leg and shout that he was loaded on pain killers and needed some consideration.  The movement of slapping his ankle combined with the heavy duffle bag sent him into the wall and almost to the floor.  He showed up at various parts of the station either bumming cigarettes or trying to get onto a non-existent bus.
• A woman who had been traveling twenty hours with two young children and six huge bags of whatever exploded at a bus driver at the Dallas gate and lost all her composure, swore strenuously at the driver who then said, “You’re not riding on my bus.”  Which seemed to upset her even more and gave her added vocabulary strength.  She then ran out the door and barricaded herself in the bus.
• A skinny woman who looked a lot like she had gone twenty hours without sleep was in a manic panic when she missed her bus although her bags didn’t.  
• After we left, we were an hour out of Memphis when the world stopped and we were in a non-moving line of trucks.  Somewhere up the road, an accident had blocked the west bound freeway lanes.  I went to sleep.  When I awoke, we were moving.  That’s all I know.

And at 01:30, a cheery deputy helped us get a cab, a friendly cab driver drove us to the Legacy Hotel, and a night clerk smiled and said “Welcome to Little Rock” and it was all o.k.